Well, it looks like we could not have been more wrong, as The Journal revealed yesterday that Andre Balazs--already said to be making a play for the Chelsea--toured the site, wedged between Saarinen's original Terminal 5 and JetBlue's crestent-shaped new one.

SLIDESHOW: Welcome to the Hotel Eero Saarinen? >>

And today comes the news that none other that Donald Trump, or at least his representatives, looked into the project, as did European pod-hoteliers Yotel and Starwood, owners of the Sheraton and W brands.

The Journal is quick to point out that it's by no means certain any of these companies will be involved, but it is still good news for the Port, which is desperate to see something take hold on the site. And there is still the matter of receiving a litany of approvals, including from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the FAA.

The Observer remains reluctant to make a reservation, awesome as such an inn would be, but with hotels willing to try anything to recover from the recession, this sems like a good place to start.

SLIDESHOW: Welcome to the Hotel Eero Saarinen? >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Toward this green-tinged skyline, Gotham Greens hopes to build 100,000 square feet of hydroponic greenhouses throughout the five boroughs by 2030.

Brooklyn is the next horizon for these sky-high tomato dreams. The startup will transform the vacant rooftop of a Greenpoint manufacturing plant into a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse brimming with a litany of earthly bounty: salad greens, basil, squash, eggplant, to name a few. Gotham’s first greenhouse, on the rooftop of a church in Jamaica, Queens, is projected to produce 30 tons of fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs annually, starting next year.

“Hydroponics lends itself really well to the urban environment, specifically because we don’t have a lot of arable land,” Mr. Puri said. “It’s also very water and land efficient: it uses about 10 times less water than conventional agriculture and a lot less land.”

Hydroponic farming also offers substantially higher and more consistent crop yields—a crucial consideration for a rooftop farm competing with sprawling agribusiness acreage. No soil means no fertilizer or pesticide runoff, which is imperative in accomplishing Gotham’s goal of a minimal environmental impact. Most of the irrigation for the Jamaica greenhouse will come from collected rainwater runoff, and solar panels will be installed on an adjacent roof to power the enterprise. To eliminate carbon emissions generated in transport, produce will make its way to markets via biodiesel van.

“I think urban agriculture, because of the constraints of a city, really lends itself to more sustainable agricultural practices,” Mr. Puri said.

AMIDST A NATIONAL SURGE in food and environmental consciousness, urban agriculture has arisen as a solution uniquely poised to address issues of public health, sustainability and local economies.

Over the past century, the U.S. has become an increasingly urban country—roughly 83 percent of Americans now live in cities. But in an age when American farming has become synonymous with large-scale agribusiness, corn subsidies and small-town provincialism, our methods of food production have yet to catch up with this seismic shift in demographics: New York City imports roughly $1 billion in vegetables every year to feed an ever expanding population. 

Much of Gotham Greens’ produce will go to Whole Foods stores throughout the city, but a significant portion will remain in the neighborhoods that grow them. In Jamaica, an area of fresh produce scarcity, about 4.5 tons of Gotham’s annual yield will go to the local farmer’s market.

According to New York Sun Works, the organization that brought the educational Science Barge to city shores, hydroponic farms spread over New York’s 14,000 acres of unshaded rooftop could feed as many as 20 million people a year. New York City, in essence, could feed itself. Gotham Greens is just the beginning, but it’s already feeding a collective urge to understand where food comes from and how it gets there.

“Urban agriculture allows city dwellers to also produce local food,” Mr. Puri said. “People today are a little more interested about where their food comes from.”

egeminder@observer.com

The concept of these "regionally significant projects" is a little controversial, since Empire Zones are set up to benefit a particular neighborhood or region. (Before 2005 reforms, municipalities were selling the tax breaks to businesses outside zones.) To qualify, manufacturing companies have to pledge to add 50 people to their workforce, although they do not have to justify why they could not locate directly within the zone, according to Randal Coburn, director of Empire Zones program at the Empire State Development Corporation.

The Long Island City company, Bimmy’s, is a sandwich manufacturer that supplies airports both here and elsewhere. It had earlier received the support of the Bloomberg administration, City Councilors from Jamaica and Long Island City, and the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, the agency that runs the Empire Zone.

