A couple of food notes from the neighborhood:

My Favorite Bistro, at 72nd and Columbus, appears to be closed. I never went during the year-and-change it was open. Why? Because the first thing I saw on the menu was iceberg salad for $7. There is no excuse for iceberg lettuce--except maybe, just maybe, under a piece of gefilte fish. Iceberg has no place in any salad and charging $7 for a salad with it is presumptuous.

Speaking of sub-par, so is the Santa Monica sandwich at Route 66 on 9th Avenue. Advertised as a sandwich on "five grain bread" with cheese and avocado, it sounds good from the menu. However, this bread turns out to be paltry Wonder-shape slices, and the cheese seems like it is right out of a store-bought package. For the same amount, I could have enjoyed a meticulously crafted sandwich at Eatery.

The Grand Tier, a new building on 65th Street and Broadway, has taken forever to complete. It's already late (a sign last spring said that the new Bed Bath & Beyond was coming "summer 2004"), and it doesn't look close to opening.

Anyway, whatever it takes to finish the job has created an unloading area on 65th just east of Broadway, making an already narrow street barely passable.

This has created massive gridlock extending in every direction but south from Lincoln Square. First, traffic heading east on 65th Street is getting stuck across Broadway and Columbus Avenues. This, in turn, is creating a long line of stalled vehicles north up Columbus Avenue, through 66th Street and beyond. That is preventing traffic heading west on 66th Street, from Central Park West, from moving. Vehicles heading northwest up Broadway are also screwed because they can't cross 65th Street and head up beyond the intersection. Same for people heading southeast on Broadway, too.

There are probably also delays at 66th and Central Park West and a block south at 65th.

In all my time near the Lincoln Center acoustic canyon, I have never heard so much honking.

So from the first three episodes of "The Apprentice," what we seem to have is a lesson in the downside of product placement.

The first season of "The Apprentice" was spectacular because each episode concluded with some kind of verifiable result. One team sold more lemonade than the other. One team rented the apartment for more of a profit than the other.

The problem is, when you start dragging Procter & Gamble and Mattel into the picture, you can't expect those companies to trust a full launch to a TV show. The best you can do is some kind of trial or focus group where the winner is based on impression.

This is wholly unsatisfying from a business perspective. Focus groups and marketing experts can be wrong. In the Crest toothpaste episode, the winner was determined by the other team going over-budget--which, while significant, seems marginal. At any rate, the overall decision seemed to hinge on a mere sense that one team generated more "buzz" than the other. The Ciao Bella project was a nice compromise.

The City section of today's Times has a little blurb about underground cell phone service. For at least the last three years, I have always had 5-bar service (on AT&T Wireless) on the 1/9 inside Columbus Circle/59th Street station. This is not only because of the numerous vents, but also because the cell cluster is perched atop the New York Institute of Technology on 61st and Broadway, right nearby.

I think the emphasis should be on stations, not subways. People talking on their cell phones in the subway would be annoying. But in stations, it would be useful (such as when you are a 45 minutes late for brunch because of flooding rains). Montreal provides a good model. Cell repeaters were installed at major downtown Metro stops along the green line (McGill and adjacent stations), so you have service while you are waiting for the train. This is a good way to start and allows people to see if expansion is worth the cost.

Grady Little must be feeling pretty good right now. Last year's Red Sox manager, he left pitcher Pedro Martinez in the game a little too long in the deciding content in last year's ALCS.

Last night showed he's not the only one capable of making a bad decision. Pedro stayed in again, and again, gave up the lead. The Yankees won 6-4.

As Mike Mussina put it, "History repeats itself--but usually not that quickly." The latest episode is yet another tale of Boston's destiny of defeat.

Getting the weather right is hard enough. But communicating weather information properly is a whole other ball game. The best on-air meteorologists are not only those that forecast accurately, but also can select exactly the right words so the public understands what is happening.

With this in mind, I was disappointed by the National Hurricane Center's decision to declare that "Ivan" has returned. It is true that some remnant of Ivan eventually circled around, in very weak form, back south to the Florida coast and then west into the Gulf of Mexico. There, over warmer water, it grew again into a tropical storm.

