A fascinating presentation on the phenomenon we perceive as "information overload."

Jonathan Franzen's highly anticipated (and well reviewed) new novel, Freedom, arrived in the mail this morning, the very day when school is getting underway, virtually guaranteeing I will have precious little time to get to the book anytime soon!

I spent a good day at the U.S. Open as the event got underway in New York, spending some quality time with some Choate folks and enjoying matches from a spectacular courtside vantage point. We were right next to the action on Ashe Stadium as Andy Roddick celebrated his birthday with a decisive win.

I always enjoy heading to the tournament in the first few days, for my ability to follow the tennis is intermittent at best, as the demands of opening school seem to dominate my days this time of year.

No denying it now. Summer is over. Tomorrow I will spend at the U.S. Open, but after that new faculty orientation kicks in and the first wave of student-athletes arrive. So by Tuesday, I will be in full work mode once more. I plan to come up for air in late November.

Well for the time being, anyway, I feel like I am done with travel after two weeks on the road for vacation, and then four days behind the wheel this week transporting our student-athletes. Happy to spend some nights in my own bed for a change! Of course, the fall term doesn't enable me to do much more than school stuff anyway.

I am scheduled to pick up members of our boys' soccer team tomorrow morning, so for my second trip to Maine this week, I elected to break up the driving over two days. I stopped at the cross country camp in New Hampshire to check on my guys along the way. In fact, I went the long way, going due north on I-91 to Brattleboro, and then traveling to Concord over Route 9 through Keene. Then I bushwhacked it over backroads from the cross country camp in the Granite State to the Sebago Lake area here in Maine. I will sleep well tonight!

I attended the funeral of a faculty colleague today in the school chapel--understandably a very sad occasion. The silver lining was the chance to reconnect with former students who came back to campus to pay their respects. It's touching to belong to a community like this where the ties that bind are often so strong.

The stars have aligned. Ricky Gervais is making an appearance in the next season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Should be priceless to see him and Larry David sharing the small screen.

Apple has announced a media event slated for next week on September 1. The guitar on the invitation suggests a music-themed presentation, probably involving a new iPod Touch (with FaceTime, presumably). The rumor mill suggests we may get 99-cent television show rentals as well and an updated approach to AppleTV.

I left Wallingford at 9 a.m. with members of the boys' soccer team loaded into one of the school's mid-buses. After a journey to Casco, Maine, and back, I hit campus at just about 9 p.m. on the button. Like Sunday's trip, I faced a lot of rain on the return voyage (though the traffic was much better).

Comcast's HBO On Demand made it easy to get caught up on this season's True Blood. I missed the last few episodes but am now up to date.

I drove a handful of kids from my cross country team to New Hampshire today for running camp. I didn't expect to get caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way back, however. It seems like everyone in the Northeast was driving from New Hampshire to Connecticut on an early Sunday evening. And the constant precipitation didn't make the experience any more palatable.

As if I haven't seen enough theater the past couple of weeks, I just caught a TheaterWorks Hartford matinee production of a new play, High, starring Kathleen Turner. This work was favorably reviewed in The New York Times and while it was flawed, was provocative and entertaining.

Got to Charlotte and once again have a tight time frame before I have to board another plane for the final leg of my journey. I'll be back in Connecticut in just a couple hours!

I had a 6 a.m. flight out of Medford, Oregon this morning and just arrived in Denver. My connecting gate here was about as far as it could have been from where I deplaned in the huge B Terminal in this airport, so there wasn't much time to relax before boarding, though I did grab a quick bite to eat--my first of the day--while making my way from gate to gate.

If one is going to see a Shakespearean comedy under the summertime night sky, Twelfth Night (like A Midsummer Night's Dream) has to be at the top of the list. This was a particularly funning evening of theater and made good use of the material with some inventive staging and production values.

I use Apple's Notes program extensively, especially in a mobile capacity on the iPad and iPhone. But syncing my notes was always dependent on physically connecting to my home iMac via iTunes. Until now. I moved all my notes files--which generally are associated with a specific e-mail account, it turns out--to MobileMe, so each iOS 4 device can be synced wirelessly with the cloud. Works brilliantly with the iPhone already and it should when the iPad gets the updated operating system this fall.

Tonight was my second Merchant Of Venice of the summer and this one did not disappoint. Though I've seen better Bassanios, the OSF's Shylock was first-rate. Lots of good energy and appropriate pathos assembled in this production.

The OSF's Throne Of Blood is a staged adaptation of the Kurosawa film which was loosely fashioned from the story of Macbeth. This tale of murder and mayhem was set in samurai culture and was a very effective piece of theater. The costumes were particularly stunning. Like "that Scottish play" this production was short (about 1 hour, 40 minutes with no intermission) but powerful.

The matches on tap for today in the Cincinnati Masters event feature all of the top players in the world: Nadal, Federer, Djokovic, Murray etc.

This reminds me of my first visit to the Stratton Mountain ATP event in 1986, when I saw all the headliners play in sequence on the stadium court: Ivan Lendl, Boris Becker, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe (against his doubles partner Peter Fleming), and then top-tenner Tim Mayotte against an unknown 16-year-old named Andre Agassi. Hearing the name, I expected some Swiss journeyman to show up on court. When he was introduced as a teenaged Las Vegan training at Bollettiieri's, I thought he would be cannon fodder for Mayotte. But that match turned out to be Agassi's breakthrough win and the tournament was his breakthrough event (he lost to McEnroe a couple rounds later but was on everyone's radar as a future star at that point).

Henry IV Part 1 is one of the Shakespeare plays I know best. Having seen a production in London just a few weeks ago with the best Falstaff I have yet seen, I was ready to be disappointed with this show, but there were some very strong elements in it worthy of praise, especially in the form of a compelling performance in the Hotspur role. Not everything the OSF stages is necessarily a triumph, but I have yet to see anything bad here.

Hamlet was presented as a matinee offering at the OSF today. The production was first-rate (though perhaps I would quibble with the choice of rappers presenting "The Mousetrap" play-within-a-play) and Dan Donohue's work in the lead role was positively stunning. This was as good a portrayal of the Danish prince as I've seen. Full stop. I expected good things from Donohue, have seen his excellent Iago in 2008's Othello in the OSF's Elizabethan Theatre, but was unprepared for just how masterful his Hamlet would be. Ample support from a strong Polonius and a very good Ophelia, too.

I am back in southern Oregon for the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland for a third straight summer. I will see five plays here this week before flying home early Friday morning. Ashland is a beautiful town nestled into the hills and boasting world-class theatrical offerings.

I am becoming a fan of light rail. I used the new system built for the Winter Olympics while in Vancouver over the weekend and I took SoundTransit from my hotel to the Seattle airport this morning. It's cheap, reliable, and efficient transportation. The trains share an underground tunnel with Seattle buses downtown and then work their way through the southern parts of the metropolis at ground and elevated levels before terminating at the airport.

