The story may be apocryphal, but a friend told me the other day that the inventor, for lack of a better word, of the cylindrical paper sachet by means of which coffee bars where cappuccinos cost $5 dispense granulated sugar–thus distinguishing themselves from ordinary coffee bars, where the said sachets are in the more traditional shape of rectangles–took his own life. The man killed himself because he had grown disillusioned, not with mankind generally, but with the small portion of it that was using his invention; apparently, he had envisioned coffee or tea drinkers breaking the sachets in half...

  Last week little brave Norway woke up to the news, sprung on her by the national TV2 channel, that Einar Gerhardsen, who had been her duly elected and much respected Prime Minister no less than three times–in 1945-51, then once more in 1955-63, and again in 1963-65–was, until his death in 1987, a KGB agent.  Recruited along with two members of his cabinet following a state visit to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, thenceforth the august statesman, affectionately known to his countrymen as the “Landsfaderen,” or father of modern Norway, would answer to the code name “Jan.”  In fact, Gerhardsen was...

  I begin with house statistics since the day before New Year’s.  We’ve had five guests staying here, all Russian in varying degree, including a Viennese lady by the name of Inga who, even when the lighting is all wrong, looks like a film noir star of the 1940’s.  Suffice it to say that an admirer had given the diva a riding crop for Christmas, which she kindly brandished for us of an evening while wearing, in an effortlessly choreographed sequence, three wigs she had providently packed in her luggage, a blonde, a brunette, and I think a redhead. As...