But the public had already been educated that "Ivan" was gone. Most people thought that once it had exited the mid-Atlantic coast, it was history.

Fortunately the revitalized Ivan was not a serious hurricane (not that tropical rain is always fun). But if it had been, I think the National Hurricane Center should have chosen form over substance to make sure the public felt sufficiently alarmed. By calling it Ivan, even if scientifically accurate, meteorologists caused confusion--something you never want to get in the way of safety.

The move went very well 2 weeks ago and things are quickly settling in. First, one of my favorite aspects of moving--change-of-address announcement postcards--are done. It was a rare opportunity to visit one of my favorite stores, Kinko's. The number of permutations of products, paper colors, paper stocks and so on is staggering. Yet they capture all the possibilities on one form and somehow it all comes out correctly.

FedEx, which acquired Kinko's last year, is trying to brand it as "FedEx Kinko's." This doesn't work. Just tell us that you can FedEx directly from Kinko's, but don't overload it with a compound brand name. Of course, this happens with many acquisitions. Credit JP Morgan Chase for letting the retail banking brand stand as is. Who is really going to say, "I went to FedEx Kinko's today?"

Second, my stock of Jordans cereal is replenished. Despite the termination of their American distribution agreement earlier this year (a new one is in the works for January 2005), I was able to order it from an online grocer in Toronto. Even with $18 of shipping costs, the total for 8 boxes was $40, or about $5 per box--the same as what you would pay in Manhattan.

I remember seeing one of the very first ads in Continental's current ad campaign. It was "From Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley. Nonstop." Clever. (Of course, this was when Silicon Alley existed.)

Five or so years later, this campaign must be one of the most enduring and successful of all time. Every time you think it may be over, a new batch arrives with fresh wit and wordplay. Among my newer favorites: "From Dumbo to Harvard. Nonstop."

There's also been "From L.I.E. to Watergate," "From 'Oy!' to Poi," and "From Hillary to Bill" (when the two were in separate cities).

In fact, the whole Continental turnaround story is incredible. In the early 1990s, the airline was a joke, notorious for chronic flight delays. A decade later, partly through smart advertising and marketing, Continental is respected. In addition to the great campaign, look at Newark Airport (otherwise known as Continental International Airport). If you're any other airline, you have to be embarrassed just to show your face in that sea of blue and white jets.

I think 10 years from now, people will still be talking about Continental's ad campaign and comeback as one of the greatest in history.

They all blew it.

Several days ago, just about every computer model out there had shown the remnants of Hurricane Ivan stalling over the middle Appalachians. By today, the center was still supposed to be in or around Tennessee. However, what's left of Ivan has moved well out to sea, and New York City is sitting under vivid blue skies and in crisp, cool air. What happened?

Well, it seems to me this is not a coincidence. As discussed here before, fronts have a tendency to act as a conduit for storm centers and moisture. The forecasts of Ivan stalling seemed based on the premise that Canadian high pressure would not quite be able to push away the lingering front along the East Coast. This moisture would be channeled up the front, the models showed, and rain would linger from the Appalachians out along the East Coast.

In fact, this Canadian high pressure center turned out to be a monster. An afternoon temperature in the low 60s this time of year represents extremely cold air. And with a pressure of 30.25, relatively high as air pressure goes around here, we're not even near the axis of highest pressure -- a sprawling ridge bubbling along a line from roughly Cleveland to Mt. Tremblant, Quebec. (The barometric pressure in Cleveland is 30.40.)

No wonder the front--and its moisture, and Ivan--were simply shoved out to sea. Of course, nobody is complaining at this forecast bust, except for the people who might want to be delayed on the subway again.

I finally got around to watching the season opener of "The Apprentice" last night. Besides overuse of the word "underutilized," it was a pretty good start.

I'm most excited to see the return of the real star of the show--Carolyn Kepcher. Her facial expressions are absolutely priceless.

Leave it to Gretchen Morgenson to trumpet a simple change of business conditions as a major corporate scandal. Of course, if a corporate director does so much as play tennis, Gretchen concludes the tennis game is inherently designed to exploit individual investors. The real story behind her commentary is just not that big a deal.

