Hasta La Gadget!

The gate that surrounds the cemetery is not to keep people out … but to keep the dead in. And it’s hilarious.

In UCB Comedy’s new series “Gary Saves the Graveyard,” Gary (Jim Santangeli) is takes over as the new graveyard caretaker, and just in time too, because the dead have risen. Aaaaaand he just accidentally let them all loose on the world.

It’s perfect for watching while you’re getting into your Halloween costume this weekend and freaking out because nothing looks like it did in the picture.

Watch as Gary reunite with his deceased best friend as they catch up the way all friends do: Finding booze.

Many moons ago, when motherhood hadn’t completely hardened my soul and sucked out my spirit, I made a rookie mothering mistake. I brought in the mail on an afternoon in early September and casually threw it on an end table, within reach of a child’s sticky fingers.

Within minutes, I heard a cacophony of shreiking and clapping and chatter.

“Mommy!” the girls squealed, thundering into the kitchen like little Seabiscuits.

“We found them! We found them! The perfect Halloween costumes!” They waved a costume catalog — purloined from the pile of mail of the end table — in front of my face. My heart sank into my bowels.

Never, ever, set mail on an end table in September without scouring it beforehand and disposing of the Halloween costume catalogs immediately and ruthlessly. Because if you don’t, your children will find those little fuckers in record speed — it’s like kids have some kind of Costume Catalog Echolocation or something.

And they will always — always! — gravitate immediately to the most overpriced catalog in the pile. The catalog that should be titled: Wallet Suckage.

Wallet Suckage does, indeed, carry darling and inventive costumes for your little goblins to choose from. For a stupefying amount of money. I mean, your kid is going to wear this costume for one day a year — there’s no way you should ever pay more than, like, five bucks for a Halloween costume, and Wallet Suckage wants 87 dollars for a Magical Ice Queen costume (not including the fancy hat or the white gloves or the sparkly mask — those are extra).

A Magical Ice Queen costume that Miss D. now had her heart completely set on.

Crap.

“I found one too, Mommy,” said Miss M. pumping her wee arms and legs up and down in excitement. “Look!”

I had no idea what I was looking at. Some purple and black be-feathered and be-ribboned confection that, inexplicably, included a set of pointy ears.

“What is that?” I said.

“It’s a combination! It’s a bat and a witch put together! Isn’t that neat?”

At 68 bucks, not including the feathery gloves and the bat wings, I wasn’t thinking it was so neat.

I dragged out my wallet, ordered the costumes and cried a little at my own stupidity.

I also vowed to never, ever, toss the mail on an end table in September without plowing through it first.

Two hundred bucks (shipping, you know) and a few days later, the box from Wallet Suckage arrived. The girls were wild with excitement and couldn’t stop talking about their costumes. Every shopkeeper, grocery clerk and passerby the girls came into contact with knew, in excruciating detail, their Halloween plans. And since we ordered the costumes in early September, this went on for weeks.

A few days before Halloween, Miss D. was sitting in her third grade classroom, working on a math drill. The classroom was quiet and the kids were busy at work when my daughter suddenly looked up from her assignment and said boisterously, “Hey, Mrs Lewis! Guess what? My sister’s gonna be a BITCH for Halloween!”

Bat. Witch. BITCH. Get it?

Mrs. Lewis, bless her, has a great sense of humor and when she called me on her lunch hour, we howled and howled.

“You could tell that D. didn’t know what that word meant,” Mrs. Lewis chortled, “but some of the kids did, and they gave me this look like, ‘Uh, whaddaya gonna do about that, Mrs. Lewis?'”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “Best thing to happen all year.”

Fast forward four years.

The BITCH now has Mrs. Lewis as her third grade teacher. In August, when I found out that we’d hit the teacher lotto and scored Mrs. Lewis for round two of third grade, I emailed her a note:

“The BITCH and I are so excited to spend this year with you!”

Now, the Bitch costume has long been retired to Goodwill, but now that Miss M. is in third grade, guess what I’m thinking?

The Magical Ice Queen costume! We still have it and Miss M. can fit in it now, so that’s awesome! I’ll get at least another wear out of that ridiculous, over-priced sucker! Score!

Except for one leeetle problem.

When I pulled out the Magical Ice Queen costume, twirled it around for Miss M. to see and said, “Remember when D. wore this costume? I held onto it so you could wear it, too! Isn’t it lovely?” Miss M. took one look at it and said, “I’m not wearing that.”

“But, it’s so cool looking!” I sputtered.

She stared at me stonily.

“It’s got these sparkly snowflakes on the cape,” I showed her. “And a hat with ribbons.”

“I don’t like sparkly things,” she said. “Or dresses.”

This happens, unfortunately, to be true. Miss M. is about the most un-girly girl in the world. She loathes dresses and will not wear ribbons in her hair and she has never, not once in her life, ever played with a doll.

“But it’s Halloween,” I said. “You’re supposed to go as something different from who you really are — it’s kind of like that SpongeBob episode ‘Opposite Day!'”

Never underestimate the power of a SpongeBob reference.

