Punk It Up!

Tis The Season

2011-05-06T16:42:00.001-07:00

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

2011-05-05T08:36:00.001-07:00

A perfect day in Brooklyn.

No Cameras!

2011-05-04T11:21:00.001-07:00

Subway Fire Patrol

2011-05-03T21:39:00.001-07:00

I'll Take The Thigh Massage

2010-11-15T15:09:00.001-08:00

Taking a stand on new TSA policies that require passengers to choose between x-ray body scans or invasive pat-downs involving genital contact:

TechCrunch's New Logo

2010-09-28T18:24:00.001-07:00

Aol has wasted no time in rebranding their new property.

SMS Language

2010-09-28T08:55:00.001-07:00

I'm listening to the audiobook of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, set in an approximate dystopian future where, among other things, youth lingo has evolved even further along its current trajectory towards what Wikipedia classifies as SMS language. OMG, you don't know what SMS language is? These are the short initialisms that have become so popular especially among youth to minimize keying long phrases on cell phones or in IM chat.

Shteyngart's take on the trend is hilarious, and some of his invented phrases ring completely believable. "JBF," says one character. "I'm just butt-fucking with you." I had to Google to confirm that this does not, in fact, appear to be a trending phrase.

Is SMS language a symptom of society's plunge into illiteracy, or merely an example of culture adapting to the preferred aparrati of communication? Did wise old elders frown upon the impatient young monks who grew tired of laboring over "Anno Domini," opting for the quicker, albeit more cryptic "AD"? Did the mathematician scoff at his student, "Is that all you have? You haven't proven anything," only to be rebuffed for the first time with a terse, indignant "QED, dude." Perhaps each generation of your own family has rebuffed the generation before, by misinterpreting the underlying meaning for the initials GI, but using it freely nonetheless.

Initialisms reflect the human desire to optimize away the most tedious, repetitive aspects of written and spoken communication. Over the past decade or so, society has shifted toward communicating with devices that, frankly, make all forms of communication tedious. The result? A shitstorm of initialisms in order to cope. I like to think that SMS language is a trend that will diminish once our devices offer superior means of communicating fluidly and expressively in complete words.

Of course, there will always be room for a reasonable number of popular abbreviations. Slang prose, FTW.

Qathra Cafe

2010-09-14T18:17:00.001-07:00

We are pretty lucky here in Ditmas Park to have access to several nice restaurants, some of which double as cafes. But there is a relative void of businesses going all-out after the cafe niche.

On my way to the supermarket this evening I noticed a "soft launch" for a business which seems aimed at filling that void: Qathra Cafe.

Looks like they'll be offering coffee, espresso drinks, and pastries at a minimum. I also spotted some bowls of hummus and other mediterranean-looking snacks, presumably not there only for the soft-launch party but also as an indicator of their menu.

The place was fairly hopping, filled I'm sure with people who are friends and acquaintances of the owners, but also with curious passers-by who I overheard whispering skeptically about the freeness of the goodies inside.

One of the things I love about restaurants and cafes in New York, in contrast to Boston and San Francisco, is the commonness of backyard patios. On this block, Sycamore and The Farm on Adderly set a high standard, but Qathra appears prepared to run with the big dogs... err, at least, with the cartoon dogs.

I only tried a cookie on my way out after snapping these photos, but I'll be back to check out the coffee offerings. I'm impressed by the design and apparent attention to detail. It looks like the proprietors are interested in making this a place to last.

Ditmas Park, Brooklyn

2010-09-14T18:02:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted here in a while, but just to catch up everybody up: we live in Brooklyn, now!

Our new neighborhood, Ditmas Park, is fairly unknown to out-of-towners. Situated to the south of Prospect Park, it has relatively easy access to the amenities of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, while still offering some less urban perks such as relatively easy parking, and a bit more apartment space for your money.

I'll be trying to revive this blog in an effort to chronicle my adventures in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and beyond, as well as to record observations about things that are going on in my neighborhood.

A Pack Of Pickled Carrots

2010-04-22T06:57:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid growing up in Santa Cruz, California, my friends and I often dined at Taqueria Vallarta, where our meager budgets would buy a huge burrito or plate of nachos, a giant glass of horchata, and limitless chips & salsa.

The salsa bar at Taqueria Vallarta offered a delicious array of tomato, pepper and tomatillo based options, but what has stuck in my memory best over the years has been the delicious pickled carrots & jalapeños, which I would pile on top of whatever my main dish was.

I rarely saw these pickled veggies at other establishments, and never executed with quite the excellence that I had come to expect. I thought they must be a rare, geographically local tradition. Perhaps the recipe originated from Vallarta, namesake of my beloved taqueria?

Recently I decided to unravel the mystery. Like most things in life, the obscure becomes common when you learn the right name to google on. Jalapeños en escabeche (pickled jalapeños) are not the sacred, secret food I had come to believe they were. In fact, you can buy them canned in any supermarket that offers even a modest Hispanic foods section. Having learned this, I bought and tried some of the mass-produced version, but of course they didn't live up to my hopes.

I decided I should try to make them myself. Having a name for these tasty goodies made it pretty easy to find recipes on the web. That should make it pretty easy, right? Unfortunately, none of the recipes can gloss over the fact that pickling is a careful process that requires sterile preparation and a technique for food preservation, called canning, that pressure-seals food inside glass jars.

Sigh. This is getting complicated. I've never canned. I don't own any canning equipment. There's a good chance I would fail at this task, but the allure of those tasty memories drives me onward.

For a few dollars at your local hardware or kitchen supply store, you will come home with a set of jars and lids, perfectly suited to the task of home canning. I bought the equipment, and set out to tackle this recipe.

The first thing you need is a big pot of boiling water. The main trick in canning is to take a hot (and sterile) jar, put hot food inside of it, put the lid on, and wait for it to cool. As part of the cooling process the contents suction the lid ever tighter against the lip of the jar, forming a seal where a rubbery coating touches the jar. They make special equipment for heating and preparing food in this way, but I wasn't prepared to invest too much in this whim.

For the veggies, you cut them up in whatever size you want, sautee them, and simmer them in vinegar to get that good pickling flavor to permeate through the vegetable. After a few minutes they start to lose their fresh crispness. I probably cooked mine a little too long, as the final result was a bit mushier than I would prefer. You can guess by the amount of color they have lost that they are a bit overdone.

I used tongs to transfer the contents into jars and pack them as well as I could. Then I spooned the vinegar liquid over the vegetables to just a bit under the lip of the jar. After the jars are filled, I wanted to be sure the contents were still hot and any residual germs were killed, so I placed the filled jars into the simmering water for several minutes (further overcooking the veggies, I'm sure).

I removed the jars and placed them on the kitchen table to cool. At this point, the lids are screwed on just enough to hold the metal discs in place. It's the metal disc itself that will suction to the jar and provide the lasting seal. You know how bottles juices have the depressed lid that will "pop" when you open it? That's the same story here, the lid centers depress so you can tell they're sealed.

You can see that I used an assortment of peppers in addition to the jalapeños. It added a nice variety to the palette of colors, and I figured if I was going to experiment, I might as well, ahem, pack as much into this project as possible.