Long Island City does not have an empire zone, which led Bimmy's to look for one nearby. Carlilse Towery, president of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, said that he agreed to take the sandwich maker in as part of the zone that the organization administers because it would bring jobs to the city.

“Most of what we do here is Jamaica,” Mr. Towery told The Observer. “We have our turf but this is a very good project. It creates 100 jobs over the next five years for Queens and we were requested to do it. We wouldn’t if this wasn’t meritorious.”

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Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

Unfortunately, the AirTrain will not take passengers directly from J.F.K. into Manhattan. Instead, they will have to transfer in Jamaica, where they can pick up either the Long Island Rail Road or the subway into midtown. Similarly, outgoing passengers will have to get to Jamaica first, either by the LIRR or subway, before they can pick up the AirTrain.

This is not what the project's advocates had in mind when they insisted, rightly, that New York needed a first-class train link to its airports. Our global competitors-London, Paris and Tokyo, among others-long ago realized the importance of such links. San Francisco recently completed a link between its airport and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. What they have in common is what the AirTrain lacks: a single-seat ride from the business district to the airport.

Without direct access to Manhattan, the AirTrain is doomed. The Port Authority, which built the system, does have a long-term plan to bring the AirTrain into Manhattan, but long-term plans have a way of becoming illusions. That simply cannot be allowed to happen to AirTrain. If the Manhattan link is not started soon, AirTrain will become a very expensive white elephant, and a public embarrassment for the Pataki administration, which pushed the project forward.

The idea behind the AirTrain is inarguable. New York needs a speedy, efficient and convenient alternative to the Van Wyck Expressway and the Belt Parkway, those highways of horror that have caused many a business traveler and tourist to miss a flight out of J.F.K. Travelers who have experienced the comfort of, say, London's rail connections to Heathrow and Gatwick airports must wonder why they have to suffer in traffic jams when they come to New York.

The AirTrain is a step in the right direction, but it's only a step. Port Authority officials must understand that when they cut the ribbon for the AirTrain, they are not celebrating the completion of an expensive and necessary project. Rather, they are simply marking the end of the project's first phase.

Congratulations are not in order, because the job remains unfinished. And if it remains that way, the AirTrain will be nothing more than a promise unfulfilled.

Get All Parents Involved In School Councils

In another victory for public-school children, the city is doing away with local school boards in the city's 32 public-school districts. The boards were part of the system's emphasis on local control, but too often they became appendages of local political clubhouses. They became riddled with corruption and populated by egregious hacks who cared little about education.

Now, in place of the local boards, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wants to set up parent councils, whose members would be chosen by officers of the local Parent-Teacher Associations in each district. It's an admirable alternative to the old local boards, which were chosen in special elections that attracted turnouts of less than 5 percent. Board members didn't have to be parents of public-school children-too often they weren't-but Mr. Klein's councils would be composed entirely of parents. The councils would advise the Department of Education on local matters.

The plan requires federal approval, and some critics are urging Washington to reject it because, they say, it is biased against minorities. How so? Schools with heavy minority populations tend to have low participation in Parent-Teacher Associations-some schools don't even have a P.T.A.-while schools with white populations have flourishing P.T.A.'s. What's more, in schools with a mixed population, white parents tend to dominate the P.T.A.'s leadership.

There is certainly a problem here, but it's not the one the critics have identified. Why is there such low parental participation in heavily minority schools? Shouldn't the critics be working to get more minority parents involved in P.T.A.'s instead of complaining about bias when white parents get involved? Are the critics suggesting that the white parents who are involved in mixed-population schools represent only white students or white "interests" (whatever that might mean)?

It is certainly true that many minority parents are under severe economic and family pressure. Single, working parents have very little time to spare, and find it difficult to take on the important responsibilities that come with serving as a president, secretary or treasurer of a P.T.A. in New York City.

Still, though, just as democracy depends on voter participation, the school system needs involved parents. This is especially true in underperforming schools in poor neighborhoods. The tragedy of this story is not that whites might be overrepresented in P.T.A.'s, but that struggling schools have no or minimal parental input.

Political organizations know that one way to fight voter apathy is to organize at the neighborhood level, so that local residents feel a connection to politics and local government. Similarly, advocacy groups that claim to speak for public-school students and parents should spend their time and energy recruiting members for P.T.A.'s where those organizations barely exist.