She narrowed her eyes and scrutinized the dress. “The top part of it looks like it’s itchy.”

As luck would have it, the top part actually is itchy.

I know this for a fact because four years ago, Miss D. came down with the costume in hand and said, “I can’t wear this. It’s itchy.”

And I said, “I’ll get you an undershirt to wear under it but get back upstairs and put that costume on right this minute, because it was one hundred bucks.”

Miss M. glowers and shakes her head. “I’m not wearing that.”

“Are you sure? Why don’t you just try it on, just to see?”

“Forget it, mom,” she said. “No way am I being an Ice Queen. Queens are stupid things to be for Halloween. The only thing stupider than a queen is a princess, which is, like, the stupidest thing ever.”

Damn. She sort of has a point.

“Put that costume back in the box,” she said. “Besides, I already asked dad and he said he’d get me the costume I want.”

Pikachu.

Anyone need an Ice Queen costume?

Do not look for mountains or valleys in Bordeaux. Do not look for rich red earth or vast forests. And don’t look for spa resorts with Olympic-size swimming pools and cabanas. That may be all well and good for Napa Valley, or the hills of Tuscany, or the stunning mountains along the Rhine, but Bordeaux has its own virtues: castles and chateaux of great beauty, impeccably maintained vineyards on gravelly soil, and some superb restaurants.

The fact that you can easily arrange to visit the great wine estates of Bordeaux while staying in some sumptuous nearby hotels makes this area of southwest France one of the most soul- and appetite-satisfying vineyard regions in the world. Indeed, most chateaux are open to the public, as long as you write ahead. (To obtain names and addresses, contact the Bordeaux Wine Bureau in NYC; 212-477-9800.)

It is a huge area of more than 280,000 acres of vineyards, with 22,000 vineyard proprietors and 7,000 châteaux, or domaines, producing 800 million bottles of wine annually–compared with less than 36 million produced in the far smaller region of Burgundy. Way back in 1855 the wine merchants of Bordeaux created a classification of the region’s very finest estates of the Médoc, Sauternes, and Barsac regions, based on the consistently high prices their wines sold for over the decades. These were broken down into quality categories called “crus” (growths), which in Bordeaux referred to an estate. Thus, there were Premier Crus (First Growths), Deuxièmes Crus (Second Growths), and on down to Cinquièmes Crus (Fifth Growths). The wines of Graves and St. Émilion were also classified; those of Pomerol and other regions were not. One St. Émilion wine, Château Haut-Brion, was listed under the Premier Cru appellation. In 1973, one wine of the Médoc, Château Mouton-Rothschild, was awarded First Growth status, but no other estate has succeeded in elevating its status since 1855.

Many of the classified crus are set on exquisite properties, usually home to their proprietors, with glorious manicured lawns and pebbly walkways leading to clear-cut vineyards ringed with roses. (If a pestilence is about to hit the vineyards, roses will catch it first and give the vineyard workers advance notice). Château Margaux (above), for instance, is a butter-yellow 1810 Neo-Palladian edifice designed by architect Louis Combes for the Marquis de la Colonilla. It has been called “The Versailles of the Médoc” and since 1946 has been listed as an “historic monument” of France.

The side effect is that visitors to the region are welcomed with open arms, by both the restaurants and the estates, which wouldn’t mind at all if you go home with several cases of their wines. At Château Giscours (a Third Growth), which dates back to the 14th century, you may not only visit, you may also dine in their splendid restaurant with the estate’s enologist, who will explain the wines you are drinking. There are also beautiful banquet rooms available for meetings and receptions.

The region, cut through by the Gironde River, which irrigates all the vineyards, also has some lovely places to stay while visiting the wineries. The city of Bordeaux has become a much livelier place than it used to be, now with 15 museums, including the Bordeaux Wine Museum, and beautiful squares and mansions that date back to the time of Victor Hugo, who was a member of the National Assembly here.

The city has fine many restaurants–including three with Michelin stars. Le Chapon Fin (below), with its fanciful fin-de-siècle décor, opened in 1823 and still keeps a classic Bordelais menu, with plenty of foie gras, roast squab, and a renowned roast lamb with sage butter. In warm weather take a table on the terrace of the more modern Pavillon des Boulevard, known for its delicious lobster in chestnut cream. And the small, intimate Jean Ramet, on the river’s bank, is always populated with estate owners and merchants who come for the namesake chef’s refined regional cooking, like foie gras with candied dates and orange. For something more casual, the rustic bistro Tupiña cooks many of its dishes over an open fire fueled by grape vines.

In the village of Pauillac there is the spectacular 17th century Château Cordeillan Bages (below), once a Carthusian monastery, with 25 rooms and 4 suites, and a Michelin two-star restaurant that serves cuisine of great finesse, from eggplant marinated in olive oil with langoustines with lemon-thyme, and rack of lamb with a fricassée of vegetables. In St. Émilion the place to stay is the Hostellerie de Plaisance, restored to pristine 18th century grandeur.