So how did it turn out? The veggies are delicious, but perhaps a little oilier and mushier than I would have liked. Also, it turns out that even though the recipe is for pickled jalapeños, it's the carrots that I coveted most. One of the unusual things Taqueria Vallarta did was to include very large chunks of carrot so there was plenty to go around. When I make these again, I'll use very hot peppers and fewer of them, to make room for more carrots as receptacles for the delicious spicy pepperiness.

It turns out I was able to can my own food at home. Nothing exploded and nobody died. It opened my eyes to a world of possible pickling and canning projects that can produce delicious results that can be stored for months in the pantry. I won't say it was a cakewalk ... it was nervewracking and seemed fraught with peril, but I am sure it gets easier with practice.

Buying A Car In 2010

2010-01-15T10:11:00.001-08:00

The vehicles I have owned span a great distance in vintage and function. The 1962 Chevy Corvair was great for weekend excursions on warm California days. The 1965 Lambretta gave me occasional thrills and mechanical anguish on the streets of San Francisco. The 1994 Ford Escort Wagon shuttled me safely to and from work for years, and even transported my wife and I from California to Boston before being sacrificed to an excited New Hampshire man who owned its twin.

But until this year, I have never once owned a brand-spanking-new car. I've been sort of proud of that over the years, since my needs were minimal and my mechanical inclinations left me just willing enough to cope with minor malfunctions, funny noises, and occasional breakdowns. The amount of money I've spent on used cars, even with the repair bills, probably adds up to far less than what people typically spend on a new car.

Late last year, my wife and son were in a frightening but non-injurious accident that left our latest car, an inherited 1998 Jeep Wrangler, on the wrecking pile. It was time to buy a new car, and this time we decided we'd actually consider buying a new car.

But buying a new car sucks. I mean, it's not too complicated in some senses: you find a car that offers what you want, then you pay for it. But the devil is in the details. Finding the car you want is dizzying because of the huge number of options and variations even within a particular model lineup. Then you pay a premium for the newness itself, but often you pay a premium to the dealership's salesperson who runs a confusing array of numbers by you, compounds that with a complicated financing plan, and asks you to sign on the dotted line.

So most people I know who have bought new cars seem to come away from the dealership with a car that is close to what they wanted at a price that seems fair. But that isn't good enough, is it?

Choosing A Car

This is, naturally, one of the hardest questions to answer in any context. Most people aren't really sure what they want. So perhaps it's better to decide what you think you want, and go with that. To come to a point where you can make an intelligent buying decision, you need to be pretty confident about the precise vehicle you would like to own. To get to that point, you start out with a list of manufacturers and models, then you test-drive them. Yes, this is tedious. You have to go the dealerships and brush with salespeople who are infrequently devoid of sleeziness. But unless you've test-driven a friend's car and are 100% sure it's the right one for you, I think you need to suck it up and get some hands-on experience with the expensive thing you're about to buy.

For every car you're interested in, call the most convenient dealer to you, and make an appointment for a test drive. You'll be dealing with the sales team, and the rule for the sales team is to give them as little information as possible. A good stance that worked for us is to pretend you are "very early in the process" even if you're almost positive the car you're test driving is "the one." Above all, commit to yourself that you will not be purchasing a vehicle from the dealer on the day you test-drive. If you read through the section below on getting a fair price, this commitment will be easy to keep.

Lots of cars these days come in a variety of "trims." So once you've decided that the Punkass 2000 is the one for you, you might further have to decide whether you want to buy the Basic, the Fancy, or the Whizbang. This distinction is important because when you go in for a test-drive, there is a good chance they will put you in a Whizbang, even if you've asked them to test a Basic. Obviously, they want you to fall in love with the car and buy it right there, and it's much more likely to happen if you're in a Whizbang. This ruse sort of worked on us, and opened our eyes to some of the advantages of the Whizbang. In retrospect, I'm glad we had the luxuries forced upon us, but if you're committed to sticking with a lower-end model, make sure you force the dealer to actually let you drive one.

Finding The Fair Price

The automobile retail scene in the United States is completely confusing. Don't beat yourself up if you don't even know what a fair price is. I don't think most people do. Here's a nutshell orientation.

Every car has an MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price), which is a term you are probably familiar with. Cars in any particular region also have a standardized invoice price which is probably a little less familiar to you. Ostensibly, this is the price the dealer paid to the manufacturer for the car. In other words, the difference between the invoice and the MSRP is the dealer's markup. Just as the bag or Dorito's with a list price of ¢99 only cost the dealer (supermarket) ¢50 or whatever, the car dealership has to charge more than they paid, so they can afford to pay employees, rent land, finance cars, etc. So it's only fair to pay MSRP, right? So the car dealership can stay in business and give you a convenient place to test-drive cars?

Don't get too weepy for the car dealers. First of all, you're spending a bazillion dollars here. So let's say you buy a $30K car and the invoice price was $27K. That's $3K in profit for the dealer, just for service of having shown you a few cars and let you test-drive them? You could pay $28K and still be giving the dealer plenty of incentive to stay in business.

But other complications in the business make the "fair price" even more amorphous. Dealers have other incentives to get you to purchase a car from them, apart from the pure markup profit of your purchase. Topping the list of confusion-inducers is a concept of dealer holdback which is a percentage of the invoice price which the dealer will be paid in cash, by the manufacturer, when the car finally sells. Yes, this means the invoice price is not actually the price the dealer paid. That puts a slant on our simple calculations of fairness, doesn't it? Returning to your $30K car, let's assume the dealer holdback is $600. Now, if you pay invoice for the car, the dealer is still making $600 for the privilege of your business. Not too shabby! This phenomenon is what leads to the puzzling reality that many dealers will, when pressed, sell a car for less than the invoice price. To a naive observer, it appears that the dealer has conceded to lose money, but they are no dummies. They know they are locking in a certain profit or they wouldn't be making the deal.

Even if you grind a dealer down to the floor with your bargaining savvy, and convinced them to make no profit from the transaction, they stand a good chance of milking you for some extra cash, possibly enough to make the "zero profit" transaction well worth their time. A big one is financing. As good as car salespeople are at selling cars, they are good at selling financing plans. Basically, if they can sell you the financing plan right there at the dealership, they've just made a good chunk of money, probably enough to make it worth taking zero profit on the car.

Anogther thing I discovered in my research is that dealers are adapting to the fact that savvy internet-enabled customers know about invoice pricing, and even dealer holdback. Some customers will walk in off the street and demand to pay invoice pricing for a car, or even less. Before you count yourself too smart, consider the dealership has been doing this a lot longer than you. They have ways of making you poor. Remember I drew a distinction between the invoice and MSRP price of the car? Well, the same distinction is applied to each and every accessory or add-on option that you might request from the dealer to perfect your purchase. What some dealers will do is flaunt the incredible deal they are giving you on the car itself, while charging you full MSRP on the option you choose to install. One dealer brags about its "less than invoice" pricing on the web site, but neglects to mention that all of the accessories and options are charged at full price.

