...no, no, this is not twenty-three as in the fifty-book challenge. A different twenty three, one which has been little publicized on this page (at least today) but one which affects a certain member of this blog much more than its other members, at least today.

Today is Will Baude's twenty-third birthday.

Notably, it also marks the first anniversary of Will Baude's graduation from college.

But more importantly, today is Will Baude's twenty-third birthday. I'd try to give advice or consolation, but it seems that other people are much better at doing this than I may or may not be. Regardless, a few observations about twenty-three that may or may not have popped into your head already, Will, namely:

Twenty-three is a prime number, and hence makes a field if one takes the integers modulo it.

The last prime year you experienced was 19. That was four years ago.

Four is not a prime number.

The next prime year you will experience is twenty-nine, six years later (six, too, is not a prime number).

Twenty-nine is significantly later than twenty-three, which makes twenty-three a red-flag year.

Twenty-three may feel old.

Twenty-nine may feel old.

Twenty-nine is six years older than twenty three, which is two years greater than the distance between twenty-three and ninteen, when you were still decidedly young, and by which reasoning, twenty-three really isn't all that old, especially compared to twenty-nine, if one considers nineteen.

Neither twenty-three, nor twenty-nine is really old.

Nine hundred and forty-four is old.

If you were nine-hundred and fourty four today, you would have been five when William the Conqueror came onto the shores of modern-day Britain.

So you should consider yourself old when people aren't speaking the language your parents were when you were five in public, and the only ones who are are translating books in stuffy corners of universities, calling themselves "classicist," or "ancient studies majors."

So really, twenty-three is quite young.

Twenty-nine too.

Calvin Trillin, Feeding a Yen

Let me be very clear about this. I like Calvin Trillin. Will, I think, likes Calvin Trillin. Most people should like Calvin Trillin. He is a funny, light hearted writer of a tremendous appetite. For life, yes - but even more importantly, for food. But this review isn't positive. I'll try to explain.

Part of my displeasure with this latest effort was caused by the fact that Trillin's sparkling wit is less funny when you notice that he's told some of the same stories in two previous books - there's only a limited number of times you can hear that his daughter always took a pumpernickel bagel to chinese restaurants when she was younger, and that he's looked for the bagel in later years, and discovered that it's not a bagel at all but bread. And maybe some of Trillin's charm has leaked away with the death of his wife Alice, who one can't help having had the tiniest crush on in his earlier books. Without her character, at least as shaped by the author, the light, loving voice of moderation no longer sits at Trillin's shoulder. There is no one to reign in our ebullient host's enthusiasms.

But what finally has bothered me about Trillin's writing is his inexplicable disdain for the heart of French cooking. It was hidden in earlier books underneath his entirely justified distate for the turgid, floury, American 'continental' cooking of the 1970's. But in this book, in this decade, when Trillian rhapsodizes about a vietnamese crab with noodles and spicy sauce as some kind of ethnic valhalla, and denigrates a fried calves liver in the very next sentence, you get the feeling that he's missing the point. The French food he doesn't like is precisely the same kind of food he claims to be looking for so tirelessly - the perfect, local, specialty. The pates, and the stews, and the potatoes fried in this or sauteed in that - these aren't museum pieces but exactly the rough peasant foods that Trillin claims to love so much, just as authentic as Kansas city barbecue, or fish tacos in California. And yet, the French food is depicted as some sort of stuffy Michelin starred inconvenience - and local food anywhere but France exaggerated into glories unimagined.

Trillin tells the story of his own book best in an especially annoying chapter about chowhound.com, which is a good website, but also apparently houses a particularly loathsome form of food elitist. Describing the latter's chief flaw, Trillin admits that if a mediocre ethnic restaurant was sitting next to a really excellent bakery making fantastic blueberry muffins, some of the food adventurers he likes so much would prefer to wax rhapsodic about the former, even though the bakery was objectively better. But Trillin apparently doesn't notice that he does the same thing - banging on and on about what other authorities have noted are actually only adequate barbecue joints in the midwest, while leaving the Parisian markets to eat Chinese food in a French capital not known at all for that cuisine. It's not that Trillin is wrong to highlight the greatness of Northern New Mexican cooking, or to wander Portugal for peppers. But he's got some really odd blind spots in his taste that seem to have persisted for three decades - and they've finally put a crimp on his writing.

No more blogging from me today as I have a bag to pack, a plane to catch, and a lovely girlfriend to greet for my birthday dinner. I do wish to note, though, this N.Y. Times story about the revitalization of the 14th/U-Street corridors, i.e., my neighborhood this summer. There's nothing terribly novel in there (i.e., nothing Will Wilkinson didn't tell me within an hour of my arriving) but it's still interesting for those who are fascinated by this town.