Here's what happened: in 2002, IBM made an outsourcing deal with JP Morgan Chase. The deal placed 4,000 IBM consultants at the client for several years. However, the client recently decided it would end the contract, saying it would rather handle its technology needs in-house.

According to Gretchen, this isn't just a loss of a contract--it represents an invalidation of IBM's entire outsourcing strategy. Which, of course, IBM supposedly oversold to investors. Just ask Jack Nincompoop, president of Nincompoop Capital Management (Gretchen likes to quote these kinds of sources).

Here's a more disinterested take on the situation since I don't have a pre-set agenda: first, business conditions change. As it turns out (if you dig deep enough in the article), JP Morgan Chase became part of Bank One. The economy is also very different now than in 2002. Then, outsourcing was especially appealing because that meant you didn't have to hire your own full-time employees. Now, with some signs that technology investments are lower risk, reasonable people may conclude that the outsourcing vs. full-time calculus has shifted. Or they may not. Maybe Bank One has access to 4,000 people that can do the job better so breaking the contract is good for its own shareholders in the long run. Who knows? This is called a free market.

Any reasonable person should know that business conditions can change. And anyone with any experience knows that a client reference is just a reference. Does the market feel it was duped? Or does it feel IBM's financial results are now suspect? At last check, IBM was down from around $87 to slightly above $86 per share. Gretchen's apparent belief that she is smarter than the market has been proven wrong once again.

It's reasonably certain now that Hurricane Ivan will make landfall along the Gulf Coast. What happens after that is, well, up in the air.

Usually, storms accelerate as they come inland and ride up the coast. They get caught in the prevailing westerlies, or the high-level current of air that steers storms across the country.

But in this case, the jet stream will remain to the north, allowing Ivan to get cut off. As a result, it will stall somewhere near the Tennessee/North Carolina border. Since winds circulate counterclockwise around a low pressure center, they will upslope along the east side of the mountains to the north of the storm center, bringing potentially copious rains.

The other issue is a cold front expected to head south from Canada. If this clears the coast before Ivan's moisture heads too far north, New York may stay dry. However, if the front is close enough, it may act as a conveyor belt to carry tropical moisture into our area. (This is what happened with Frances--the heavy rains we received, as thoroughly discussed already, were not per se part of the core Frances system.)

Overall, it's a situation generating low confidence forecasts for the weekend. The key word for planning is flexible. Many five-day forecasts show downpours all weekend. While I wouldn't plan an all-day outdoor excursion, just how the weekend plays out won't be clear until it's over.

I have yet to find anything on the menu at Hunan Park (Columbus Avenue and 71st Street) that isn't outstanding. That's why Hunan Park's unintentional advertising strategy is brilliant.

In the summer, they leave windows open right along where the windowside tables are. This allows scents of their dishes to waft out onto the street. When you walk by, you can't help but put Hunan Park first in line for your next dinner.

I'll be offline for much of tomorrow so here is a special Thursday edition of the Friday Top Five. Getting ready to move, I found the following largely unused items in my refrigerator and freezer.

5) Grape jam. I think this is because one day, jam on toast sounded like an appealing breakfast. This enthusiasm wore out after one or two days. From the look of the jam jar, probably one.

4) A large bottle of seltzer. This is from the time last summer I got ketchup on my shorts and wanted seltzer to get it out. This worked, but why not a smaller size?

3) Four ice packs. Each of these is from a trip down to Florida in the last several years. My grandmother sends me back with a frozen take-home portion of lasagna and uses an ice pack. I had simply accumulated these in my freezer before getting rid of them today. (Should I have brought an ice pack down to Florida to recycle it?)

2) A too-large jar of mayo. With the frigid winter there was definitely a turkey sandwich-at-home lunch phase on weekends. This has long expired.

1) An unopened jar of Bertolli tomato sauce. When I received a coupon from Bertolli in response to a question about their discontinued salad dressing, this tomato sauce looked wonderful. Unfortunately, I'm fed up with pasta and hardly ever eat it (unless it's prepared in Florida). Oh well.

Cingular's buyout of AT&T Wireless seems to be drawing nearer and nearer. So, it's a good time to review some of the reasons I think AT&T Wireless has earned a place in business case study history as a dreadfully uninspired company.