So let's take that $30K, and pay invoice minus $600: $26.4K for it. What a deal! But you also wanted some nice additions: bumper guard, wheel-well moldings, multimedia upgrade, heated seats, whatever. Let's say they add up to $2K. The dealer adds them to the order, bringing your total to $28.4K. You're sitting pretty, you just paid almost $2K less than sticker price and walked away with a bunch of luxurious add-ons. Quick, get on the internet and brag about! But the invoice price of all those options was only $1K, and your dealer is feeling pretty good about themselves, too. See what they did? They got their $1K for letting you test-drive the car, and made you feel awesome at the same time. And maybe that is a great equation. Maybe we should just let it stand at that. After all, the dealership deserves to make some money, right? Or maybe we should get an even fairer price.

Making It Happen

The great thing about the internet is that it makes all this information available to us. The bad news, it doesn't magically give us the cojones to walk into a dealership, start throwing down mad logic and demanding a perfect deal. You have to have the subtleties I've outlined above, and probably many more, totally cemented in your mind in order to survive the whirlwind of sales-speak and come out even moderately victorious.

Fortunately, the internet has sensed our apprehension and come through with some services that help to bridge the gap between knowledge and execution. There are online negotiating services that essentially promise to locate a dealer in your area who will give you a car for a particular price. The de facto "savvy" price target for these kinds of services seems to be "invoice +$0". They promise to find you a car for this price, you go to the dealer they have selected for you, and things go pretty smoothly and without hassle from there.

These services are great, but you have to remember that they are still making money somehow. The car dealerships are paying the service for having brought them a customer (you) who the car dealerships know full well they will still have lots of opportunity to make a large profit off of.

I settled on a service that takes no payment from the dealers, called CarBargains.com. It's a service of a non-profit consumers organization, and you pay them to do the dirty work of negotiating a price. The process they apply is really simple, and they even describe it in detail on their web site. You can take the knowledge from that site and do all the work of faxing dealerships, demanding precise terms, etc., yourself. Or you can pay CarBargains $200 to do it for you. Essentially what they do is to contact several dealerships in your area, and ask them to bid on your business, in terms of invoice-relative pricing. What this means is, they promise that whatever options you end up adding to the car, the price you pay will be determined by adding the invoice price of the car itself, and the invoice prices of the options, and then adjusting by the invoice-relative price they bid.

I paid CarBargains $280 to request bids for three distinct styles of Subaru Outback. (The cost is $200 plus $40/additional model from the same make). One drawback to CarBargains is there is a little delay. I had to wait a couple weeks for the process to unfold, but the good news is I just kicked-back, relaxed, and waited. No pressure, no haggling, no psychological warfare.

When the bids arrived, I had before me a stack of papers from 8 or so Boston-area dealerships. Each dealer had specified an invoice-relative price, and any other terms of business that were pertinent. The bids also include any extra fees the dealer might charge for weird things like "closing costs." One of the huge benefits of CarBargains is that you end up with a sheet of paper that allows you to truly predict the final cost of the car should you choose a particular dealer or another.

Bids from my local dealers range from invoice -$300 to invoice +$50. Obviously, they are all aware that they need to be "in the zone" to even have a chance at my business. Some of the dealers had stipulations that the bid price only applied to cars that were ordered. This is because they don't want to let a car on the lot go to a savvy internet buyer. They want that car to be on the lot when they guy off the street comes in, expecting to pay MSRP.

CarBargains gives you the name of a contact for each dealership whose job it is to deal with these kinds of offers. This is the part of car dealerships that is (more or less) separate from the sales force. Think of the team that sells cars to police departments, or corporate fleets. These guys don't need to be sleazebags, and as a consequence they don't have any skill or desire to be so. The friendly "inernet sales manager" at the dealership I called was extremely attentive to my needs, was zero-bullshit, and essentially lined up the process for me, calling me back when necessary and in a timely fashion. Zero pressure. Zero sales. Just the price he had bid to CarBargains, and we're down to business arranging options.

Getting The Specific Car You Want

Now, let's be real. Part of the reason you're getting such a great deal on the car is because you've been willing to be patient. If you walk in off the street and demand the terms I've received via CarBargains, they will laugh you off the lot. For one thing, the low-grade salespeople on the lot probably don't even know that deals like this exist. No offense if any car retail professionals are reading, but your typical salesperson is much more psychologically intelligent than anything else.

The extremely low price you have arranged to pay is partly due to the fact that the dealer is, in turn, not spending much money on you. They were possibly not even the same dealership you test-drove at. They aren't paying rent to store your car on the lot. They didn't pay a salesperson to coax and coddle you. They didn't even have to advertise on television to get you to come through the door. So they can afford to be generous. They're typically just "lining you up with a car." They're the go-between that gets you access to the manufacturing and distribution process.

This process varies a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer. I believe that for US-made vehicles, it is quite common to be able to put in a so-called "factory order" to get the exact car you want with the exact details you want. This is also true to varying extents with foreign manufacturers, but it's not always as straightforward as that. You have to ask the representative at your dealership how it works to understand how it can work for you.

In the case of Subaru, the car I ended up buying, it works something like this:

Engines (and other big parts?) are made in Japan and shipped to the USA.
A plant in Indiana assembles fairly generic vehicles for each trim, e.g. a "Premium Metallic Silver Subaru Outback 2.5i w/Moonroof".
Regional distributors coalesce orders from local dealerships into "allocations" from the assembly plant, to be manufactured and then delivered.
Upon delivery, the local distributor "outfits" each cars with a set of options, according to the orders of each dealership.
The outfitted vehicles are delivered to the dealerships, where they are sold to consumers.

In this setup, everything in the "outfitting" phase at the local distributor is considered "factory installed" in terms of cost. You might also see the term "port installed." So if you have options that you really want on your car, it's a great idea to get them port installed, because you won't have to pay the dealership for the labor of installing them. Let's say your dealer has a car on the lot that is perfect except it doesn't have the "mulitmedia system" you were hoping for. No problem, they will swap that out and give you the desired system, but they'll charge for installation. If however the dealer has a car "allocated" but yet to be outfit, they can ask the distributor to outfit it with the multimedia system of your choice, with no extra cost for installation.

We ended up going for the "custom outfit" arrangement, which involves paying the dealership a deposit fee to "lock down a car" in our name. Conceptually, I believe that car does not yet exist. It's a twinkle in the glimmer of some factory worker in Indiana. Sometime next month, the car will roll off the assembly line in Indiana, and will be stacked up onto a cargo ship, sail to Rhode Island, and drop the car off at New England Subaru's distribution center. Here, it will be "outfitted" with the precise set of options we ordered (at invoice price!). Then, it will be transported to our local dealership, ready for us to buy it.

At this point, I'll either stroll in with a check from my preferred financing method, or agree to take the dealership up on their financing offer. This will be the first time I have stepped foot into the dealership. I will hand the check over to the friendly fleet manager with whom I have been doing business, sign the paperwork, and drive off in my new car.

I hope this long explanation of the process as I understand it, both in general and specifically as it applied to us, will help make sense of this daunting task for some of you who are in the market for a new car. It really can be fairly easy and stress-free. You can get the precise car you want. And you can get it for a really fair price.

Good luck!

Update: Taking Delivery

To wrap up this story, let me explain how the car purchase actually went down.