. . . about the proposed Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site.

via Reddit:

[Rush] Limbaugh sarcastically suggests that we build a Hindu temple next to Pearl Harbor and a mosque next to the Pentagon . . . without realizing that Shinto, not Hinduism, is the most common religion in Japan, and there is already a mosque inside the Pentagon and a Shinto temple next to Pearl Harbor.

Meanwhile, in a moronic analogy that is wrong on so many levels, Newt Gingrich equates American Muslims with Nazis (via Media Matters):

Seriously, where do we get these guys?

For the second day in a row, I toured a city mostly on foot. (An especially good workout today, since Seattle is far hillier than Vancouver.) I did some touristy things, such as going to the Space Needle's observation deck--it was a cloudless day, so the views were very nice. This is another great town.

Once again, a certain college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts sits atop the list in the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This is the second such kudo for Williams in a week, following the Forbes ranking list (which was different in that it lumped research universities and liberal arts colleges in the same category) that also had Williams at #1. Not that I put much stock in these rankings, but still it's nice . . .

Back in the States after nine days in "America's hat" (a.k.a. Canada). My 5:45 train from Vancouver to Seattle was converted into a bus trip--at least for the first part of it, as there was a drawbridge out just north of the border. So about 180 of us traveled by bus to the border station, where we were processed by the Homeland Security folks, and then to the Amtrak station in Bellingham, Washington, which is a beautiful little town from whence the ferries to Alaska depart. The Cascades is a terrific train, with tremendous views of the coastline and a pretty cool dining car (check out the ceiling mural--a map with illuminated lights).

Additional delays on the train meant that we arrived in Seattle about 75 minutes behind schedule. No worries, as the station was just a few blocks walk to my hotel in the Pioneer Square district. Feeling fairly exhausted from a day touring Vancouver, I am ready to hit the sack.

Spent a glorious summer's day walking around much of the city of Vancouver. The sheer physical beauty of the place is stunning. Like Sydney, Cape Town, and San Francisco, there are spectacular vistas over the water and they are often framed--as in the latter two cities--against a backdrop of impressive mountains. Moreover the people here are friendly, the politics progressive, and the scope of the place very manageable.

The train pulled into Vancouver this morning right on schedule. After an hour's leisurely amble through the city from the train station to my hotel, I am settled into a room on high floor (thanks for the upgrade!) with great views of the city and the water.

In the last hour or so of westward travel, it became clear we had left the prairie and arrived in the Rocky Mountains! We have a short stop in Jasper, a charming mountain town just east of the British Columbia border. Scenery around here is spectacular!

I am picking up an extra hour in the day on each of the last three nights on the train due to the gradual movement from Eastern to Pacific Time Zones. This has added to the leisurely feel of taking the train across the continent.

We are in Saskatchewan now. Meals have been very good aboard The Canadian. I have shared a table in the dining car with folks from Germany, Austria, England, Newfoundland, Ontario, Alberta, Chicago, and Washington, DC thus far in the trip. An interesting mix of people!

Meanwhile back in my cabin, I've been watching Rubicon, the new series airing on AMC. Saw the first two installments on iTunes and it looks promising, though it's a bit slow so far.

Just as we were about to pull out of Winnipeg, I realized I had left my Kindle back in the station's waiting room and I panicked, realizing the likelihood of me getting back to the station and locating the device before the train departed was slim. Fortunately, when I (in a frenzied state) asked the porter, she assured me someone had found it, brought it aboard the train, and she would deliver it to me in a few minutes. Whew!

Had the chance to get off the train and wander around Winnipeg for a few hours. Good to stretch a bit, but not much to see here, frankly! The station's WiFi did give me the chance to get caught up on the news of the world, however.

Forbes has assembled a special report: "America's Best Colleges" and ranked Williams #1 among all universities and colleges in the country. Princeton was ranked #2 and some college called Amherst was #3. Nice!

Being on a train for four nights is giving me a great opportunity to unwind and catch up on my reading. George Packer's article about the "broken" Senate in last week's issue of The New Yorker is a fascinating read: a "don't miss" piece for anyone interested in American politics and government. I'll have to find a way to work this into my American Political Institutions course this fall.

Off I go! Vancouver or bust.

Yesterday was rainy and today was sweltering out at the Rogers Cup venue. And if the spectators were roasting, it had to be very tough conditions for the players on court.

I always wanted to attend this tournament--which always used to be called the Canadian Open--since the days I watched it on television as a kid (a Borg/Lendl final is promient in my memory). What I miss is the red trim that used to adorn the court. (Just like the Queens Club tourney, red has been abandoned in favor of blue.)

Now that I've seen this tourney staged in both Montreal and Toronto, I figure I have hit all the sites of all the major North American tennis tournaments--most of them multiple times. I came up with a list of pro events I have seen in person:

• U.S. Open [Grand Slam]--many times


• Stratton Mountain/New Haven [ATP/WTA] (currently the Pilot Pen)--many times, since I used to work for the tournament


• Key Biscayne Masters [ATP/WTA] (currently the Sony Ericsson Open)--half-dozen or so times


• Indian Wells Masters [ATP/WTA] (currently the BNP Paribas Open)--half-dozen or so times


• Montréal/Toronto Masters [ATP/WTA] (currently the Rogers Cup--once at each site


• Cincinnati Masters [ATP/WTA] (currently the Western and Southern Financial Group Masters)--once


• Newport [ATP]--a couple times


• Boston (Longwood) [ATP]--a couple times


• Delray Beach [ATP]--once


• Stanford [WTA]--once

I've also attended Davis Cup ties in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

and outside North America I have been to:

• Wimbledon [Grand Slam]--at least a half-dozen times


• Australian Open [Grand Slam]--twice


• Roland Garros (French Open) [Grand Slam]--once


• Sydney [ATP/WTA]--twice


• Melbourne (Kooyong Club) men's exhibition--twice


• Queens Club, London [ATP]--once

So what's left on my "someday" list?

• Monte Carlo


• Rome


• ATP Finals (currently in London)

I had my pick of movies tonight at the 24-screen multiplex across from the Eaton Centre shopping mall in downtown Toronto. The one that fit my schedule the best was not my first choice: Knight And Day, with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. But folks who saw this when it came out in the States a few weeks back all said the same thing: it's not as bad as you'd think. Though such a comment may be damning the film with faint praise, after seeing it, I know exactly what they meant. While this movie had been pummeled by critics, it was fun in that mindless sort of summer blockbuster way.

Although the tennis tour has been in full swing since Wimbledon ended, this week represents the first time all the top stars in the game are back in action, as the Toronto tournament is a Masters 1000 level event. In the last seven years this stop on the circuit has been won by Andy Roddick, Roger Federer (twice), Rafa Nadal (twice), Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray. And all five are in action here this week. Unfortunately today's schedule was trashed by intermittent rain. I got to spend some time out at the site, though, and saw some play.

Looking forward to seeing all the top names in men's tennis in town here this week. I'll be out at the tournament site tomorrow and Tuesday.