The solution is not to complain about white parents who get involved in their local schools. The solution is to get more minority parents involved.

In the Era of Globalization, there has developed what I think of as the "Sexagonal Trade." The only commodity involved is engraved paper and proxies therefor. Think of it in terms of one of Rube Goldberg's fantasy gadgets: 1) I.M.F. money is sent to countries in trouble, where it is 2) confiscated by local kleptocracies, or appropriated by a variety of agencies fronting a game of credentialed usury, and 3) manumitted to a currency laundry like the Cayman Islands, then 4) to a "clean currency" market and 5) thence back to the I.M.F., to be put to work again 6) "structurally adjusting" the economic affairs of some other beleaguered Third World nation to begin the cycle all over.

Like its triangular forebear, the Sexagonal Trade involves, principally, persons of color. Like its three-sided predecessor, our six-sided model involves the enslavement-actual in some cases, virtual in others-of those persons.

If you want to see how it works, you cannot do better than to put pedal to the metal and go see Life and Debt , a prize-winning documentary by Stephanie Black now playing at the Screening Room. I read about it in the New York Press -unaccountably, I missed Stephen Holden's glowing five-star review in the Paper of Record-and rushed to the theater where it was then playing.

I did so because Life and Debt is about Jamaica, and what the I.M.F. and the W.T.O. and bent pigs like Carl Lindner of United Fruit have done to the place. Anybody who has read this column for any meaningful portion of the 14 years I have been writing it must know how I feel about Jamaica. We are talking about a 40-year love affair.

But that's not the whole story here. Yes, after seeing it, I got on the phone to other people who have houses at Round Hill and Tryall to tell them that anyone who has an investment of heart or wallet in Jamaica has got to see this film. Yes, I hope that Bob Pittman, who loves the island as I do, will find a way to get it on HBO. Yes, I hope that Ralph Lauren, who's the "king" of Round Hill, sees it. Mr. Lauren uses Jamaica all sorts of ways in his fashion-and-lifestyle empire, but not as a manufacturing resource, and maybe this will make him think about that . Yes, I hope that any of us with a shred of clout or influence will do what we can to make it hot for the corporatist sonsofbitches that do what's been done to Jamaica.

What makes Ms. Black's film so interesting and so provocative is that it is both site-specific and yet transcendent. It isn't the whole story: It contains an on-camera interview with former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, shot not long before he died, in which Manley is incisive about the I.M.F. but somehow fails to mention his ill-judged flirtations with communism and Castro in the 70's, which brought down a mess of trouble upon his unhappy country. Nor is the ascendancy of the narcotics trade in the Jamaican economy given due weight. But one cannot ask for everything.

Be thankful for what Ms. Black has given us: not a political-protest film, not in tone or attack similar to the Seattle protests or the anti–Big Mac movement in France. In only one scene do people take to the streets, and I think Ms. Black includes this moment in a measured, cautionary way, to remind us that when you grind virtually the whole of a population down to zero economically, then the few who are left with anything to lose stick out. As I tried to remind those silly young people who put together Bright Young Things -a disgusting book that is the single best argument for a 100 percent inheritance tax that I know of-if you insist on calling attention to your wealth and advantages, it will occur to others to come and take them away from you. A lesson I would not think lost on one of the authors, the child of a principal lawyer for the Rockefellers, a family not known to favor boastful, worldly ostentation-but we seem to be living in an era when the thirty- and fortysomethings appear to have forgotten what little they bothered to learn at Brown or wherever they went to study Gucci.

There are no manifestos flashed on the screen in Life and Debt , no angry young people. The Jamaicans we meet are mostly people of a certain age, who went decently and honestly about their work for decades and now find their lives in ruins-the kind of "ruin" Adam Smith may have had in mind when he speculated as to how much ruin may be in a country. If I may paraphrase another great American with a hand in Jamaica's plight, former Citibank chief executive Walter Wriston, the old petrodollar recycler: "Countries don't go broke, people do." Of course, if you can find enough people, it adds up to a country.

Life and Debt shoves no politics in our face, which makes it all the more riveting. It just gives the facts. It shows the human face of "structural adjustment" (along with "family tennis" and "native entertainment," the most ominous word rubric in English). It counts the money costs and then personalizes them.