On Monday, February 15, I got a call from the dealership, telling me that my car was ready. There had been some confusion about whether a certain option was available for installation at the port, so they ordered it directly and installed it at the dealership, at no extra cost.

Importantly, way back when I made the order, I had asked the representative to itemize the invoice costs for every item I was adding in to the order. This left me with a printable "expectations" sheet that I could take to the dealership. It included assumptions about the base invoice price, all the options, the state sales tax, license fee, and ultimately, the it should cost approximately this much number.

The process at the dealership was a little slow, but ultimately went smoothly. In spite of the fact that I did all my dealings directly with the "internet sales manager," when it came time to pick up the car, they assigned me a salesperson to go through those final steps. He was fine, and understood completely that the numbers were already worked out. I guess there is some incentive on his part to get high ratings from me, because he drove 45 minutes to pick me up from my house and take me to the dealership to get my new car.

When we arrived, we took a quick test-drive of the car to make sure everything was working fine. Then I looked over the car for blemishes. Ugh! There was a nice little gouge on the edge of one of the interior panels. It looked like somebody had manhandled it during assembly and they just hoped that nobody would care. I cared. When taking home a brand new car, you at least want it to look brand new for a while, right? I complained to the sales manager and he stepped right up, asking a mechanic to swap the panel with a panel from another car of the same model.

The payment process was simple as can be. I wrote them a check for the total, minus the $1000 I had put down as a deposit to make a special order. They tried to sell me some special extended warranties but when I politely declined they just moved right along. After payment, we had to get insurance on the car, so I had called ahead to our preferred agent to warn him. The dealership faxed him information about my new car, he faxed back proof of insurance, and the dealership was then able to assign license plates on behalf of the state, and perform the required (even for brand new cars!) emissions testing.

About 2 hours after arrived at the dealership, I drove off with my fancy new car. I noted that I had not driven so carefully and been so paranoid of an accident or even a scratch since driving my son Henry home from the hospital he was born at a year and a half ago.

Homemade Pizza.

2009-10-04T18:02:00.001-07:00

Won't come close to what we just had in New York, but I'm steadily putting distance between me and anything we can buy in our neighborhood.

Touchscreen Building

2009-10-04T17:31:00.001-07:00

I was pretty amused to see two women interacting with a huge, touch-screen display in mid-town Manhattan.

Dolphin Seafood. Bad Restaurant Name Or Worst Restaurant Name?

2009-10-01T17:59:00.001-07:00

Harvard Square, Cambridge.

My Moonshot

2009-08-24T18:17:00.001-07:00

Outdoor Art

2009-07-31T12:21:00.001-07:00

Found this hanging in a Cambridge alley. It's cool how much newer the art is than the backdrop.

Brooklin Beach. Not THAT Brooklyn.

2009-07-25T12:50:00.001-07:00

Leave it to Maine to have pine trees on the beach.

Cow Town. Up Close And Personal.

2009-07-19T17:15:00.001-07:00

Our hosts didn't have any problem opening gates and traipsing all around this farm. Without their courage and/or knowledge of local custom, we would have found this area pretty boring.

Vermont Hospitality. Buying Maple Syrup On The Honor System

2009-07-19T17:04:00.001-07:00

We were invited with friends to spend a weekend near Jacksonville, Vermont. We bought a pint of local syrup with this self-service policy.

We've Got To Get Down To Swingtown!

2009-07-14T18:17:00.001-07:00

Henry just barely tolerates the swing, but sometimes his tolerance does veer towards joy.

At Jack's House

2009-06-07T17:07:00.001-07:00

Wanted Dead Or Alive: @munidiaries Editor @herenthereblog

2009-06-05T23:35:00.001-07:00

Iron Nerd

2009-05-29T21:27:00.001-07:00

From the campus of MIT, a chalk drawing that only a geek could love.

Morning Temptation

2009-05-25T03:13:00.001-07:00

The universe is so certain nobody is awake, that boxes of fresh pastries lie unguarded outside this cafe. Note to self: ants crawling around will doubtless exercise less self-control.

Cambridge, 6am.

2009-05-25T03:03:00.001-07:00

I can see what motivates early birds. At this tiime of the morning, any waking soul owns a majority interest in the world.

A Warm Day In Somerville

2009-05-22T13:58:00.001-07:00

Better spent outdoors. We're chillin' at Lincoln Park where there are suprisingly few other people.

My Moonshot

2009-05-17T10:30:00.001-07:00

Checking Out My New Wallet

2009-05-12T16:55:00.001-07:00

From http://dynomighty.com/

Wanted: Crazed Programmer

2009-05-03T20:37:00.001-07:00

Dead or alive. It sure is fun typing on this little computer.

Careless Love

2009-04-06T11:56:00.001-07:00

I went to music school a few years ago, and earned a second BA degree. Anybody who has been through any music school knows that it's hard. Especially if you're not particularly talented going in. So I learned a lot, but still came out the other end relatively incapable.

But, as all good education does, it put the ability to learn in me. Some of the tools and disciplines I learned for studying music and practicing, I try to apply from time to time in order to keep my musical mind growing, and to keep my facility with these tools in some order.

My ear training instructor, David Xiques, taught us a form of movable-do solfa, the syllables most people are familiar with because of their famous use in the musical "The Sound Of Music." Using these syllables allows me to look at any (simple) piece of music, identify the key, and sing out the melody with relative ease. As my ability progresses, I should be able to read more complicated pieces, and eventually have a good shot and hearing the melodies without applying solfa mnemonics to them.

Let's take a look at a simple folk song I found in a library book. "Careless Love" is apparently a well-known song to some people, but it is new to me.

My first step is to identify the key of the piece. In this case it's E Major. So the E (the bottom line of the staff) is the "Do" in this key. I will often start by singing a scale in the key, just to get my brain "in the key."

Now, I can take a look at the song and try to make a slow reading of the melody with my solfa technique. Notice that I stumble and feel out the pitches sometimes, especially where you see accidentals (the ♯ and ♮ symbols alter the pitch slightly). Solfa has names for all these accidental notes, but I only know a few of them, and don't use them correctly. Still, it helps me to utter something while squeaking past those spots.

Careless Love: Sung With Solfa

Once I've practiced singing through a few times with solfa, I try to read the actual words. Sometimes I have to switch back to solfa momentarily to get the "scale" back in my head. The song is still very sterile and unemotive. I'm pretty much just trying to get the right notes out.

Careless Love: Simple With Lyrics

Having the basic pitches down frees me up to start concentrating on the style I want to present the song in. Instead of the rote "on the beat" guitar strumming, I decide to give it a little strumming rhythm. I am also able to start loosening up my singing style because I'm not painstakingly seeking the correct pitch for every note.

Careless Love: An Acceptable Performance

At this point I've got a pretty decent understanding of the song, and I can play and sing it a nearly entertaining fashion. So I decide to start fooling around with it. Once I know the actual notes, I can take liberties and substitute other notes which are not technically in the original song, but which still work harmonically.

Careless Love: Personalized With My Style

I hope this serves as an interesting example of how a simple song can be dissected and, with the help of movable-do solfa, understood and performed with increasing artistry.