Evita was a show I have never seen before. I was vaguely familiar with some of the songs, mostly from commercials for the original Broadway run years ago. It was good, not great. The Andrew Lloyd Weber rock opera score gets tiresome, for one thing. I did come away from the theater more interested in learning about the Peróns and Che Guevara, though.

Christopher Plummer showed why his reputation is anchoring this summer's slate of offerings at the Stratford Festival by turning in a terrific performance as Prospero in The Tempest. At the age of 80, he was a commanding lead in this generally strong take on one of Shakespeare's last works. The modern indoor space at the Destival Theater gave this production the opportunity to do a lot more with effects to emphasize the magical qualities in the story: a hydraulic stage, extensive use of the trapdoor, dropping Ariel in from the ceiling, and top-notch lighting and sound design all added to the supernatural ambience.

The As You Like It I saw this afternoon was an engaging production, one that made me appreciate this play--one of my favorite Shakespearean comedies--in new ways. The previous stagings I had seen (at the Globe in 2009 and he Bridge Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last winter) were also quite good. It may speak to the strength of the play itself that a decent company might have to work hard to screw up this work!

This is my second visit to the Stratford Festival, a annual season of theater--mostly, but not entirely, Shakespeare works--in Ontario. My weekend here starts with a "table talk" lecture in conjunction with lunch at the Festival Theater. Then I will see two of my favorite Shakespeare plays, As You Like It this afternoon, followed by The Tempest tonight.

The flight from Bradley to Toronto took nearly two hours because we were on board a turbo prop propeller plane rather than a jet, but it left plenty of time to read and watch some video on the iPad. I have just rented a car and will spend the night in Guelph, about halfway between the airport and my weekend destination of Stratford.

I had missed the news that Terminal B at Bradley Airport was being mothballed. All airlines leave from the expanded and much more modern Terminal A now and Terminal B (which I never cared for all that much) is slated for demolition.

Last week I bought the DVD of the Rush documentary, Beyond The Lighted Stage and enjoyed it. Now that I have familiarized myself with the history of the city's best-known musical product. I am ready to head to Toronto.

As I am getting ready to fly to Toronto tonight, two others heading there--Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, currently ranked #1 and #2 in the world in singles--have announced they are teaming up in the doubles event at the Toronto Masters tourney. This is the first time in thirty-five years the top two players in the rankings have constituted a doubles team on the tour. (The last such tandem was Arthur Ashe and Jimmy Connors--strange bedfellows indeed, given that Connors had sued Ashe and the ATP a year or two before!)

I needed to renew my driver's license before leaving for a two-week vacation, so I arrived at the Hamden DMV office about 7:50 this morning, got into the building at 8, and was out the door with new license in hand by 8:15. Pretty sweet!

Click to enlarge:

No posts for the past three-and-a-half weeks because I royally screwed up this blog's architecture by trying to upgrade from Movable Type 4 to version 5. I've since learned that most pros recommend avoiding MT5 altogether. But I was too clever by half and thought I could pull off the transition and in the process I basically got locked out of my own blog. The main blog page was still up and running but has been missing its CSS formatting.

I actually think I got pretty close to completing the upgrade, but I just don't have enough experience to know what little thing was off, so I had to pay through the nose to get a pro to fix it. The good news is that I backed up the database that runs the blog before I started playing around "under the hood." This meant someone who knew what he was doing was able to restore the blog pretty quickly.

Anyway, I have entries saved up to post after-the-fact, which I plan to do in the next day or so. In the meantime I still need to tweak the layout and formatting of the blog. I'll probably experiment with a new look for the page as well. Hopefully I won't crash the site again in the process!

In the summer of 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Company will be setting up shop in the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The slate of plays to be transplanted from the RSC repertory has just been released: "King Lear" and "Antony and Cleopatra"--the two productions I saw in Stratford-upon-Avon in June--as well as "The Winter's Tale" (which I saw in in Stratford in 2009), "As You Like It," and "Romeo and Juliet." The latter two have garnered favorable reviews, so I will be aiming to snag tickets for these shows.

I am a Mary Carillo fan--I once ran a clinic for Special Olympians with her when I worked for the ATP event in New Haven years ago and discovered she is basically a good egg all the way around--and I stumbled across a clip of Mary in rare form during NBC's 2004 Olympic coverage. Enjoy:

I suppose I am a more experienced traveler than most, but it still boggles my mind that I can have breakfast in London in the morning and enjoy lunch and work in my office here in Wallingford by early afternoon!

Henry IV, Part II is a darker play than its prequel. The same cast I saw in Part I this afternoon adapted ably to the different material at the heart of tonight's play. While there was still plenty of buffoonery on hand among the denizens of Eastcheap, the resolve of the young prince on his way to becoming Harry the king was in evidence. The scenes between the prince and his dying father worked quite well. It was a treat to see the two parts of this story back-to-back like this. Six hours of theater can be a long time (and a butt-numbing experience!) but I was thoroughly dialed in during tonight's show.

What a splendid play Henry VI, Part I is. And what a terrific job the company at Shakespeare's Globe did in bringing this piece of theater to life. With a wonderfully amusing and rascally Falstaff and a mischievous but calculating Prince Hal, the play hit all the right notes, and was equally adept in portraying the fun of the Boar's Head Tavern, the power struggles in King Henry's court, and the climactic battle between Hal and Hotspur.

Henry VIII is not performed all that often. This is a shame, because I think it's an underrated work. Scholars disagree as to how much of Shakespeare's hand is in the text. But no matter, it's a sweeping work about Tudor royalty and court intrigue best known for a couple of huge set pieces that offer a chance to display visually sumptuous costumes and sets. The OSF did that in its Elizabethan Theatre in the Ashland production I saw last summer. Shakespeare's Globe did the same tonight here in London. I appreciated the intricacies of plot a lot more the second time around, too.

A bit of West End theater before immersing myself in Shakespeare's history plays the rest of my time in London. The first hour of La Bête was laugh-out-loud funny, mostly because Mark Rylance delivered a virtuoso comic performance, highlighted by a dazzling, uninterrupted delivery that ran nearly half-an-hour at one point. Rylance had very good support from straight men David Hyde Pierce (from Frasier) and Stephen Ouimette (from Slings And Arrows). The entire play is in rhyming couplets, which worked better than I thought. The denouement does fall a bit flat after such a thrilling start, but seeing Rylance as the idiot poser Valere was well worth the price of the ticket. (By the way, this production is Broadway bound after its run here in London.)

I am staying in the City of London proper for the first time since I started frequenting the British capital in 1994. Most of the places Americans think of as "London"--Piccadilly Circus, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace--are, in fact, located in the City of Westminster. "Greater London" refers to the entire metropolis. But "the City" is the medieval core of the place, defined by just over a square mile on the north side of the Thames. It's pretty much the financial district for modern London.

The most visible landmark in the City is St. Paul's Cathedral, and from my hotel window I can see the front towers and the Dome of the imposing edifice less than a block away. I am also a 10-12 minute walk across the Thames--via theMillennium Bridge--from Shakespeare's Globe, the theater where I will be spending about 9 hours of my stay here this weekend.