With 7,000 châteaux to see, visiting Bordeaux may take a while. But the pleasures of visiting once can only serve to bring you back again, wondering what wonderful wine you may have missed and what charming chateaux you haven’t seen.

It’s hard not to love Ellen DeGeneres, and the holidays with her are truly unlike those with any other talk show host.

This year, Ellen pulled out all the stops for her costume. The big reveal? “Amal, the luckiest woman in the world, Mrs. George Clooney.”

The costume is complete with a puppet-esque version of Clooney and a giant People Magazine cover.

“I like Halloween because it’s the one time of year you can dress up however you want, and pretend you’re someone you’d never be in real life. For me, that’s married to a man,” DeGeneres quipped.

Check out the video above!

(h/t Towleroad)

BEIJING — The Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, completed last week, decided that modernizing the state governance system and the state’s governing capacity will be the general goal of further reform in the near future.

This is of great theoretical and practical significance for China’s political development and the entire modernization drive in the future. Theoretically speaking, modernizing the state governance system and the state’s governing capacity is an entirely new political idea, and it is an important theoretical sign of the transformation of the CCP from a revolutionary party into a governing party.

Practically speaking, it shows that the CCP has formally incorporated political modernization into the reform agenda. Modernizing state governance will necessitate a change in the relationship between the government, the market and society.

CHANGE WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

The Chinese government constantly reiterates that it will not slavishly follow the Western political model of multi-party competition, general elections and the separation of powers. At the same time, it stresses political reform, particularly the reform of state governance.

If you look at Chinese politics over the last 30 plus years solely from the Western perspective of multi-party competition, general elections and the separation of the three powers, you could well conclude that nothing has changed. However, if you look at it from the perspective of modernizing state governance, you will discover that Chinese political life has undergone tremendous changes during that time.

We can see enormous changes, for example, in terms of the rule of law, public participation, democratic decision making, social governance, public services, government accountability, political transparency, administrative efficiency, government approval procedures, decentralization and the development of social organizations. There is a clear direction here: from unity to diversity, from centralization to decentralization of power, from the rule of man to the rule of law, from being closed to being open, and from regulatory government to service-oriented government.

The success of China’s economic development and social transformation, and its ability to continue its long-term economic development while maintaining basic stability, derives to a large extent from successful reform over the years of China’s governance.

A BALANCE BETWEEN STATE, MARKET AND CIVIL SOCIETY

There are three important findings from China’s experience of reform to bear in mind in the years ahead.

• First, the structural foundation of modern society is the differentiation between the political, economic and civil system.

In pre-modern society, the government, the market and society were intimately integrated; there was no clear boundary between political, economic and social systems; civil society and economic society were obliterated by political society, and the state controlled everything in society. However, after the human race entered the modern age, society began to be segmented into three mutually independent realms: the state system, which has government organizations as its foundation and officials as its main representatives; the market system, which has business organizations as its foundation and business people as its main representatives; and civil society, which has nongovernmental organizations as its foundation and citizens as its main representatives.

The basic function of the modern state is to demarcate boundaries of the powers and responsibilities of the government, the market and society. Its basic mission is to render unto the government what belongs to the government, render unto the market what belongs to the market and render unto society what belongs to society.

• Second, the state governance system is a set of institutions and procedures for standardizing the functions of social powers, and safeguarding public order. It includes a set of institutions and procedures for standardizing administrative, market and social conduct.

Correspondingly, government, market and social governance are the three most important sub-systems of a modern governance system. That is to say, a state governance system is a system of institutions made up of the state’s administrative, economic and social systems.

Effective state governance requires the answer to three questions: Who governs? How do they govern? And how well do they govern? These three questions pertain to the three main elements of state governance: the governing body, governing institutions and governing tools.

• Third, neither the government, the market nor society is omnipotent; it is necessary for them to be complementary and balanced. In pre-modern society, government was effectively omnipotent and its powers were unlimited. However, in modern society, not only is government not omnipotent, but the scope of its powers is also constantly contracting and the constraints civil society and the market system impose on it are constantly increasing.

It is not only the government that is not omnipotent; but also the market and society.

As this situation is prone to result in human error, two things need to be done to overcome failure: one, the government, market and society need to cooperate and use their strengths to compensate for the others’ weaknesses; and two, there should be equilibrium among the three.

“State governance fails if the government becomes too powerful and also if it becomes too weak.”

State governance fails if the government becomes too powerful and also if it becomes too weak. However, the allotment of powers between the government, the market and society in state governance should be expected to vary between different countries and within the same country at different stages when national conditions differ. Today, in China, the CCP and the government play an overwhelming role in the country’s governance.

Stated simply, the ideal of good governance is governance in which public interests are maximized. Its basic characteristic is that the relationships between the state, the market and society are the best they can be so that each segment can coordinate in governing social and political affairs.

However, governments have always been without question by far the most powerful segment of society, and no other can be considered their equal. Therefore, in modern state governance, the government, still plays a larger role than the market and society. In other words, the key to good governance is good government, and if you want to have good governance you must first have good government.

This article is adapted from a longer piece in China US Focus. See more here.