The Untold Story of Lizette Alvarez, New York Times Journalist

Lizette Alvarez, of the New York Times

The untold story of Lizette Alvarez begins in the Florida Keys (doesn't every good story begin there?)

One day in 1997 Manny Honduras, the local kingpin of illicit bay rum operations, was smoking a leisurely Cohiba in the backyard of his luxurious Key West hacienda when the phone rang. Angling out of his chair with some difficulty (for Manny was fond of cazuela de platano and boniatillo, both very fattening,) he waddled inside to answer it. His wife was in Chilicothe, Ohio, for an Arbor Day workshop, and the maid had gone to visit a healthy relative who had money. He was alone in the house.

"Yes?" he barked impatiently into the phone receiver. He was in a bad mood; he did not like having to shift for himself in the big house. 

When he heard the voice on the other end of the line, his face grew pale. Beads of sweat trickled down his furrowed brow and flabby cheeks. He let his Cohiba go out. 

"Yes, of course. Right away!" he whispered meekly and hung up.

Packing quickly, he chartered a plane to take him to Bismarck, North Dakota, and there we must leave him for the moment.

At the same time, up in Miami, a young Latina reporter was tracking down an anonymous tip about a batch of adulterated bay rum that had caused an outbreak of espinillas among professional jai alai players. Her editor had given her carte blanche to follow the story wherever it took her. Going the limit, the vibrantly attractive reporter took a taxi to Etzel Itzik to consult with Mama Bravo, a voodoo priestess known to have dealings with the corrupt underbelly of the city. And there we must leave them for a few brief paragraphs.

For at the very same instant, halfway across the world in war-torn Zagreb, Croatia, the sinister influence of Vladimir Putin was put to use in the murder case of Maslov Maslovsky, recently poisoned with a dose of Deadly Dapperling. Before he had sunk into a lethal coma, Maslovsky had scribbled on the sidewalk in front of his apartment: "Kako sada, smeda krava?"  Interpol was very interested in this cryptic message about brown cows, until they received word from their Moscow operative that it would be best to let sleeping brown cows lie. And there we really have to interrupt our narrative for just a teensy weensy bit . . . 

Because Lizette Alvarez, a graduate of Northwestern University, at this exact same moment decided to cut out all keratin from her diet. Which led, inevitably, to the Helsinki Accords. 

And now you know . . . the rest of the untold story. 

Paul Harvey, who else?


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Ms. Alvarez replied to her new profile by email, thus:

Ha. Love this. You are so awesome. It’s as if you’ve know me my whole life. Keep writing!

Lizette Alvarez

The New York Times

973-508-5595

Dan Barry, the Wandering Reporter

Dan Barry, of the New York Times

By his own admission, Dan Barry is on permanent Wanderjahr. Beginning in Manchester, Connecticut, then moving to Providence, Rhode Island, and then meandering to New York City in 1995 to work for the New York Times, Mr. Barry's restless feet and disquisitive mind have caused him to embrace the open road with a passion not seen since Marco Polo set off from Venice in quest of the fabled wealth of Cathay.

With nothing but a pen and pad, Mr. Barry trods the obscure rural lanes and glittering cosmopolitan boulevards of America to discover what makes America tick. He has crisscrossed the country on foot so often that his Florsheims have Frequent Flier Miles. Although he will occasionally fly or take the train, and has been known to get behind the wheel of his vintage Citroen from time to time, he prefers to travel by mare's shank -- in order to snuff up the pedestrian pollen of everyday life in Dubuque or Pahrump. Sidling along a sidewalk in Woonsocket, Mr. Barry relies on serendipity to discover things like the last castor oil works in the United States, or how to make good corn cob jelly. His inexhaustible curiosity keeps him constantly on the move, and his editors in New York stamp the ground in a Rumpelstiltskin-like rage at his propensity to be in Cut Bank when he's supposed to be in Alpharetta. But wherever his traveling tootsies take him, you can be sure he will find a story of elemental surprise and slightly acidulous schmaltz to report on.

He has written so many books that he has been the Center Fold in the Nebraska Library Journal a total of five times in the past ten years. 

He always travels with his pet glass snake Oscar, and has never turned down a helping of scrapple in his life.

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Peter Baker, Alias 'Eleftherios of the New York Times'

Eleftherios, of the New York Times

An Oberlin College graduate who worked for many years at the Washington Post before joining the New York Times eleven years ago, Mr. Baker is the proud bearer of 'Eleftherios' as his middle name.

To John Q. Public and Jane Sixpack this middle moniker may mean less than a thread of gossamer briefly seen wafting by in the summer sun, but to Peter Baker himself the name is fraught with portent and consequence.

