Besides spending a very pleasant evening with two good friends, with whom we enjoyed a delicious grilled lamb dinner at the Lebanese Taverna in Pentagon Row, I probably learned more about basketball tonight than I have in the preceding thirty-odd years.  For my first live professional basketball game, we went to see the Wizards, who narrowly defeated the Atlanta Hawks.  Now I will be able to tell my children that I saw the legendary Michael Jordan play, even though a better time would have been when I was in Chicago ten years ago.  Still, he made a palpable difference when he was on the court.  The half-time show was quite fetching: the eleven members of the Boehmer family jugglers juggled batons in every conceivable combination, and the patriarch engaged in feets of balance on his chin ranging from his youngest daughter in a chair by one leg to a full-size canoe.

11:35:12 PM