Sitting at Gregory’s Coffee after the Opening Day game, rating Gregory’s dark roast and blueberry muffin A+. Both of them.

The game not so much. Patrick Corbin is still Patrick Corbin, and C.J. Abrams is not yet C.J. Abrams. But three cheers for Joey Mineses and four for Victor Robles. Final score was Braves 7. Nats 2. But the game itself was a bit more even than that. The Braves’ 3 in the 9th was the killer. And Kyle Finnegan sure didn’t shine as our closer. We’ll see how long he stays there.

One other thing. Baseball when it’s in the 40s does lack something. Comfort. And Nats Park still lacks somthing. Edible, affordable food. Why is that so hard?

Let me add to the A+ section of this post. Last night, we had dinner at Bistro Lepic on Wisconsin Ave for the first time since pre-pandemic. How do you say A+ in French?

Our guest last night was an old friend from NYC down here for an international law conference. Always a pleasure to see him. Next time, maybe his wife will join him. We last saw them in New York in October. But that was a quickie.

Final thing for today. It’s Thursday, and that means someone gave an excellent presentation at my breakfast group. Today, it was about Harvard professor Henrich and his book on how Western personalities differ from those of the rest of the world, and how that relates to material and scientific advanced in the West. His book, whose name I don’t recall but which has WEIRD in it, runs 900 pages. Among other things, he appears to credit/blame the Catholic Church for much of the Western differences, and interestingly, finds that Jews in America are different in some respects from other Americans, sharing some qualities with people in other parts of the world. Apparently, he doesn’t specify, and I didn’t get that he was making a value statement. But some of the concentration on “clan”, that you find in other places, you find here, he concludes, among American Jews.