About to head to Kennedy Airport for a flight to London: my fourth trip to Europe in 2010. The airfare is more or less free, as I cashed in mileage points so I could catch three Shakespeare history plays at the reconstructed Globe Theatre. This will be a bit of a whirlwind tour, as I'll be back stateside Monday morning.

I've been meaning to do this for some time now, but we finally got our act together and had a "Choate Squash" logo with the boar's head silhouette painted on the tins of all ten of our squash courts. Since we host so many national-level events in our facility in addition to a full slate of scholastic matches and tournaments, it seems an appropriate way to promote our program a bit.

Two days from the end for the summer session here at Choate. I taught the last new materlal of the five-week term today. Final exams will be administered tomorrow, and then grading and report writing becomes my focus, and I will be on my way to the airport on Friday at the same time a lot of the kids here will be heading out.

Apple upgraded its iMac line today and also released a new 27" monitor for $999 as the top offering in its line of displays. The technological stars may be alignment now for me to set up a multiple monitor workstation for my study at home, with one of the new 27" iMacs paired with the new display. Not before the fall, though.

I've been lucky to catch a couple of very good independent films this summer among the clutter of major studio action flicks. The Kids Are Alright was another such gem, an intimate look at a "non-traditional" California family in transition. Well written, well acted, and well worth a look.

I've waxed and waned in following HBO's Entourage over the years. At times it's been enormously entertaining and very funny. But I've drifted away from it as the familiar situations and generally unlikeable main characters grew tiresome. I unwound the most recent batch of episodes courtesy of HBO On Demand this weekend and this show, while far from its peak, is still better than a lot of the dreck on television now.

Entertaining a visiting Choatie this afternoon, we killed time by taking in the Italian language film I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton. The art house release turned out to be a wonderful surprise. Though it was a bit slow and confusing at the start, this drama about a wealthy Milanese family was beautifully photographed and emotionally engaging.

New signature T-shirts unveiled this weekend and distributed to my summer school classes. This one, in blue and orange, is called "Metropolitan."

This brought a smile to my face:

Watched Angelina Jolie in Salt today, figuring I'd keep up with all the supposed "blockbuster" releases. This is another flick in which one can check one's brain at the door before viewing. An entertaining summer action movie: reasonably fun and entirely forgettable. Jolie demonstrated she had the chops to hold her own in this male-dominated genre.

I was never aware of this film until I watched a whole bunch of excerpts from it on YouTube today: a documentary about the 1981 French Open tennis championships with remarkable behind-the-scenes access married to well-shot coverage of on-court action. The clips are riveting. Wish I could find the film on DVD so I could watch it in its entirety. It captures so much of what I remember as the atmophere of the sport some thirty years ago now.

No better circumstances under which to see A Midsummer Night's Dream than a comfortable July night on a lawn under the stars! Since one of my colleagues was playing Puck, there were a few other Choate folks in attendance. A fun staging of one of Shakespeare's most endearing and accessible plays.

A couple of big athletics-related projects underway on campus this summer. Most visible is the double-sized artificial turf surface now being installed behind the Johnson Athletic Center. This field complex will significantly enhance our ability to have field sports practice in just about any conditions and also give us first-rate competition venues for field hockey and lacrosse, as well as the capacity to stage night football and soccer games under the lights.

We are also reconstructing all 14 courts at the Hunt Tennis Center and redoing the landscaping, so that will be like a brand new facility this fall.

Living in such an exciting town as Wallingford (ha!) it's no surprise that the appearance of a new fast food establishment has created quite a buzz. In this case, it's a bit understandable, because one doesn't find many Sonics in this part of the country and the whole retro "get served in your car" angle is pretty different. So I spent twenty or so minutes waiting in line (in my car, of course) before pulling into one of the berths. Bottom line: the food was hardly worth the wait. I can say I've been there and done that, but no need to hurry back now that the novelty is gone.

Lovin' the digital delivery of Daniel Silva's latest release. The Kindle edition of The Rembrandt Affair was on my iPad (and Kindle and Mac) when I woke up, on the same day the print copy hits the bookstores.

One of my two summer school history classes heads to D.C. this afternoon for the Kennedy Institute Washington session (which I, having done this trip nearly twenty times now, begged off). This means I'll have an extra 80 minutes of class time freed up this week (plus one fewer prep).

Back in Williamstown, home to my alma mater, for a few hours tonight. Had an enjoyable dinner with the Confortis followed by a visit to the Clark Art Institute's new (to me, anyway) addition, the Stone Hill Center, which provides spectacular views in the gloaming.

After a twin bill of Shakespeare yesterday, I drove to the Berkshires to join a newly-minted Choate graduate, one of the students in my spring class on The Bard's history plays, to see Richard III, one of the texts we studied. This was a strong production, probably the best of the handful I've seen at Shakespeare And Company. John Douglas Thompson tackled the title role with great energy and in general the cast and director made the most out of limited stage space and production values.

Driving through the streets of D.C. in the wee hours is starkly different than the capital by daylight. There is little traffic (thankfully!) and the illuminated dome of the U.S. Capitol looms over the city in a magical way.

I am taking the 3:15 a.m. Amtrak back to New Haven this morning. Hopefully that journey will entail mostly sleep! I'll catch about 90 minutes shuteye in my own bed before driving to western Massachusetts for a third Shakespeare performance in two days.

Othello at its best is hard-hitting stuff and I enjoyed the ASC's take on the tragedy. Good casting, of course, is the key: a deliciously manipulative Iago and a Moorish general who can be both an imposing leader and a gullible jealous husband are essential and the folks at Blackfriars were convincing.

I love the approach to Shakespeare that the ASC takes: lightning-quick pacing, judicious cuts to keep the action to roughly two hours of stage time, lots of interaction with the audience, and appropriate injections of humor wherever possible. So this company has turned me around a bit on The Taming Of The Shrew. I've only seen this performed once before--two years ago in Stratford-upon-Avon--and if you asked me before today which of The Bard's plays was my least favorite, this one would be at least in the top three. But today I came to appreciate the work a lot more.

After settling in the Mem House boys, I took a 12:45 a.m. Amtrak train from New Haven's Union Station and arrived in the nation's capital about 7:00 this morning. I got a fair amount of sleep along the way. I now have a rental car and will take my time driving over to the Shenandoah Valley. I'll probably find a place for a short nap along the way!

I liked the new Christopher Nolan film Inception quite a bit. It's clearly a well-made piece of storytelling, with a clever premise and impressive execution. I appreciated that there was a bit of ambiguity in the ending, too. It's a movie I will need to see again to digest properly; there are not many films I can say that about in this day and age!

Apple held a press conference today to diffuse the growing controversy over alleged antenna problems on the new iPhone 4 release. Steve Jobs mounted a pretty compelling defense, I thought, but was clearly peeved at having to do this sort of thing. Damage control is not something Apple wants to spend its time on, but in light of the Consumer Reports decision to not recommend the new phone, Jobs and company had to step up and respond. I think this will put an end to all the hullabaloo.