Hall Of Mirrors

2009-03-22T12:35:00.001-07:00

I was using Apple's Screen Sharing to control a new Mac Mini I'm setting up. When I shut down the Mac Mini, the app lost its shit and apparently tried to start controlling ... the computer it was running on.

That's quite an effect!

The Comforts Of Home

2009-03-22T12:06:00.001-07:00

We've been casually browsing open houses for a few weeks. We're not sure if or when we'll be buying a place, but the process of visiting and evaluating the pluses and minuses of places is giving us a better understanding of what we value in a home.

One of the things that is so engaging about open houses is you never know what you'll find on the inside. The outsides of homes, especially here in the northeast of the United States, vary little compared to what you find within.

The goal for sellers is to spruce up their home so that you feel at home the second you walk in the door. To achieve this, some agents even bake cookies before the open house in order to give the home that "deliciously comfortable" aroma.

But nothing screams "buy this house" quite like a latex rubber glove dangling off the bathtub faucet.

Iran Is On Facebook

2009-03-20T06:44:00.001-07:00

Today we receive news of Barack Obama's dramatic shift in policy towards the nation of Iran, recording and sending a video appeal to the people and government, hoping for a more diplomatic relationship in the future.

Few people realize the extent to which modern technology has played a role in this softening of stances. Punk It Up recently uncovered evidence that Iran has been using the popular Facebook web application to learn more about both its allies and opponents.

Rumors are circulating that Iran has also gotten back in touch with several grade school friends with whom it had considered a long-term friendship impossible. Here's to technology!

Employees Must Wash Hands

2006-08-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one neurotic enough to be turned off when I see those signs in restaurant bathrooms stating that employees must wash their hands before returning to work? The last thing I want to be reminded of as I fumble for the door knob with my hand wrapped in thick paper towels, is that the short-order cook makes his way in and out of this filthy place several times per day between shifts of handling the raw tomatoes and onions.

As a germ-phobic customer who's about to eat here, what I really want to see is:

"Employees must sanitize hands using the sterile sink that is not separated from the kitchen by several feces-laden doorknobs."

What's worse is when these signs are up, but soap and paper towels are absent. Nice move, restaurant. This means:

"Employees must take a shit, lightly rinse their hands with water, dry their hands by wiping on their washed-weekly work pants, and touch the feces-laden door knob before returning to work."

Who's hungry for take-out?

The Spice Of life

2006-08-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

I've always been a food spicer. Always salt (if you can call it a spice), and sometimes its counterpart black pepper, but especially any of the various red peppers, hot sauces and salsas. I'm especially inclined to cover my pizza with the flaky red pepper seeds and skins that are so common to many Italian and pizza restaurants.

But since I tried the pizza at Emma's in Cambridge's Kendall Square, I've been a little bit obsessed with black pepper. Their pizza is excellent, and among the usual condiments on every table is a shaker dispenser of black pepper. This isn't your typical diner pepper shaker: this is a large container such as you might use for sprinkling parmesan. For some reason I thought I'd branch out and sprinkle some onto a piece of the plain cheese pie.

The results were amazing. Their pepper was ground into large, extremely aromatic chunks. My eyes (nostrils really, I guess) were opened to this spice as they never had been before. Ground black pepper, and lots of it, is excellent on cheese pizza.

I tried it out myself the next time we brought home a $5 Large Cheese from Dial-A-Pizza. Their value pies actually range from quite excellent to depressingly bland, depending on the day or possibly the mood of the cooks. In any case, it made a good test bed on which to unleash my oft-neglected grinder.

I covered a piece with a much finer grain of specks than I'd have liked. But my grinder didn't seem capable of producing the kind of chunks I was hoping for. Even though it sported some kind of brute adjustment, the largest specks were still far too small. The result tasted "OK," but lacked the magic. It could be I needed to get better pepper corns, too.

At some point last week, I noticed that the pepper grains were coming out a little bigger. Also, the grinder was harder to turn. Maybe I had stumbled across a patch of more rigid corns, although I did observe the machine getting nearly empty. I labored away and noticed larger black chunks appearing on my food. I shrugged; it did seemed better than before.

This morning while eating an excellent breakfast of blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs, I treated myself to some more of these beautiful black grindings. This time it was impossibly hard, however. I looked down at my food with a tad bit more focus and observed that the pepper chunks looked more like thin shards than the chaotic, craggy chunks you'd expect from demolishing a hard, dry berry.

I intuited something appalling, and opened my grinder to confirm the worry. A large piece of plastic, whose purpose was unclear, must have broken off inside the machine and had been resting on top of the pile of pepper corns. When the plastic reached the bottom, it succumbed to the grinder's teeth just as the berries did, mixing in the appearance of larger chunks of pepper while giving a decent elevation to my daily intake of hardened black plastic.

I have been feeling a little bit sick the past few days, and I can't help but wonder if it's related to my diet. Still, the eggs looked good under all that plastic, and I figured it wasn't anything I hadn't eaten before. But hopefully that's the last plastic pepper I have for a long time.

Drug Party México

2006-05-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

Mexico has apparently stolen all of the innovative liberal thought that used to reside within the boundaries of the United States. Vicente Fox, the conservative President of Mexico, is apparently planning to sign the bill that would legalize personal use of most of the evil narcotics that in this country will earn you a long-term prison sentence, and possibly seizure of your personal property.

"The list of illegal drugs approved for personal consumption by Mexico's Congress last week is enough to make one dizzy — or worse." Cocaine. Heroin. LSD. Marijuana. PCP. Opium. Synthetic opiates. Mescaline. Peyote. Psilocybin mushrooms. Amphetamines. Methamphetamines.

It's high time somebody taught the United States a lesson about "drug wars." You don't win by fighting the victims.

Update: Fox wussed out.

Rock My Funky Tax Holiday

2006-04-15T10:59:00.000-07:00

You know those stupid yet sometimes illuminating web memes that people contagiously follow, answering questions like "ten things you don't know about me" and putting them on their blog before tagging the next person? I've never participated in one of those but here's one thing you may not know about me:

I always file taxes on the last possible day.

I know this comes as a surprise to some of you, because you view me as this eccentric yet organized individual. Bzzt! Organization to me means putting everything made of paper into a giant pile in my office which will be periodically rummaged through when an important document is needed, but otherwise untouched until "Sorting Day," an unofficial holiday in my life which usually falls on April 14th, but sometimes gets stretched out to the 15th or even 16th.

This year, Sorting Day would fall on either today or tomorrow. The "bonus weekend days" before tax deadline. I file on the last day, but usually have enough wisdom to know that shit is going to hit the fan big time if I attempt to also do the sorting on the deadline date. So in a typical year I would be digging through that paper pile right now.

But normally I didn't live in Massachusetts! Welcome to freaky eff-the-rest-of-the-country pilgrimsville. Thanks to our state's fine Patriot's Day holiday (in honor of the Battle of Lexington and Concord), we're being given an extra day to file taxes this year. Shit like this never happened in California. It's the distinct scent of government palm greasing in the air. Massachusetts just gets its way more than California, even though we are a pinko liberal commie state just like ya'll.

To make things even sweeter, all the states around us who don't even celebrate Patriot's Day (Maine also does) get a free ride on our wacky holiday. Because Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia are all send their tax returns to our Andover, MA IRS processing center, they're not obliged to file until Tuesday, either.

