Getting caught doing something negative to a friend is beyond embarrassing; it's mortifying and most people know it's an issue of broken trust.
The cuisine of Ashkenazi Jews deserves a future beyond, as a friend put it, "self-referential jokes that fewer and fewer living people get".
As Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the spokes-nun for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, delighted in pointing out in her denunciation of my column, I have in the past described myself as a "collapsed Catholic," a friend's clever term for "beyond lapsed".
As I was flicking through Time Out Madrid, a friend told me about Madrid & Beyond, a firm based in the Spanish capital that functions as a concierge-cum-ground agent.
A divorced former rock bassist with a serious alcohol and drug problem, he was brought into the church by a friend and has flourished beyond his wildest imaginings.
To prepare, he earned a nuclear engineering degree (a challenging step beyond a friend's suggestion that he study mechanical engineering), which enabled him to leave yachts for submarines with warheads.
He is arguably the most underrated figure of the avant-garde: a larger-than-life personality, the oldest of the young turks who transformed post-war music at the Darmstadt Summer School and beyond, a friend, mentor, and teacher of Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and dozens of others.
Nova can be used up to 20 feet away from phone — assuming you can get a friend to hold it beyond arm's length, while you snap the shot.