I've become a fan of the NT Live program of high definition theatrical telecasts. Tonight I ventured up to Amherst to see London Assurance, a funny nineteenth-century play showcasing the comic talents of Simon Russell Beale. Good stuff.

Though this looks like something one would find in the hangar on an Imperial Star Destroyer, it's actually a real-life stealth plane the British unveiled for the R.A.F.

I caught a matinee of the new Disney/Bruckheimer take on The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Utter nonsense, of course, but mildly entertaining and visually somewhat interesting.

After the school year ended, I ordered T-shirts for my third former advisees, the only group I worked with this past spring that didn't get one of my signature shirts. Each class or team or advisee group gets its own color scheme. These are called "Dragon."

Just got word today that my tickets for the U2 show in Montreal have been pushed back twelve months to July 9, 2011. So I can start making plans for a trip to Canada midsummer next year.

. . . in American interest in the Tour de France now that Lance Armstrong's chances of contending have effectively disintegrated. Too bad that U.S. fans are so fickle when it comes to cycling's showcase event, but without the American star gunning for another win, I don't see the casual sports fan getting too engaged with this race.

Nice to see Spain win its first World Cup title today. The game certainly was dramatic, if it wasn't pretty.

Next weekend was supposed to be a Montreal getaway, centered around a U2 concert Saturday night. But since the tour is postponed until 2011, I canceled my plans to head north and today I decided to go south instead, specifically to Staunton, Virginia, where I will see two plays at the American Shakespeare Center: The Taming Of The Shrew and Othello. Booked both theater and Amtrak tickets this morning.

Fiddling around with the "behind the scenes" architecture of this blog, migrating from Movable Type version 4 to version 5.02. This is uncharted territory for me, so wish me luck!

One of the four "feet" on the bottom of my MacBook Air came off. Since the laptop was still under warranty I brought it to the Apple Store thinking one of the Geniuses could replace the little black round plastic piece. Instead, they replaced the entire bottom panel! Probably not the most cost effective solution, but this is another good example of Apple's over-the-top customer service.

I downloaded this week's issue of Sports Illustrated on the iPad app, just to give it a whirl. Hard to imagine I will do this regularly, since I had to pony up $4.99 for something I am already subscribing to in its traditional format. But it is pretty cool to flip through the electronic edition to see photo galleries (with some pretty stunning photography, which has always been one of this magazine's hallmarks). Not much here in the way of video stuff, though.

They've really got to figure out a better business model. I'd love for subscribers to have access to the digital mag the way The Economist and The New Yorker give print subscribers full access to their Web-based digital content. I could see charging us a nominal fee to read iPad versions of what we get in the mail. But five bucks per issue is not going to generate much traffic.

On a hot and humid evening in New York City, I watched the flip side of The Public Theater's summer Shakespeare In The Park repertory offerings: The Merchant Of Venice. Al Pacino's Shylock was the big name here, but the cast--most of whom appeared in The Winter's Tale that I caught last week--was very capable indeed. This was a gripping take on the play, and Pacino made Shylock generally sympathetic without undermining the character's complexity. The "comedy" aspects of the play--principally the relationship between Portia and Bassanio--worked quite well to balance the drama onstage.

Very nice!

I always find the first day or two after one of the major tennis tournaments finishes up, there is a void in my daily routine--no need to check the scores or tune in to see televised action. I had gotten used to thinking about the daily match schedule and checking tennis-related blogs and reportage. Now that's all done--at least until the U.S. Open rolls around. I guess it's a mild form of some kind of postpartum-like experience!

The final weekend was anticlimactic, I suppose, mostly because this year's Wimbledon Championships was an absolutely wild ride, with plenty of upsets, near upsets, and terrific showdowns. A few quick thoughts:

• For all the millions of pounds the All-England Club spent on the retractable roof on Centre Court, the tournament did not experience one rain delay in 2010.


• Who would have expected the Williams sisters and the Bryan brothers to lose the way they did in doubles?


• We may have seen the last Wimbledon in which Roger Federer entered as a favorite.


• And the Isner/Mahut marathon is surely one for the ages.


• Ditto Venus Williams.


• Though the men's final couldn't hold a candle to the five-set duals of the preceding three years, it was pretty cool seeing how Rafael Nadal dominated by improving his game.


• Same with Serena Williams and her serving.

Time to decompress now.

I stopped at the Apple Store at Westfarms Mall on my way to South Windsor this afternoon (I had to see about a minor repair to my MacBook Air). I was surprised the store was even open on Independence Day, as were most stores in the mall. It wasn't crowded there, of course, but I guess commerce does not take a vacation on one of the year's biggest holidays.

It wasn't a great final round match. But it was an emphatic statement of Rafael Nadal's position of dominance in the men's game right now. It's as if after his 2009 Australian Open win he disappeared for a year and then picked up right where he left off, owning the European clay court season and then winning titles at Roland Garros and Wimbledon--an amazing feat to with the biggest crowns on red clay and then grass in the space of just a few weeks!

Nadal pretty much has locked up the #1 ranking for the rest of the year with a lead that will only increase if he has a strong summer on the North American hard court circuit. And Rafa really seems keyed in on winning a first U.S. Open title--the only major accomplishment in the game yet to elude him.

Have a happy and safe Independence Day, fellow Americans.

No one came close to beating Serena Williams at Wimbledon this fortnight. In winning her 13th major title, she showed the enormity of the gap between herself and the rest of the women's field. No reason to think Serena can't continue winning majors the next few years.

Andy Murray played very well in his Wimbledon semifinal today. But it wasn't good enough to overcome an increasingly impressive Rafael Nadal. The Mallorca native moved incredibly well, blasted forehands all over the court, carved vicious underspin backhands, and countered everything the Scot could throw his way. When on his game, Nadal is a far better player than he was even two years ago: he serves bigger, is more comfortable and effective at net, and has much better tactical variety in his game.

It would have been exciting to see a Brit contend for the title on Sunday, but it now looks likely Rafa will bag an eighth major crown this weekend.

DIdn't see much of this match at all, but it's disappointing that Novak Djokovic once more was flat on a big occasion. His Australian Open win a couple years back aside, the Serb's career has been marked by letdowns when opportunities have arisen. Djokovic was quietly working his way through the draw, playing awfully good tennis, and in a position to perhaps win a second major title this weekend (especially after Federer was knocked out of the event). No doubt an in-form Tomas Berdych had a lot to do with the result today. But this has to be seen as another huge setback for Nole.

On my first unscheduled night in over a week, I headed out to the cinema, where I was the only one in the theater for a screening of Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work, a well-reviewed documentary about a year in the life of the 75-year-old comedienne. This was a pretty engaging profile of someone still driven to command the spotlight after decades in show business.

Though the Ladies' Singles field has been marked by the early departures of past champions and other supposed contenders--Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, Justine Henin, and Kim Clijsters have all been put out--Serena Williams appears to be the overwhelming favorite to claim her 13th major title this weekend, having advanced to the final today. NBC must be thanking its lucky stars she is still around to lend some star power to the closing stages of the women's event.