Powdered milk costs 57 cents per whatever to produce in this country; thanks to the I.M.F., it is sold-if it were the "free-trade" U.S., the phrase would be "dumped"-in Jamaica for 27 cents, decimating the local dairy farmers and causing their herds to be sent for slaughter. Stanley Fischer of the I.M.F. speaks in reasonable tones-I would call him a reasonable man, in the same wise that Marc Antony described Brutus et al. as honorable men-but his soft, superior voice, with just a hint of Afrikaans about it, prescribes calamity for those nations unlucky enough to have no friends in court or in Congress.

What this movie is about is what I believe to be the great issue of our time: whether we are going to let giant corporations, with governments and governmental agencies and cooperatives fronting for them, run our lives. Whether we are going to permit them to continue to earn hatred for this country around the world as they search for that extra mill or farthing for the bottom line. Whether it is the I.M.F. in a place like Jamaica, or the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia in the matter of U.S. v. Microsoft, the outcome seems clear. The object of the exercise is to clear the way for corporations to do as they please. If they encounter resistance, the shock troops of the "free market" are sent ashore-peacekeepers commissioned by Uncle Sam.

This is what has concerned me about the Bush Project from the day of his nomination. There are too many Big Company men and women on the team. I know about Big Companies. I have sat on their boards, helped arrange their finances. I came of age in the Era of the Organization Man. I can think of no group of people better equipped-on their own say-so, if nothing else-to fend for themselves. I know of no group of people less acquainted with the notion of the "public good." Most of them don't know how to spell it, any more than they acknowledge that U-period-S-period spells "us" and not just " Us! " (the plural of "Me! Me! Me!").

From 1962, when Jack Kennedy took on the steel companies, until the 1980's, Big Company thinking-what's-good-for-General-Motors thinking-was relegated to the margin. But the entrepreneurial interregnum is over, partly a homicide victim (the complete abandonment of antitrust), partly dead by its own hand (the dot-com bubble). The men in gray flannel are back. At the I.M.F., they wear gray, too.

See this movie, Life and Debt. Then tell yourself that, of course, something like that could never happen here. And keep telling yourself.

for the first time since we'd arrived in Jamaica, the wind was sufficiently

down and the sea calm enough for decent snorkeling. Beloved Stepmother was in

good spirits. The night before, we had attended the annual party at Round Hill

that benefits the associated charities of Hanover Parish, which had gone well,

although Poppi did complain of having been sideswiped by a particularly

aggressively mixed margarita.

Poppi, Peggy O'Shea and I donned flippers, etc., and set out

for our favorite spot-a small reef that lies approximately 100 yards offshore

from the site on which Poppi and my father built their vacation house back in

1959-60. It's the place where, along with her native Engadine, she felt closest

to Nature and thus happiest.

We swam about for a while, then headed in, Poppi leading the

way. When she reached the tip of the rocky breakwater that guards our little

beach, the first shock hit her. My eldest son Jeffrey, sitting on the beach,

saw there was trouble; he and my daughter-in-law Laura ran to her aid, and

helped her into the shallows, where Laura supported her while Jeffrey ran to

phone for assistance. By now, I had seen that something was going on and rushed

in, as did Ricky, the gardener. When I got to her side, it was clear she was

leaving us. For no more than a couple of minutes, we were frozen there, like a

Pietà by Mantegna or Giovanni Bellini. She was calm; she wasn't confused, and I

don't think she was in much pain. "I'm going," she murmured, and then, seconds

later, "Nigel will know what to do"-a reference to Nigel Pemberton, our oldest

Jamaica chum-and then she was gone.

Thus ended the most extraordinary association of my life,

and, I dare say, of the lives of a great many others. When Poppi came into my

life, in 1949, I was a month away from entering eighth grade. When she left it,

I was two months to the day short of cashing my first Social Security check.

That kind of span deserves thinking about.

She was the sort of person you should only think about in

terms whole and straightforward. Frequently, when the fog of death settles on

the landscape of a life, all that remains to be seen are the shining peaks, and

that's what we talk about among ourselves or from the lectern at memorial

services. This was a lady, however, whose fascination lay in her fullness.

