Saturday coffee.

Anne and I celebrate 34 years of marriage today.

Maybe some day, and not too far away, everybody in the US will be able to celebrate wedding anniversaries if they want to. And then in 34 years, everybody can celebrate 34 years of marriage if they want to.

We’re celebrating it by having coffee, reading the Times, going shopping, dropping stuff at the cleaners, raking autumn leaves if it doesn’t rain and having dinner in Bucktown at a French-Japanese fusion restaurant. We decided to dress up.

I’m putting on a tie. I never wear a tie.

At Whole Foods they had an eye of round roast on sale. I asked the butcher if I should braise it. He nodded.

As I was getting in line to check out, a young guy comes up to me and tells me he overheard me at the butcher.

“Here’s what you do,” he says.

“Rub olive oil on the roast. Salt and pepper. Mark it on the grill.  Make a rub of chopped rosemary and Dijon mustard. Put it in the oven at high heat for 8 to 9 minutes, just under rare. Let it sit and then slice it thin. Serve with caramelized shallots. On a roll or with green beans.”

“You’re a chef,” I ask?

“Private chef,” he says and lifts up a large container of scallops he will be cooking that night.

Klein never intended to keep the information confidential.

Following up on yesterday’s post about the lying chancellor of the NY city schools, NYC Public School Parent reports:

Though Klein also originally agreed with the UFT to keep the individual reports confidential, as are most performance ratings , and to resist releasing them to the public even if FOILed, he has gone back on this promise as well. 

Yet even back in the fall of 2008, when the reports were first provided to principals, it was clear to me and many others that DOE would eventually use them to evaluate teachers, as by nearly all accounts, they have little or no value to helping teachers improve.

Dems holding their own in early voting.

I suspected back a few weeks that the Republicans may have peaked around Labor Day. The Dems had no where go but up.

Talking Points Memo:

As the Washington Post reports, the Democratic political consulting firm the Atlas Project says that Dem turnout right now is better than it was in the early voting for the last midterm election, the Democratic wave year of 2006. “In many states, it even appears that the electorate so far is a little more Democratic than in 2006, although it is still early in the early voting process,” reported the firm. “Further, in some states like Georgia, Florida, Michigan and North Carolina, African Americans in particular seem to be making up a greater proportion of early voters at this point than in 2006.”

The next DC election.

Now that DC’s Mayor Fenty is gone and DC school boss Michelle Rhee is gone, what happens to George Parker who headed the DC teachers union?

George Parker, who signed the game-changing labor contract with Rhee that was approved by members in June, is running for reelection to a three-year term. Reform advocates hailed the pact for provisions such as performance pay linked to student achievement and new latitude for principals to make hiring decisions.

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