Hey, look!

These onetime dinners keep popping up in the South. In Athens, Georgia, there’s a group of guys in their late twenties to mid-thirties—and now one woman—who cook together most Saturday nights in a century-old house downtown, with space to invite a couple dozen people to dinner. So they do. The supper club operates fairly underground; it started back in the spring of 2007 when four friends got together one Sunday to cook a four-course dinner. (Two of the men say they “aren’t chefs at all, but love food…to talk about it and cook it,” and two had already worked in kitchens of some of Athens’ best restaurants like Farm 255, the Grit, and the Five and Ten.) From that beginning, the Four Coursemen have filled their table several nights a month by inviting friends, and friends of friends. It’s been a pretty popular gig, and to help, the group of mostly University of Georgia grads have added a wine expert and another experienced chef, and have started collecting a donation of forty-five dollars or more. (At first they’d had “a loose donation system” and were left with lots of out-of-pocket expenses.) One of the Four Coursemen founders is a Web site designer in “real life” and has started a simple site for the club that lists no location address (that’s given once you’re invited to attend), and only the organizers’ and chefs’ first names, along with menus that are deep with food experimentation and local ingredients…celery root soup, crisped pork belly, beet gnocchi with boar sausage, boiled peanut ice cream. Every menu is for one night only, and not repeated. One of the founders explains, “This is about trusting the chef…it’s not like at a restaurant where you go in and say, ‘Here’s what I want.’ All we do is say, ‘This is what we’re cooking this week. Would you like to come over?’

Simplicity, many people think,
is an end in itself
But they’re getting it backwards
Simplicity is the path, the means
It’s not a far off destination,
somewhere in the future
It’s right here, right now
It’s taking things one at a time
It’s asking simple questions
It’s taking simple actions
It’s doing it slowly
It’s considering and being conscious,
with everything When you find yourself becoming overwhelmed
on the path to simplicity
Taking a complicated, frenzied path
to get there
Stop, consider, and choose
the simpler path
And take it slowly
And easily
And lovely

Information is completely integrated. That is to say that, for example, the Google Maps app seamlessly shows a restaurant’s location, user reviews and the menu. It means within that same interface, you can switch to street view for a picture of the front door; you can check where your friends are using Google Latitude and when you’re ready, head there using Google Navigator, the search behemoth’s entrée into GPS-enabled, turn-by-turn, voice guidance routing.

We have the greatest health care system in the world. Sure, it has flaws, but it saves lives in ways that other countries can only dream of. Abroad, people sit on waiting lists for months, so why should we squander billions of dollars to mess with a system that is the envy of the world?

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Larry Ellison: I remember when Steve [Jobs] was my neighbor in Woodside, Calif., and he had no furniture. It struck me that there wasn’t furniture good enough for Steve in the world. He’d rather have nothing if he couldn’t have perfection.

And I jokingly said, “The difference between me and Steve is that I’m willing to live with the best the world can provide. With Steve that’s not always good enough.”