Hard to think that Roger Federer's loss in the Wimbledon quarterfinals today doesn't constitute the end of an era. The man played in seven straight finals at The All-England Club (winning six of them). And this result follows a defeat in the same round of the French Open. The Swiss star will drop to #3 in the world for the first time since 2003. He has won only one event in 2010--admittedly a big prize, the Australian Open--and has been hit off the court on big occasions by the likes of Nadal, Del Potro, Soderling, and Berdych--the next generation, if you will. Federer has been written off before, notably in early 2009; can he bounce back once more?

I was in Central Park tonight for the Public Theater's 2010 Shakespeare In The Park series. The Winter's Tale is in repertory with The Merchant Of Venice (I am scheduled to see the latter next Tuesday)

The Winter's Tale is one of my favorite plays by the Bard. It's a late play, a romance--not quite fitting into the usual breakdown of comedy, tragedy, or history. The cast was quite strong and the production generally solid. I saw two stagings of this play in England last August: the one at The Old Vic was The Bridge Project's presentation, which played around the world, and the other was the RSC's in Stratford. The Public's version tonight held up well next to those two excellent renditions.

And who wouldn't enjoy a night of al fresco drama at the Delacorte Theater, with the beautiful Turtle Pond visible behind the stage and a moonlit sky overhead on a clear summer's night?

One of the two classes I am teaching this summer is a middle school history class. Working with ten 12- and 13-year-olds is a new experience for me, in that I have to shift my assignments and teaching style a bit for this different age cohort. So far they seem to be a pretty capable bunch and I'll be interested to see just what they can do as the syllabus unfolds over the next few weeks.

When I spent the day at the All-England Club last Monday, I spent some time cruising around the outer courts, looking for a good match between (relative) unknowns to digest for a while. Away from the show courts, one can take in the action at court level, very close to the players, and thus appreciate the nuances of pace and spin and athleticism that get lost on television or up in the stands. I settled in at Court #11, where Argentina's Horacio Zeballos was battling Taiwan's Yen-Hsun Lu. The latter prevailed in straight sets.

Fast forward to today and Lu found the spotlight with a five-set upset of fifth seed and 2009 finalist Andy Roddick on Court #2. He advances--improbably--to the quarterfinals.

Fourth round gets played at Wimbledon. That's ALL of the fourth round singles: 32 men and 32 women will face off and half will be heading home before the end of the day. All-star line-ups on Centre Court, Court No. 1 and even the outer courts. Some featured showdowns: Djokovic vs. Hewitt, Serena Williams vs. Sharapova, Murray vs. Querrey, Henin vs. Clijsters. Good stuff!

New students are arriving on the Choate campus as the summer session kicks into gear. I am prepping a new class for middle schoolers as well as teaching a small group in this year's Kennedy Institute In Government program.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is in the last weekend of its run at The Public Theater downtown. The play came highly recommended and l saw the first of two shows tonight and am happy to report it lived up to its billing. Ostensibly the story of Andrew Jackson's life and political career, it is a biting (and musical) look at populism in America.

I updated my travel map page with summer 2010 trips:

Since this is a pretty small map, you might want to check out the page with maps of all my treks since 1995.

I just finished my athletics-themed presentation at the Risk Management conference sponsored by TABS (The Association of Boarding Schools), and it seemed to be well received. I'll take a 1:34 train from Wilmington and be back on the Choate campus for the opening dinner for the summer session faculty at 6:00.

After another hour of play, picking up from where they left off at 59-all last night, John Isner managed to break Nicolas Mahut for a 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68 win! Total time on court for this one match? Eleven hours.

Boarding Amtrak right here in Wallingford this morning, just a mile from campus. The rail journey this morning will get me to Delaware, where I am delivering a presentation at a conference tomorrow. Pretty convenient to avoid even the short drive to New Haven to catch this train.

Went to see Pixar's latest, Toy Story 3, in 3D tonight here in Wallingford. Like the earlier installments in this series, the film managed to be utterly charming, funny, and heart-warming. These Pixar guys really have the magic touch.

In the wake of the World Cup excitement earlier in the day, another intriguing sports storyline developed abroad, as John Isner and Nicolas Mahut battled into the gloaming in a five-set first round men's singles match at Wimbledon. Before play was halted due to darkness at 59-all in the fifth, this final set alone was longer than the previous record for longest match played at the professional level. And it will continue tomorrow. Wow!

Caught the thrilling conclusion to the USA's final round robin game in the World Cup tournament, in which a 91st minute goal from Landon Donovan elevated the team's prospects from elimination to first place in the group. This was like watching Lance Armstrong sew up the Tour de France climbing up Alpe d'Huez or Nadal edge Federer in the Wimbledon final two years ago--a can't miss sporting event that leaves you with a lump in your throat. What a great moment!

Since its primary rival, Marvel, had an app for the iPad (and iPhone) ready to go the day the iPad became available, it was only a matter of time before DC Comics jumped into the digital download arena. That day has come, as DC released its own app this morning in order to bring Superman, Batman, and friends to tablets everywhere!

Got a call from a Class of 2008 alum who invited me over for dinner--he's alone this week at his beach house on the Sound--and we went to catch the late showing of Get Him To The Greek, which I found only mildly amusing.

Loaded the new iOS 4 on the iPhone this morning and have already started organizing my apps into folders. Also a big fan of the unified in box for my various e-mail accounts. Haven't gotten around to multi-tasking yet, but I'm sure I'll be using Pandora a lot more now.

Spent a glorious day at the All-England Club. Watched the men's defending champion dodge the upset bullet: by all rights Roger Federer should have lost, as he was being thoroughly outplayed by Alejandro Falla. But the Colombian couldn't pull the trigger while serving for the match in the fourth set. Once that set ended, I had to head back into London to retrieve my stuff and head to the airport. But I knew Federer would survive, and sure enough he won the final set at love.

It's the summer solstice: the longest day of the year and the official beginning of summer. No better way to spend the day than taking in The Championships at the All-England Lawn Tennis Club.

Then I fly home tonight!

On the eve of another Wimbledon, may I suggest an absolutely brilliant piece of prose: the late David Foster Wallace's "Federer As Religious Experience" essay from the New York Times in 2006. The author of Infinite Jest is able to capture--better than any writer I've seen--the magic of tennis in the hands of the world's most talented practitioners.

Picked up my credential for Wimbledon today, which means I won't have to go through the hassles of sorting out tickets tomorrow morning--which usually entails queueing for hours!

I am attending the pre-Wimbledon coaches gathering hosted by the LTA that I have been to twice before. I've also attended the USTA's version of this conference, held on the eve of the U.S. Open, many times over the years (though that conference used to be a lot bigger than its British equivalent). And I even made it to a similar such conference in Melbourne before the 1998 Australian Open. I usually pick up a few good ideas at these workshops and meet some interesting folks as well.