Thus setting a new record: Sorting Day 2006 falls on April 17th! Booyeah!

Technorati Tags: taxes, massachusetts, holidays, california

Eye/Hand

2005-11-09T22:05:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the "Eye/Hand" Flickr feed? This is my favorite, and by that I mean my first and only favorite Flickr feed. I just haven't been that in to Flickr. Blah blah blah. Pictures of people you met at parties who didn't know your geeky ass was gonna spray them all over the internet. Hang up the phone!

But Eye/Hand is special. This feed has a simple barrier of entry. You take a picture of yourself, and you draw it. Judging by the entries so far, it doesn't matter if you draw it on paper and scan it, or draw it in a computer program, it just has to be a hand-done thing.

Most of these are really awesome. I am accumulating all kinds of social speculation about society based on these drawings. For instance, women tend to draw themselves fatter than they really are. Men tend to draw themselves more angular, and perhaps even as distorted caricatures, than they really are.

What I really don't dig are the ones that come up and it's so clear that somebody traced it, I'm like "fuck that! you traced it!" Sure, art is art. Blah blah blah. But if you traced it, it looks so much like the original that it's no fun. It's like when you see Belle and Sebastian perform, and it sounds just like the record. No fun! So I really grimace when I see the loser "perfection" drawings show up. But I really grin when I see the wacky disproportionate "true players" images show up. If this is what Flickr is all about, then Flickr is all right.

Web Diaries

2005-11-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

It's lucky for us that the term "Weblog" caught on. Because, as much as we may be annoyed by the prevalence of the common abbreviation "blog," we'd be frickin' ridiculous if we talked about our "b'diaries" all day long.

Snowy Somerville

2005-10-30T08:46:00.000-08:00

In keeping with the trend for crazy weather, it snowed here yesterday! And not just a little teeny weeny bit of snow. We were walking in a winter wonderland! (Actually, I didn't leave the house, except to step out on the deck and catch some flakes).

And flakey they were! It was as if somebody had slaughtered a million chickens in heaven and just let their feathers quietly float down to earth. Isn't that romantic?

I like how the presence of snowflakes turns even our rather dull back-porch view of the Foodmaster and neighbors' houses into a picturesque scene. Now it's 58 degrees and sunny. Go figure.

Candlepin Bowling

2005-10-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

Moving to the Boston area involves a bit of culture shock for a California boy. Things that you wouldn't necessarily find out about on a short vacation here bubble to the surface as you wander around and chat with the natives.

One of the most mind-bending encounters I had early on in my residence here was the realization that when people refer to "bowling," they are as likely as not speaking of "Candlepin," rather than the variety the rest of the country is more accustomed to.

Candlepin bowling is just like regular bowling, except it's hard.

That's the two-second summary, but there's a bit more to it. The rules of the game are more or less familiar to anybody who's bowled in their lives, but the ball is much smaller and the pins are much narrower. While I unfortunately have no photos to illustrate the differences, those people on Flickr who think it's fun to share every little visual detail of their life with the world are happy to oblige.

My ten-second summary: Candlepin is like regular bowling, except the ball is small, the pins are narrow, and when you knock something down, it stays put until your frame is over. You can then use this "fallen wood" to strategically knock over other pins that are still standing. Sounds easy, right?

I finally got a chance to play last night, when our neighbor invited us out to Lanes and Games (worst website ever). Walking into Lanes and Games is like walking into any huge bowling alley. There's the pro shop. The lounge. The video arcade. The pool tables. Then you realize that all the bowling lanes are Candlepin, and it starts to get surreal! People are treating this sport like it actually exists! In fact, people are good at it!

Lanes and Games is a two-story bowling alley, big enough to be huge without the second story. The entire bottom floor is (I think) Candlepin bowling, while the second story is mostly regular bowling with a few lanes of Candlepin. So the percentage of Candlepin lanes is a bit more than 50%.

By the way, they call regular bowling "Ten-Pin," which is a name somebody must have come up while extremely drunk or extremely dumb, because there are also ten pins in Candlepin. If it was up to me I would call regular bowling "easy bowl." Since this is my blog, it is up to me!

The first thing you notice when playing a game of Candlepin is that the ball is very small. The lane return is just like an easy bowl lane return except the profile is much slimmer. Overall the appearance of Candlepin is much more elegant, despite the raucous action on the lanes. It was interesting to play Candlepin in the proximity of easy bowl because the speed of Candlepin made the easy bowl look ridiculously slow-motion.

The second thing you notice about Candlepin is that it's hard. You palm this little ball, make your approach sort of like easy bowl, then release the ball while twisting your wrist in an uncoordinated manner so as to hurl the ball directly into the gutter. If you've ever played Skee-Ball, Candlepin is somewhat similar. Now imagine rolling a Skee-Ball to the far end of a bowling lane. This is where it gets hard. When you do manage to hit a pin, the narrow profile can make the whole event much less eventful than with easy bowl. Unless you smack the pin into a chaotic frenzy, it's liable to just fall over, punching a hole in the triangle of arranged pins. When by chance a pin falls in front of a bunch of other pins, it offers a rare chance for a novice "home run." I like to call this "the bulldozer." People much more entitled to come up with Candlepin terminology have apparently settled on the term "barn door." You can learn more of their charming terminology on the International Candlepin Bowling Association website. My impression in this case is that "International" means "New England and Eastern Canada." The site also includes an "official rules" type document, which includes provisions for magical things that can apparently happen in Candlepin games:

8. PIN DOWNED, THEN STAND UP: If a downed pin is caused to stand erect
again in the playing area, it shall be judged as down and shall remain on the lane to
be played as wood.
From: http://www.bowlCandlepin.com/Rules.pdf

To sum up the difficulty of Candlepin, I will announce now that my final score in my first game was 39. Yes, they score Candlepin essentially the same as regular bowling: a perfect game is 300. Getting back to the "Candlepin is hard" summary, I will point out that while perfect games in bowling are fairly common, there has never been a perfect games in Candlepin. You just don't get too used to seeing all the pins go down. The best Candlepin game ever played only added up to 245. That's still a lot better than 39, but it's no perfect game!

We ended up playing two games. On my second try, I broke 50! Not a bad improvement. We all had better second games, but were a bit demoralized and decided to try a game of easy bowl to get our spirits back.

2-Second summary of easy bowl: It's like Candlepin, only it's easy to aim, and when you hit any pin, they all fall down.

We only played one game of easy bowl, but even after a maybe 4 years since I last played, I managed a 150+ game. Thank god for easy bowl!

I'm intrigued by Candlepin, and I would like to play again. Fortunately, they hide these bowling alleys around every corner in these parts. Not only do the big bowling alleys have them, they are present in quaint little neighborhood settings such as Sacco's Bowl Haven in Davis Square, where they proudly declare "We've got small balls, but we're big on fun."

Over in Boston proper, a bar called the Milky Way in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood offers karaoke, cushy couches, and Candlepin all huddled together in a hipster-bar environment. We went here once to meet some friends, and I was mighty jealous of the Candlepin players.

Next time you're in New England, give Candlepin a try. It's fun! And it's American, yet it's foreign. At least to most of us.