For it is the first name of Eleftherios Kyriakou Venizelos, a revered figure in the Greek National Liberation Movement who became an elder statesman guiding the modern nation of Greece to prominence among world democracies. He also had a notable beard and mustache that bristled like an aroused porcupine. 

Mr. Baker is quick to tell anyone who asks (which is why no one asks him anymore) that Eleftherios is a derivation of Eleutherios, which has reference to the ancient deities Eros and Dionysus, and means, loosely translated, 'Liberator.' Or, in the Slavic tongue, 'Librarian.'

Mr. Baker has striven all his life to honor the great Greek patriot that he is named after; he dances the traditional kalamatianos at every wedding he attends, and tosses moussaka and tzatziki to his admiring fans wherever he goes. His dry cleaning bill is enormous.

Mr. Baker's hobbies include heavy breathing and woolgathering.

His family motto is:


Τι έχει να κάνει με την τιμή των ψαριών;

Which he prefers to translate as "A Fish in the Hand is Worth Two in the Pond." 


Mr. Baker's email response to this profile is thus:

"Ha, this is hysterical. My father (Eleftherios Peter Baker) will be delighted. Thanks so much for passing it along."

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Potluck

Sunday. November 11. 2018. 4:06 p.m. Provo. Utah.

I hereby make a record of a Potluck held in the Community Room of the Valley Villas Senior Housing Building at 650 West 100 North.

For the past several months I have been bringing soups, salads, hotdishes, and curries to the kitchen adjacent to the Lobby and serving them out to one and all an hour before Sacrament Meeting in the Community Room at 1 p.m.

But two weeks ago I decided to delay serving until after the Relief Society meeting , which ends at 2 p.m. Suddenly the crowd of hungry sisters grew unmanageable, so I told them I quit -- I couldn’t feed twenty at a time. But those Relief Society ladies are tenacious as well as starving. They proposed that we start doing a Potluck each Sunday after Relief Society (and, by implication, I could bring the main course.) Since Sunday afternoons are rather boring for me, I grudgingly acquiesced.

I told the ladies we would have a blessing on the food first, and that in honor of Veteran’s Day we would let all the veterans go first. This didn’t sit well with several hoggish types, who had already filled their paper plates up with all the best goodies. I told them, as politely as possible, that they would have to wait for the blessing and that they would have to let our brave veterans go first. This caused several of them to throw their plates in the trash in a fit of pique. I muttered a Scotch blessing over them as they marched back to their own apartments, where I hope they choked on a stale Ritz cracker.

This Sunday I made a spicy Thai chicken curry -- the coconut sauce was thick with red pepper flakes. I figured the ladies who like to shove their way in line first and take the biggest portions of everything would get an unpleasant surprise when they dug into my fiery stew. But the joke was on me; they gobbled it up with unalloyed relish and didn’t even break a sweat. Doubtful as to its potency, I took a tablespoon of the curry myself and had to rush down the hall to the drinking fountain before I could get the steam to stop issuing from my ears. So I guess those nanny goats will eat just about anything on God’s green earth, as long as it’s free.

I’m happy to say that several of the ladies brought some very nice vittles -- including scalloped potatoes, a succulent coleslaw with sunflower seeds and apple slices in it, and a homemade chocolate cake. The rest of the gang just went over to Fresh Market across the street and bought stale cookies, apples that were about to be thrown out, and cheap boxes of Brand X ice cream bars. One old couple, who don’t choose to wear dentures, gave me a jar of expired mustard and a jar of expired sweet pickle relish in return for letting them into the feast. But then, my Potluck philosophy is that no one gets turned away as long as there’s any food left. Karen Allen, who you kids know from North Dakota, insisted on quizzing each person at the Potluck to find out what they brought, and if they didn’t bring anything she told me she would ask them to leave. Summoning every ounce of patience I possess (which is never very much, and was rapidly diminishing at that moment) I gently suggested that we just let well enough alone this time, as it was a sort of shakedown cruise, and worry about deadheads next Sunday. She agreed to that.

Old people, and especially those here in Provo, do not seem to have much of a sense of taste. They like to graze indiscriminately on fresh and stale alike -- so the mushy apples and stale cookies and gluey ice cream bars all disappeared in due course, right along with the really good food.

So I guess I could make a lasagne from used cardboard next Sunday and it would still get eaten up to the last staple. But I choose the high way -- I am making baked hamburger goulash, with a fresh garden salad on the side. Enough for twenty. Everyone else can bring pork rinds, for all I care.

The Cosmic Affairs of Dennis Overbye

The erudite Dennis Overbye, of the New York Times

Dennis Overbye has spent the last twenty years at the New York Times fighting a rearguard action against the forces of superstition and hidebound inflexibility in the cause of Good Science.