Especially for me, because the "step-" relationship is never less than

complicated, and needs to be worked at full-time from both ends. I think of our

half-century together as being like a flight above her beloved Alps in a small

plane: frequently bumpy, but never less than breathtaking.

She was born to command. A joke in our family is that, in

all the years we knew and loved her, there is one phrase that none of us ever

heard pass her lips: "Now, what would everyone like to do today?" Some years

ago, in St. Moritz, when I had done something that didn't fit her book, I

received the following interesting phone call: "Herr Thomas, here is Ernst at

the Palace Hotel. Frau Poppi says I should tell you to go jump in the lake!"

The day after she died, the flags flew at half-mast above the Corviglia Club,

as they did at Tryall. She was about the last of the Old Guard at what was once

the most glamorous, stylish, fun

resort in the world-and the most beautiful-and with her passing disappears all

but the final vestige of something that I doubt can ever be recaptured. Once

again, I think of the words written on the retirement of Ty Cobb, which I

paraphrase: "We will not see her like again, for the game has changed-and not

for the better."

She was probably the best friend anyone who could fairly

claim her friendship ever had. I have known a lot of people in my life, but

never one who went to bat for her friends with the unflagging, even ferocious

zeal of my Beloved Stepmother. A doctor's daughter, she had a special feeling

for those whose lives weren't going well, who had less: less money, less

health, less to fight with. It was old-fashioned noblesse oblige, if you will,

the duty that goes with privilege or comparative advantage, an obligation to

look out for those at whom fortune either scowled or smiled too thinly for her

liking. She was an American citizen, naturalized as soon as she could be after

her marriage to Joe Thomas, and I think she understood-as well as anyone I can

think of-the injunction James Fenimore Cooper lays on his countrymen in The American Democrat , which I have

"re-gendered" to fit: "Liberality is particularly the quality of a gentlewoman

…. She asks no more for herself than she is willing to concede to others. She

feels that her superiority is in her attainments, practices and principles,

which if they are not always moral, are above meanness, and she has usually no

pride in the mere vulgar consequence of wealth."

Of course, Poppi famously extended these principles to

include animals, whose cause she championed unremittingly, personally and

institutionally. She liked to tell me that animals were every bit as

interesting as humans, but she was also willing to admit doubt; five years ago,

after a Wildlife Conservation Society trip to Africa where we were privileged

to be tutored by George Schaller, the great zoologist, she confessed that the

behavior of New York society women at close quarters on safari was every bit as

bloody-toothed terrifying as anything we had seen in the savannas of

Ngorongoro.

In the last few months,

if it is any consolation, Poppi's outlook darkened. Not that she let on in

public; her friends counted on her to be there for them , after all, not to tell them her troubles. But there were medical issues whose long-term effects

promised to be dire. Old friends were dying at an unacceptable rate. Life was

getting to be too much. Several times she spoke to me of a wish to pass on.

And so she did. In the whole sense of things, I cannot

honestly say I wish it had been otherwise-and I, thank God, was there with her

at the end. I will go to my own grave convinced that she realized what was

happening, that she saw in a flash that this was how easily and swiftly it

might end, and that she added a bit of afterburner of her own to speed herself

on her way.

I'm happy for Poppi. She got pretty much the life she

wanted, and she definitely got the death she wanted: quick, in a place she

loved, surrounded by people who cared deeply for and about her.

Still, no matter how grateful I am to the powers who so

considerately arranged for her to take her leave in this way, I have to say

this. Three years ago, as many of the family as could be rounded up gathered in

Jamaica. Four generations were represented. This coming August, when Poppi

would have been 86, there will be three. The diminution seems insuperable,

insupportable, unacceptable.

As longtime readers know, I regard Jamaica as a terrific vantage point from which to contemplate the New Global Order and its wonders. I say this because–in the course of a year's reading on the N.G.O.–it has become perfectly clear that those who have the loudest opinions on the subject are people who actually spend precious little time living in it.