Tasty Nor'Easter

2005-10-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

Tasty Nor'easter Speaking of the Northeast, there's a little phenomenon going on up here involving orange and purple. This is nothing new for those who have lived here all their lives, but for California boys like myself, it may come as a surprise to learn that Dunkin' Donuts is the Starbucks of the Northeast!

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of Starbucks here. It's just that, instead of seeing them every block, you see them maybe only every 5 or 6 blocks. Seemingly more prevalent than the naughty coffee goddess are location after location of gaudy orange and purple Dunkin' Donuts signs. I find it kind of charming in a, "God I'm glad to be inundated with the presence a completely different chain" kind of way.

There's something less sickening about the Dunkin' Donuts impact on the region. It seems to be embraced more universally than Starbucks is in the West. For instance, I was reading through the latest issue of Boston's Weekly Dig, which includes a reader's poll type "Best Of the Area" feature this week. Included are all the usual categories one sees in these types of things: Best Burger, Best Haircut, Best Pub, Best Dunkin' Donuts?

Dunkin' Donuts is more than a store, my friends. Dunkin' Donuts is a frickin' genre! The winner of this year's "Best Dunkin' Donuts" award is the 750 Washington Street location, where apparently an employee named Claudia is known to shake her booty to dance music while expressing her "love of the Rolling Stones and America in general."

The Rolling Stones and Dunkin' Donuts pretty much sums up America, 'round these parts.

Nasty Nor'Easter

2005-10-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

At this point the few of you who are still subscribed to this blog are probably scratching your head and wondering, "punk it up? who is this?" I apologize for the month-plus delay in shouting the news from the Nasty Nor'East. I've been swamped with work and other obligations, and furthermore I've completely slacked in my Foodmaster sign-shooting duties.

While "Nasty Nor'Easter" sounds like the stage name of somebody opening up for Li'l Kim, it's actually a weather term, heard this morning on the local news.

Shit howdy! I kid you not, as I finished typing the above paragraph, the dang Nasty Nor'Easter cut the power for one second - long enough for my Mac to power off. Amazingly, my blog editor (MarsEdit) does autosaving and miraculously kept the above intact.

Anyway, I guess a Nasty Nor'Easter is what you call it when winds up to 50MPH accompany non-stop rain, and the power goes out for one second at a time. Isn't that fun? I'm heading to MicroCenter to get a UPS today, if this is how things are gonna be. Actually, I think only the term "Nor'Easter" is official weatherese, but a search for "Nasty Nor'Easter" in Google reveals that it has been used by at least 600 other people. Even "nor'easter" is cool by itself. How many "official" terms have you seen that include apostrophic contractions?

All in all, this storm isn't bad. I'm not leaving the house or nothing, I mean except to get my UPS, but it's not bad. At least I'm still able to type and publish this, despite the one second power outage. When you won't hear from me is when the cheerful morning shows announce the arrival of the "Nasty Bitch-Ass Fo-Shizzle Nor'Eastin' Mutherfu'er." I'll be hiding in the bas'ment.

Welcome to Hotel Turkey Breast

2005-09-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

New FoodMaster specials

Remember when I blogged about the cool movies being projected onto the back wall of the FoodMaster in our backyard? No? Well get the hell back into the archives and find it! I think it's on livejournal.

I took this photo a few days ago from our back deck. The neighbors downstairs have installed a local area FM transmitter on the laptop playing the DVD, so they can listen in silence at any time of the night. The project is not even noticeable from our house unless we go to the window and look out.

Black Person iPod

2005-09-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

iPod nano is about to rock my world. But I was a little taken aback by this invoice email from Apple:

 Item Product   Product Description       Total   Total   Unit       Extended
      Number                              Ordered Shipped Price      Price 
 001  PA107LL/A IPOD NANO 4G BLACK PERSON 1       1       249.00     249.00
                SerialNo.: ( XXXXXXXXXXXX )

Black Person iPod? Racist - isn't it?

Shake Your Punk Ass

2005-09-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

If you've ever wondered what I would look like in a mini-skirt, dancing insanely to KISS ... it's time you found out:

Thanks (?) to iTunes and Cingular (archive.org hosting of original http://makemedance.com).

Foodmaster Food Pyramid

2005-09-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Foodmaster has a pretty high-tech receipt printing system, for such an overall low-tech (and some might say low-brow) grocery store. In addition to printing out an itemized list of everything you just bought, the Foodmaster receipt printing system separates them all by category. This is sort of like how some credit card statements break down what you bought into handy groups. At the Foodmaster, this means that as you're leaving the store, you can reflect on the weight of your alcohol purchases compared to everything else.

Of course, the Foodmaster's high-tech system doesn't make things too complicated. At first, I thought there were actually only four categories in place: meat, grocery, produce, and beer. If that isn't an advertisement for America then I don't know what is. Whoever came up with these categories obviously thought that wine was just a glorified, purple beer. "BEER - Napa Ridge Cab" and "BEER - R.R. Chardonnay" mark recent receipts.

As a vegetarian, I'm fortunate that my white-trash neighborhood supermarket is hip enough to stock at least a few veggie-boy feel-good necessities. Walking out the market door one evening I glanced down at my receipt. "I bought meat?" Sure enough, there it was on my receipt, "MEAT - Smart Dogs" and "MEAT - LOL Swiss Cheese." The LOL stands for "Land-O-Lakes," but in this context, it sounds like the store is having a fun internet chat with me ... "MEAT - Laugh Out Loud! Haha I'm fucking with you, I'm going to put swiss cheese in the meat section!"

I imagined some poor stock boy laboriously deciding which of these four food groups to classify newly stocked products in. I imagined him staring deeply at the tofu dogs for a minute or two before finally deciding that anything shaped like a hot dog is more meat than grocery. And cheese, it comes from an animal. Meat comes from an animal. Case closed.

Then I noticed that there are more categories than just the "Big 4" outlined above. There are actually tons of categories. I don't know if I've even exhausted them all, because they're so random and pointless. There's the "DELI" category, into which a package of ordinary water crackers falls (even though it was boxed and cellophane-wrapped just like any other "grocery" product). Then there's the DAIRY ... why didn't the fucking cheese end up in dairy? Dairy is apparently reserved for liquid dairy. Solid dairy is meat, and frozen dairy has its own category as well: "FROZEN FOOD." Well this little beauty of a category is helpful. I'm glad to know that frozen peas, ice cream, and a frozen side of ribs all belong to the same organization.

That's all for now, I'm off to enjoy a nice glass of room-temperature purple beer, some swiss cheese meat, and crackers fresh from the factory, via the deli, but shelved on the other side of the store from the deli.

Thanks for making life interesting, Foodmaster.

Cokes 'Til Sunrise

2005-09-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

12-pack of a coke for $2.22? Where are Jeff & Suzy when I need them?

Minuteman Bikeway Adventures

2005-09-03T22:43:00.000-07:00

I decided to take a late Saturday afternoon ride on the Minuteman Bike Trail. This trail technically runs from the Alewife T Stop in Cambridge out to Bedford, but an extension to the trail brings it through part of Somerville, to within about a mile of my house.