The second half of today's RSC double feature was Antony and Cleopatra, featuring more or less the same cast as this afternoon's Lear. I was stunned to discover at the interval that it was Kathryn Hunter--whose Fool captivated me earlier in the day--who was playing Cleopatra. Her Queen of Egypt is very different from the usual portrayal of this character--the accent and almost raspy vocal shadings gave the role more of a exotic Earth Kitt-type vibe. While the diminutive actor doesn't convey sex appeal the way most actors who play this role do, there was no denying her chemistry with Darrell D'Silva's Marc Antony.

Greg Hicks is a spectacular Shakespearean actor. I saw his impressive turn as Leontes in The Winter's Tale last summer here at the RSC and this afternoon I watched him command the Courtyard Theatre as King Lear. Though a youngish Lear--whose age the text places at "fourscore and upward"--the fifty-something Hicks managed to convey an astonishing emotional range in this tragedy. Kathryn Hunter made the Fool work for me better than ever before, too. And the actors portraying Goneral, Regan, and Edgar were similarly top-notch. The nuances of the acting in this performance brought out elements of the play--the Shakespeare work I probably know better than any other--that I had never appreciated before.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the democracy movement in Burma, turns 65 today. Walk On.

Seeding and draws for next week's Wimbledon tournament have been released. Though ranked #2, Roger Federer is the top seed in the men's singles event. Seeded #2 is Rafael Nadal. Both men have seven-match winning streaks at The Championships to defend! The Spaniard appears to have a tougher road to the final, though he appears fresh and confident after his successful European clay court spring. Andy Roddick is in the same half as Federer, so we won't see a rematch of the classic 2009 final. A rematch of the 2006/2007/2008 showdown might still be in the cards however!

On the women's side, the big question is: can anyone derail the Williams sisters? Venus and Serena seem to own the All-England Club.

That's a snippet of Wordsworth.

I am spending tonight and tomorrow night in Oxford, a short jaunt from both Heathrow (where I arrived today and will have to return my rental car first thing Sunday morning) and Stratford-upon-Avon (where I will spend most of tomorrow seeing two plays at the RSC).

Because I took a British Airways flight back to London from Budapest this afternoon, I finally got to experience Terminal 5, which opened in 2008. This terminal is everything the rest of Heathrow Airport is not: beautiful, airy, efficient.

I finished a surprisingly good novel today: It's Superman. The book takes as its premise the hero's original appearances in the late 1930s as a champion of the oppressed without the expanded powers and complex mythology that grew around the figure in the decades that followed. The novel reworks the backstories of Lois Lane and Lex Luthor with a hefy dose of gritty realism. Tom De Haven clearly did his homework in capturing the feel of New York City and the midwest in the middle of the Great Depression. (Maybe he did a little too much research, as at times his frequent allusions to historical events and contemporary films and music as well as popular consumer products of the day was a little excessive. No need to show off so much!) An enjoyable read.

Spent most of the day exploring Budapest. The city is beautiful, with wide avenues and some striking architecture. It bestrides the Danube River and has an efficient and cheap public transportation system (I used a combination of subway trains and trams to get around). It feels a lot like Prague in some ways.

All winter long, the girls on my squash team tried to get me interested in watching this season's breakout hit TV show, Glee. I fended them off, but the last week or so I've slowly been digesting the first season of this series and it's one of those slightly addictive guilty pleasures. It's easy to work my way through a television series on the iPad while killing time in airports, on a flight or train ride, or in my hotel room before bedtime.

I arrived in Hungary and have settled into the Ramada Plaza, which overlooks the Danube River. Happy to report there is excellent WiFi service here! Tomorrow I explore Budapest.

So nice to fly Lufthansa, the German carrier, because they actually feed you and offer you a choice of drinks without the stupid nickle-and-dime approach the U.S. airlines have adopted in recent years.

I have a connection to Budapest to catch shortly. Fortunately, it was just a few gates away from where I deplaned from my flight from Rome.

I took the high-speed rail from Florence back to Rome this morning, cruising through the rolling hills and expansive green landscapes of Tuscany. As soon as we pulled into Termini, I could feel the pulse of this city. There's an energy to Rome that's much more intense than a place like Florence can offer. This is a capital city, a center of politics and commerce and media. There's an almost palpable buzz one can feel in the air, not unlike what you experience when you arrive in the middle of New York City.

Happy Bloomsday to all you members of the literary cognoscenti.

Good to know the chances of meeting up with someone connected to Choate are pretty high no matter where one goes in the world. Had an enjoyable dinner near the Duomo tonight with one of my former advisees from the Class of 2009, a runner and tennis player. He is here for six weeks studying Italian.

Got an early start and spent much of the day hitting the museums in town. Not a bad way to spend part of a vacation: checking out works by the likes of da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rafael, and Caravaggio.

The sculpture of David is most closely identified with the city, of course. What strikes one when first seeing it is the size of the work. I guess one assume's it will be life-sized, but it is considerably larger than that! (And I'm hardly an art critic, but the hands did seem a little too big.)

Great excitement about Italy's World Cup game against Paraguay here in Florence, of course. I watched it in my hotel and when Italy scored to level things at 1-1, the cheers from all directions outside the building seemed to shake the city!

Stopped by an Internet cafe to get online at a reasonable speed after the disappointing hotel connection earlier today. I've never understood why it's so hard to type the "@" symbol on the computer keyboards in European countries; it's nowhere to be found on the keyboard! Clearly they use it for e-mail addresses too, right? I had to cut and paste it from a website.

It's also annoying that other keys, such as the apostrophe and the question mark, are in different locations than the standard American "QWERTY" design, too. This is another reason why it's far better to use one's own computer when traveling.

I have arrived in Firenze, the home of the Italian Renaissance. After a bit of urban bushwhacking to find the place, I have settled into my hotel and discovered that the "free wireless Internet" advertised here is exactly an hour's worth after there are charges (!) and that the connection speed of the hotel WiFi is so slow it has me yearning for the good ol' days of dial-up!

Heading out to explore the city a bit this afternoon.

Happy Flag Day to everyone back home!

. . . go to bed. My flight just landed at Leonardo da Vinci Airport and I am exhausted. Fortunately, I only had to walk to the Hilton adjacent to the terminal. In the morning I head to Florence.

Not surprisingly, a lot of chatter around London today about yesterday's draw between England and the U.S. in World Cup soccer. This result was evidently a huge disappointment on this side of the Atlantic. Just had a good-natured exchange about the match with a quartet of locals in a restaurant here at Heathrow, who were bummed about the outcome but conceded the Yanks played well.

The production of Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe was as good a presentation of "the Scottish play" as I've seen. The entire theater was done over in black, with a blood soaked backdrop, and groundlings in the yard--me included for this show--had the option of standing under a canopy extended from the stage with dozens of holes cut into it such that seemingly decapitated heads floated on a sea of black to take in the spectacle. And the show had its fair share of blood-drenched bodies and gruesome encounters, along with spooky music to add atmospheric effects. This take on Macbeth was a hellish one indeed!