Put aside all the other problems such as the botched Siebel implementation. With the spinoff from AT&T, AT&T Wireless could have been fresher, more imaginative, and more nimble. This is not what happened.

They could have changed the name. Instead they just called it AT&T Wireless.

When it came time for a new slogan, they chose "reach out," precisely because that's the same one AT&T used a decade ago.

With an opportunity to rebrand the service package using its new GSM network and no roaming charges across America, they called it...GSM America.

And finally, the latest ad campaign simply inversed the question posed in Verizon Wireless's ads. Verizon asks, "Can you hear me now?" AT&T Wireless responded with "How many bars do you have?" Brilliant.

The service problems have added a whole other dimension to this sad episode. But purely from a marketing and advertising perspective, I think AT&T Wireless will go down as one of the most boring of our time.

You can always count on NY1 for a certain dramatic flair--or fiction--when it comes to reporting the weather. A couple of months ago, a story described participants in a parade as enduring "hot" weather, when the actual high temperature was 78.

Now we have the heavy rain this morning, and NY1 is reporting it as "remnants" of Hurricane Frances. This is completely wrong. The heavy rain this morning is simply the result of the prevailing tropical flow and a lot of moisture in the atmosphere. The remnants of Frances are still all the way down south, in Georgia. Although rain from the system has spread up into Ohio and western Pennsylvania, it doesn't take a meteorologist to look at a weather map and see a distinct separation between that rain and ours. Our heavy rain is more the result of this tropical moisture interacting with a wavering cold front stretching through northern New York and New England.

I'll never understand why people expected to report the truth are willing to create a double standard when it comes to meteorology. Is it because nobody will pay attention otherwise?

--

Postscript (12:24pm): According to an AP story, Ralph Izzo, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, attributed the rain to the remains of Hurricane Frances. I still don't buy it and think NY1 rushed to put "Frances" in the headline for ratings. If you look at the radar and surface map, there is a distinct rounded area of rain emanating from the center of the storm. New York City is not in it. Tropical moisture is streaming up from the southeastern states and the rain here is more the result of the interplay between this moisture and the cold front.

Determining causation in weather--a phenomenon of interconnected fluid events--is a matter of judgment. I still don't think the relationship between Frances and the rain today makes the cut.

I don't know how Gary Sheffield does it with that swing. It's not a normal swing. As he waits for the ball, his bat goes back and forth, back and forth, at a seemingly chaotic pace. Then he swings and always seems to get the clutch hit. He's 4 for 4 tonight, bringing his average for the season up to .302.

A great hitter like Don Mattingly you can understand. Mattingly's swing was nearly perfect every time. Sheffield's consistency seems to defy laws of physics.

Having connected my iPod to my stereo as a full-time high-tech audio peripheral, I've been motivated to make more custom playlists. This has been fun. However, two things I wish iTunes had: (1) an easy way to email friends a plain text list of songs and artists in your playlist, and (2) some kind of "mix test" feature allowing you to hear the first ten and last ten seconds of each song automatically, so you can determine how well the mix moves from one track to the next.

Even with those limitations, the latest mix happened to work out quite well. I may still do some tweaking, but here it is for now. It's composed more or less of modern and alternative rock songs from the last year:

1) "Amsterdam" (Guster) (Note: I saw these guys back on March 1, 1997 at the Bayou in Washington D.C. and saw potential. It's great to see them have made it big.)

2) "The Reason" (Hoobastank)

3) "Blurry" (Puddle of Mudd) (A song I never wound have found without the Internet's power of search and sample)

4) "Ocean Avenue" (Yellowcard)

5) "Figured You Out" (Nickelback)

6) "Last Nite" (The Strokes)

7) "So Far Away" (Staind)

8) "Someday" (Nickelback)

9) "Like a Stone" (Audioslave)

10) "Fly From the Inside" (Shinedown)

11) "Talk Shows on Mute" (Incubus)

12) "The Middle" (Jimmy Eat World)

13) "Love Song" (311) (Funny, because the first 311 hits I heard from 1997 were incredibly annoying)

The one missing? "Last Train Home" by Lostprophets. It's not available at the iTunes music store and I'm not set to buy the album. Maybe someday.