December 11, 2005

WAITING for an apartment to sell is surprisingly vexing, and the wait is growing longer. In Manhattan, properties are taking a month longer to sell than they did a year ago at this time, 133 days on average, according to third-quarter data from the appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel. As agonizingly long as that may sound to a seller, it is still within the norm for the last 20 years, which was 120 to 150 days. Dottie Herman, chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that for buyers and sellers, the current market feels like being on an expressway going 100 miles an hour and suddenly dropping to the speed limit when a state trooper appears. ''Now the speed limit feels like you're not even driving, it feels so slow,'' she said. ''But it is a healthy pace.''

HERE'S something you don't see every day: 33 mostly middle-age New Yorkers sitting around a television set in a Midtown restaurant, watching a bullfight. The setting, on a recent Thursday night, was a Spanish restaurant in Manhattan where the New York City Club Taurino -- an organization of bullfighting enthusiasts -- holds its monthly meetings. On the television: a videotape of a 1982 bullfight known to aficionados as the Corrida of the Century because it featured six especially ornery and energetic bulls and some of Spain's most revered matadors, including Luis Francisco Esplá.

CHRISTMAS shoppers are bypassing video game bins with a vengeance, according to a report last week from the NPD Group, a market research firm. Raw data for November indicate that overall game sales dropped roughly 20 percent from the same period last year. One reason for the falloff is that buyers may be putting off software purchases until they buy the new hardware that is hitting the stores right now. Only one company showed impressive growth during the month: Activision, whose sales rose an estimated 48 percent over the same period of 2004. At the bottom of the barrel was Take-Two Interactive Software, the industry bad boy whose hit, Grand Theft Auto, rewards players for committing violent crimes like killing prostitutes and shooting up police stations.

AS the debate over torture intensified earlier this month, Charles Krauthammer hit a nerve. In a Dec. 5 cover essay in The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine, Mr. Krauthammer argued that torture is not only defensible in certain very limited circumstances, but in fact morally necessary -- if, for instance, it would save thousands of civilians by squeezing information about an imminent attack from a captured terrorist.

A police officer trying to stop a burglary in a neighbor's home was fatally wounded in a gun battle in the Bronx early yesterday, but continued to return fire and wounded two suspects who were captured by arriving officers as they stumbled away bleeding, the police said. The slain officer, Daniel Enchautegui, 28, was the second city police officer to die in the line of duty this year. As with the first, less than two weeks ago, the police said he had stayed in the fight despite a mortal wound near his heart, to aid in the capture of his assailants.

After his girlfriend left him and his cat, one Long Island man went on the hunt for a new apartment that was affordable and took pets.

Eugene J. McCarthy, the sardonic Senate dove who stunned the nation by upending President Lyndon B. Johnson's re-election drive amid the Vietnam War turmoil of 1968, died early yesterday. He was 89. A courtly, sharp-witted presence in capital politics for half a century, Mr. McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, died in his sleep at an assisted-living home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, where he had lived for the last several years.

DURING Saddam Hussein's remorseless harangues from the dock last week, one spectator sitting in the glassed-off viewing galleries found his mind moving back more than 40 years, to a court in another Middle Eastern country where a man accused of mass murder stood on trial for his life. The man was Adolf Eichmann, and the venue of the court was Jerusalem. His was a trial memorialized by Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, in The New Yorker, about the banality of evil -- Eichmann was an almost pitiable figure, a man so ordinary when stripped of the trappings of fear and power, who in fact saw himself as so ordinary, that he seemed quite out of proportion to the slaughter of millions in which he had been among the most lethal practitioners.

After putting up 100,000 posters across Iraq to promote his political party, Hamid Kifai discovered this week that they had all been torn down, even the ones on the front of his own campaign headquarters in the south. ''They have made it impossible for us to compete,'' said Mr. Kifai, a stocky, talkative Shiite candidate who spent his entire $50,000 war chest on the posters and has nothing left. ''This is not democracy.''

JUST after July 4, 2002, Jon and Donna Woods helped their 17-year-old daughter, Catherine, move to New York. They pulled out of their driveway in a minivan loaded with her clothes, dance shoes, photographs and the stuffed rabbit she had had since she was a baby. They drove all day, sweeping across Pennsylvania on the interstate. When they finally approached the city, all three were bewitched by what Mr. Woods described as ''the skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty, the whole aura of New York.''

THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION The Conquest of the Middle East. By Robert Fisk. 1,107 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40.

AMANDA CONGDON is a big star on really small screens -- like the 4 1/2- inch window she appears in on computer monitors every weekday morning or the 2 1/2 inches she has to work with on the new video iPod. Ms. Congdon, you see, is the anchor of a daily, three-minute, mock TV news report shot on a camcorder, edited on a laptop and posted on a blog called Rocketboom, which now reaches more than 100,000 fans a day. In terms of subject matter, Rocketboom is actually quite a standard -- one might even say traditional -- Web log: Ms. Congdon comments on intriguing items she, and the site's producer, Andrew Baron, have found on the Web, and includes links to them which appear just below clear, smooth-playing video. The items tend to be developments in Internet culture (robots and flash mobs, say, or flash mobs of robots) with a sprinkling of left-leaning political commentary (Ms. Congdon announced the posting of Representative Tom DeLay's mug shot while wearing a party hat and blowing a noisemaker) and samples of Web video from around the world.