When I flew to London at the end of summer school in 2009, it started disastrously. I had to rush to finish reports and other chores before leaving and left packing until the last minute. Normally not a problem, but thunderstorms shut down the electricity, which slowed me down considerably and got me off to a late start. Road and traffic conditions were abysmal in light of the weather and I ended up getting to JFK fifteen minutes before my plane was scheduled to leave. I had to pay through the nose for a later flight.

This time around, I was packed early, left campus early, enjoyed smooth sailing on the drive down, checked in and cleared security quickly, and everything is peachy!

Ready to head off to Kennedy Airport for nine days in Europe. The more I travel, the more I am convinced I can make do with less stuff to carry around with me. So I am limiting myself to one backpack (my trusty HEAD-issued one) to hold most of my gear as well as a small shoulder bag I can use during the day.

Here is the gist of what I expect to get me through just over a week on the road: four T-shirts, two shorts, one pair of sneakers, four pair of socks, a track suit jacket in case it gets cool, a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, vitamins, a book I intend to finish, a universal plug converter, digital camera, iPad and its USB cord, MacBook Air and its power cord, a travel pouch with my passport and travel documents and Macbeth ticket, Bose nose-canceling headphones, EarThumps, iPhone, iPod Touch, and a few magazines. That's actually traveling light--though I admit I may be overdoing it on the tech front, with no fewer than four WiFi devices in tow! Probably should be able to ditch the laptop and iPod Touch, but whatever.

Nearly showtime for the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa. My earliest memory of this event is watching the 1982 final at a friend's house (Italy defeated Germany--then West Germany, of course). And since the 1994 event I always seem to be traveling in Europe during the tournament and it's a much bigger deal over there. I'll be abroad again next week and expect to be swept away by "football" fever once more.

Looking forward to the November release of the third volume of the Edmund Morris biography of Theodore Roosevelt. I just pre-ordered it on Amazon.com. The first two installments were excellent.

I have just finished seeing the entire canon of Shakepeare's 39 surviving plays produced on stage. Timon Of Athens--the last drama remaining on my checklist--was presented by a troupe called the Actors Shakespeare Project, and this show turned out to, perhaps surprisingly, a very compelling piece of theater, and well worth the trip up to Boston to see it.

I hasten to add I am not "finished" with the Bard in any sense. I still have a schedule of plays I intend to see all over the place this summer. And I am scheduled to take a course on Shakespeare's comedies and romances at Yale this summer. But it is nice to have a sense of closure to this challenge I set for myself two years back.

Hmmmm . . . what to do next?

Well, not really banquets, I guess. But at the end of the school year, there is a cluster of faculty events requiring my attendance in between report writing, meetings, and other such chores. Last night was the English department party. Today there is a catered luncheon in the Alumni Center for the history department, and tomorrow night is a big shindig for all the school's faculty and staff.

After seeing Waiting For Godot in London in March, I heard about this television series Theatreland, which is essentially a documentary about the Theatre Royal Haymarket and the staging of this production of Waiting For Godot with Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Simon Callow. The series is a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to operate West End theater, covering everything from the front of the house staff to the technicians to the artists and audiences.

I picked up the DVD from Amazon.co.uk and am digitizing it so I can watch the episodes during my travels next week.

The newly released version of Safari includes plug-in functionality, so I could add an Amazon search bar to the browser window. Nice.

Just watched the keynote address Steve Jobs delivered at WWDC 2010, in which he unveiled the new iOS 4 as well as the iPhone 4. For me these were the key highlights:

• multi-tasking on the iOS


• being able to group apps into folders on the iPhone and iPad


• managing multiple e-mail accounts with one "In Box" on the mobile platform


• note-taking in iBooks

As far as the new iPhone goes, it's awfully attractive. The "Retina display" looks awesome. Camera improvements are great, too. And the FaceTime video chat feature is pretty sexy, though probably would not be all that practical. By all accounts the HD video capacity and iMovie are dazzling, but it's hard to imagine one would want to edit a lot of video on the iPhone (on the iPad, maybe).

I plan to try to resist the impulse to upgrade this summer. If I can hold out until 2011 when my AT&T contract expires, effectively skipping this release, there ought to be an even better version of the iPhone heading our way next June.

Win a Slam title on red clay. Next morning, shoot a few pics at Disneyland Paris, hop on the Eurostar to London, and have a hit on grass at Queens Club. Pretty jarring transition, it seems to me. Yet Nadal will play doubles tomorrow and singles on Wednesday on the lawn.

A relatively quiet day after the departure of the Class of 2010 from the Choate campus yesterday. I met a couple of the new grads and their families for breakfast in town this morning, had a couple of meetings in the Athletic Center, got started on my term reports, and am visiting my parents for dinner this evening. Lots of work still ahead of me this week before I head off to Europe for an eight-day tour.

Steve Jobs is delivering the keynote address at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference today (1 p.m. Eastern time) and is expected to announce an OS upgrade for the iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad platform as well as the new version of the iPhone expected later this summer. And perhaps there will be a surprise or two coming as well.

The new ATP World Tour rankings today have Rafael Nadal back at #1 in the world. Since he missed last year's Wimbledon and much of the summer circuit, his lead in the points standing will increase with every match he wins the next few months, even if Roger Federer successfully defends his All-England Club crown.

A year ago, I referenced the words to "Never Die Young" by James Taylor as a song I associate with the graduation of students from Choate. Here are the lyrics of "Landslide" by Stevie Nicks, which also capture how I feel about a day like today:

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too

Bon voyage, Class of 2010! You shall be missed.

With the threat of heavy weather, commencement exercises at Choate this morning started fifteen minutes early, which meant I got home to change out of my academic regalia just in time to watch the final point of the Soderling/Nadal French Open final. The Spaniard exacted a measure of revenge in beating the Swede--the only man ever to beat Rafa at Roland Garros--in straight sets.

It's great for the sport to see Nadal back in Slam-winning form, with his physical health and his confidence apparently restored to pre-injury levels after a sub-par 2009.

It will be very interesting to see what happens at Wimbledon next month, as Roger Federer and Nadal will be returning to the All-England Club, each having won the title in the last match he played there.

Tonight I made my cameo appearance in West Side Story. It was the show's closing night and by all accounts it was the best audience of the five performances. I spent the couple hours before the curtain mentally rehearsing lines: mine wasn't a big part, but screwing up my delivery would throw off my fellow actors (virtually the whole cast was on stage when I was). I had rehearsed the part twice with script in hand--most recently at the pick-up dress rehearsal on Wednesday--and could have cheated a bit by having my lines on a clipboard prop, but I was determined to perform without a crutch. Walking to center stage for my scene, I instantly got a round of applause (undeserved, of course) which made me feel like Jackie Gleason whenever he first appeared as Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners. I managed to get through my lines without error and even got a pretty big laugh for a visual gag I threw in, so I guess it was a success.

I certainly had a lot of fun doing this show (my cameo in No, No Nanette two years ago was a much more limited one). The whole process of rehearsing and performing was very nostalgic for me, since participating in school theatrical productions was a big part of my teenage years.