Good Science, according to Mr. Overbye, is fun and cool. Not the sole provenance of geeks and recluses. Emotionally scarred from having to memorize the Periodic Table by rote at the tender age of seven, Mr. Overbye is dedicated to the proposition that mixing diluted acetic acid with sodium bicarbonate is more fun than a barrel of kinkajous. And that quantum physics can be easily explained to a child -- but why bother? 

Good Science, he continues, is fun. A game of hide and seek where scientists count to ten and then scatter to look for Hadrosaur fossils and tinker with bionic mushrooms. A race to see who will be first to find something darker than a black hole; to locate a new home for Goffin's cockatoos; and to find a cure for Adam Sandler movies.

A votary of Albert Einstein, Mr. Overbye keeps photos of the tousled-hair theoretician on his desk at the New York Times, in the living room of his home, in his bathroom, and under his pillow (where he hopes the Good Science Fairy will leave him a viable Grand Unified Theory some day.) 

He suffers fools gladly but not indefinitely, and was recently awarded the Coast Guard's prestigious Transportation Distinguished Service Medal. 

His favorite color is octarine, and he cultivates lithops in his spare time.

Is Jon Talton a Reporter Who Works as a Novelist, or a Novelist Who Works as a Reporter?

Jon Talton, of the Seattle Times

Jon Talton has worn many chapeaus during his checkered career. He has written fiction and history books, performed wonders as a columnist writing about economic trends and issues for the Seattle Times, served as business editor for several prestigious journals, done mobile medical search and rescue in Phoenix, and taught theater at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. A true polymath, Talton has garnered a slew of awards -- everything from the Spiel des Jahres to the coveted Royal Victorian Order. He has  to rent an abandoned Sears store in downtown Seattle in order to warehouse his tremendous collection of accolades.

But in those rare moments when Talton is at ease with his friends and family, a faraway look comes into his eyes -- and those closest to him smile and nod to one another, for they know that their Jon is daydreaming of those halcyon days long ago, when he was a theater teacher down in the Panhandle and working as a busker on the streets of Tulsa to supplement his meager teacher's salary. He'd juggle a few tennis balls, spin a few dented tin plates, or play the Lucia Sextet on his ocarina, and then pass his battered trilby hat among the crowd, imploring winsomely: "Just tuppence is all I needs, guvnor. Lord love a duck -- thankee kindly!" 

On a good day Busker Jon (as he called himself) could clear as much as six dollars in quarters and bus tokens.

His celebrity status today makes it impossible for him to take to the streets again, of course. He'd be mobbed; torn to shreds in a mad scramble for one of his buttons or PEZ dispensers. So he bides his time, knowing full well that the public are a fickle crew -- today they idolize you, yet tomorrow you're already a has been, forgotten like yesterday's weather. Jon has his old green baize bag ready for when that day of obscurity inevitably comes; it's filled with juggling equipment, a squirting flower, and an assortment of rubber chickens and penny whistles. Never one to sit idly on his laurels, he is also taking a vocational class in how to give chalk talks. Because in the writing game you never know when the editor will put you out to pasture with nothing more than a gold plated railroad watch that's missing the second hand. 

"I used to be somebody in this town . . ."

Paul Vigna, of the Wall Street Journal, Knows his Cryptocurrency

Paul Vigna, of the Wall Street Journal, knows his crypto from his currency

When they finally get around to writing the full history of cryptocurrency, one name will loom larger than all the rest -- Paul Vigna, of the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Vigna, a modest and unassuming man who prefers to identify himself as a turnip farmer from Verona, New Jersey, has followed Bitcoin and other cybercurrencies since their hazy inception ten years ago. He it was who first cast doubt on the existence of Satoshi Nakamoto, grouping him with Prester John and the Loch Ness Monster as merely a convenient and somewhat whimsical fairy tale figure.

Standing aloof from the partisan and greed-induced hurly burly of the cryptocurrency maelstrom, Mr. Vigna's cool eye and steady hand have made him a keen analyzer and stern critic of this monetary Johnny-come-lately. While other reporters plucked at their toupees in anguish and eventually took prussic acid to end their puzzled agony, Mr. Vigna tracked down the online protagonists and offline antagonists in government and finance -- sniffing out the wheat from the chaff, and then sneezing it all over the place on his MoneyBeat blog for the edification of the masses. He has kept all his ducks in a row until they flew South for the winter.

When Mr. Vigna is not busy whaling on the whales or bruising blockchains he likes to relax by playing the zither in his garage band, The Garden State Gnomes. They are available for weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, interventions, and household pest control. 

  

Haiku: tangled purposes

tangled purposes

in the searching light of June

reveal dry results

Haiku: waiting for the bus

waiting for the bus

hard wind ruffles the white hair

chilling like a dull ache

Haiku: so red that it stings

so red that it stings

so heedlessly displaying

so gone yet so near