This Thanksgiving proved to be an especially fruitful period for the study and analysis of the N.G.O. The "outside world"–a phrase that in a place like Tryall Golf, Tennis & Beach Resort, near Montego Bay, Jamaica, has real resonance–was less present than ever. One reason is that the American networks have been scrubbed from our satellite TV system down there. No CBS, NBC, Fox or ABC on the dish. For this we can thank litigation that has convinced some idiot judge somewhere in the United States that a system relaying, say, the feed of NBC's New York affiliate to 80 private residences in Jamaica is in restraint of trade–because the system is thereby (theoretically) denying NBC's Missoula, Mont., affiliate access to this incalculably valuable market. Then there is The New York Times , now virtually impossible to obtain in Montego Bay, thanks to a U.S. distribution reorganization apparently designed to promote the Good Gray Lady's e-publication. The latter takes the form of something called "Times Fax," which arrives every afternoon and manages to exclude anything one would want to read.

Without a lot of news pouring in over the transom, the guests at Tryall were thrown back on their own experiences, reflections and convictions as we discussed the way the world may be going. It's quite surprising, for example, how we overlook, by taking for granted, the philosophical and sociological implications of mechanical changes in our getting and spending. Take the computer, for instance, which all would agree is the soul of the N.G.O.

We talk about the computer this and the computer that, but one point I seldom hear advanced, a consequence that may loom largest of all, is that the computer has made it possible to economically (and often profitably) pursue infinitesimal sums of money. The computer has made the phrase "It's too small to worry about" extinct. This phrase represents a human judgment, of which the computer is the enemy, despite all the talk one hears of "intuitivity." How many times does a friendly merchant say, "Oh, forget the penny"? How many times does a computer make the same response?

In the difference, I submit, is the new world foreseen by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Not necessarily brave–but accurate to the 10th decimal place.

Making small judgments–we don't all begin as Solomon, with a baby to bisect–is the way we learn to make large ones, the way we train people to manage, to move up the ladder. The more we turn the small judgments over to machines, the greater the risk of turning people into machine-directed automata–the sort who call you during dinner to make a pitch, but can barely pronounce the words they are laboriously deciphering from a screen before them. These are people who are learning absolutely nothing as they go.

More and more people are becoming uneasy with this, I suspect. This Thanksgiving, for example, I was interested to see that a distinguished, truly accomplished and cosmopolitan Tryall friend seemed to be singing a new tune. When the talk at the table turned to taxes–the flat tax, the wealth tax, progressivity in general–I was surprised to hear him say that we should oppose anything that further subsidizes the wealthy, of which he is eminently a member in best standing. Three years ago, I heard him declare exactly the opposite. It may well be that in the interval he has added a zero to his net worth, but that's not what impelled him to say what he did. In his voice, I heard what I suppose Tocqueville did when he moved among our materialist ancestors 160-odd years ago: not altruism, but "self interest properly understood."

This is a lesson the N.G.O. needs to learn. Since it was born two and a half decades ago in a conference room in Vienna, midwifed by OPEC and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the N.G.O. has basically been about making the rich richer through games played on computer screens. This effort has been abetted by a wondrous new technology of greed and a worldwide failure of political will at the top, from those in office to those in the media who are supposed to keep watch.

What bothers me most is how much of the N.G.O. seems increasingly to verge on the ridiculous, whether we're talking I.M.F. policy or Internet wealth creation. It has such a comic quality, with the borderline between sublime and ridiculous all but effaced. Think about it: Trump for President, Clinton as President, the Mexican bailouts, Ebay, the "new" Russia, the "defeat" of Iraq in the Gulf "war." Make your own list!

I'm beginning to think that this is what Marx foresaw when he made his famous statement: "Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Do not forget that Marx lived and wrote not only in the Revolutionary era of 1848, but in the Gilded Victorian times of the rising bourgeoisie, replete with railway (for which substitute Net) and emerging-markets speculation.

What Marx might also have added is this: that the working-out of either scenario, tragic or farcical, can prove equally catastrophic, perhaps bloody. A chair pulled out as a joke can lead to a broken back as easily as a smash with a club. So much of the N.G.O. has the dissociative unreality of a game. After all, where more so than from the window of a Gulfstream cruising at 40,000 feet does the world resemble a Monopoly board? Someone like Bill Gates has never had a real job. What does the world look like to him? What does he know of life?

We have survived, somehow, what Marx might have called the tragic instance: the 20th century of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and the friends-in-power of Henry Kissinger. The question I found myself pondering as the stuffing and gravy went round was this: Can we survive its recurrence as a joke? Maybe this is what is really meant by Y2K!