I had ridden it once before just to Arlington Center, a mile or two past Alewife station, so today I thought I'd head out and try to go a bit further than I had last time. I had the idea that I might gradually build up distance on separate rides until one day making the entire journey to the end and back. Before today, I didn't even know where the end actually was, so it was sort of a magical mystery dream to explore as far as the end of it.

The ride was really pleasant, despite the throngs of idiots who pollute the trail on a nice summer day. Stupid moronic families loitering in the middle of the trail huffing and puffing, drinking juice out of a thermos. Get off the trail! Imbecile children riding on the wrong side of the path while imbecile parents warn them about completely stupid things like "don't go too fast, stay close to daddy," when they should be warning them that they're going to become kid-smear the first time some fast bicycle comes around a blind corner. Idiotic inline skaters who do their stupid skating moves in the middle of the trail, headphones blaring, obliviously sliding as far to the left and right as they possibly can as they meander their way up the path. Hey idiot! Olivia Newton-John just called and they're worried about you back in Xanadu!

Anywhoo... as I was saying, the ride was pleasant nonetheless. It's just a good thing I'm such a patient, easy-going, happy-go-lucky kind of guy.

After I had made it to my previous mark at Arlington Center, I was still attached to my original plan. Just go until the next "town intersection" or whatever and turn around. Well I started scooting along and before I knew it I was completely confused as to where I'd gotten to. Most of the path is bordered by either random suburban backyards or by public parks, making for a confusingly non-descript repeating landscape of baseball diamonds and monkey bars (which must be part of the attraction for the drooling stroller-pusher crowd; this trail is like the world's best bar-hopping strip for the Gymboree crowd). I kept thinking I would just go a little farther until I could figure out where I was. I was slightly concerned about getting too far and then having to trudge all the way home, but I took comfort in the fact that the trail seemed to be almost entirely a slight uphill incline going this way, so going home, I'd be practically coasting.

As I said, the trail is basically a connecting route for mothers drunk on the idea of bringing their children to the next park. But one field really stood out as I rode past. This was no municipal little league field. This field was not even fit for a state college! Surely it must be some kind of private hoity-toity school with bazillions of dollars:

But in fact, on the internet later, I discovered it is part of Arlington High School! A public school? I presume so. It sure looks nicer now than it does in that overhead shot on the web.

After not too terribly long, I made it to an intersection where the Veterans of Foreign Wars office confirmed for me my location in the city (town?) of Lexington, MA. Well, this is where I figured the bike trail ended. I hadn't looked on the web carefully enough, I suppose, but it had been my anecdotal impression that "the bike trail goes all the way to Lexington." So surely it must end soon, if not now. I kept pedaling.

I was in fact starting to get a little bit tired. I hadn't eaten lunch, and hadn't had much water to speak of for that matter, either. I arrived at Lexington Center (I presume) where I was greeted by a lovely drinking fountain and a quaint little tribute to the man who allegedly spearheaded the bike path I was presently enjoying.

I was pretty sure the path ended in Lexington, so I forged onward. I was still feeling surprisingly energetic, and I was excited to think that I might actually make it to the end today! The path at this point is very rustic, with few houses abutting it. I think in Lexington and beyond a lot of the land around it might be park land. I stopped to take a picture of what was ahead of and behind me on a particular straight stretch of path.

Finally, I reached an "end of the road" looking place. Bedford, MA! Hmm! Well, I didn't know it went there, and that's kind of far! I asked some bike dorks in the parking lot if this was the end of the road, and they confirmed it. Here is a dorky little restaurant or something you can go to if you end up at the end of the Minuteman Bike trail.

I was so disappointed with the destination (no offense to Bedford residents, I'm sure it's got much prettier spots than this - and isn't BBEdit made there?), that I decided to venture a little off the trail, just to see what was around. I went about 500 feet in one direction and discovered the welcome sign to Raytheon, a major military defense contractor. Gotta love the calm, relaxing countryside!

I decided to head home. I had passed up some interesting sites on the way in without taking pictures, because the uphill incline encouraged me to keep my momentum instead of stopping for tomfoolery. On the way back, I made sure to stop and grab a shot of an amazing sign I had seen on the way in. There are few signs on the path, so you notice them when you see them. I couldn't help but wonder when I saw this sign, is somebody going to sell me crab here, or are they inviting me to play Nintendo's Legend of Zelda?

It turns out that this sign is a remnant of what was once a more prolific guerrilla art exhibit on the trail. I found a reference from the Minuteman Bike Trail site to the Sonik and the "Bolted Signs Project." While I'm excited to learn what the hell the signs were about, I'm glad the trail isn't littered with a bunch of signs like what's shown on the web site. Evidently somebody agreed with me and tore down all the signs except for the cute crab and squid pictured above.

The ride back was shaping up to be a bit tougher than I had expected. Apparently the "uphill incline" I had counted on for most of the trip had actually turned into a slight downhill after Lexington, and now I was paying for it. My fingers were turning numb from gripping the handlebars, and my ass was starting to hurt, due to the fact that all bicycle seats make your ass hurt unless you've been riding every day for a month. I was starting to think about the recent Runners World article I'd read about hill runners, and their tradition of grabbing a pint of beer between runs. I thought it would be a nice refuel, especially since I hadn't had lunch. Hell, I might be able to score a cheese toasty, or at least nachos. I stopped in Lexington, because they were kind enough to put a sign on the trail advertising the "Buckman Tavern." Hell yes!

History Schmistory! It's just not cool to put a sign for a tavern on a bike trail where sweaty, exhausted individuals will read it, and have it be a historical museum. Eat your heart out, Jeff!

I thought maybe Lexington would have *something* to sate my hunger, so I took a walk down the street. Unfortunately, the town that once housed our country's most rebellious fighters is now home to posh yuppie eateries, Starbucks, and the most frickin' yupped out gilded Dunkin' Donuts on the face of the earth.

I decided to suffer the thirst and hunger and barrel on towards Arlington. On the trail, I did observe one slightly less highbrow refreshment offer. One of the applications of capitalism directly on the trail. I decided to keep pedaling instead of wasting time tinkering with these machines.

But I did stop to take a quick snapshot of the headquarters of the ice cream company I ridiculed in a recent post!

Finally I made it to Arlington, and stopped at Spy Pond, where a refreshing drinking fountain and the low sun over the water provided a kind resting spot.

I made it home about 3.5 hours after I had left. Not bad for a 26-30 mile trek that included many a ponderous moment and camera clicking.

Weird Kitchen Bug

2005-08-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

This bad boy showed up on our kitchen sink. My first instinct was that it's a silverfish because it's long and slinky and well that's just about the only kind of bug I've seen that meets the description.

I didn't think it was a silverfish after all since they seem to have many fewer legs. I counted at least 20 legs on this bad boy.

I thought I'd send it off to What's That Bug to get it indentified, but after I browsed a little bit at the site it became clear that it's a "House Centipede" and it's harmless. It actually is supposed to eat other bugs, so I let it free in the kitchen.

New Foodmaster Specials

2005-08-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

Taxation Without Representation

2005-08-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

In the same vein of my recent commentary about state mottos and license plate snippets, I'd like to talk a little bit about Washington, DC.

You don't see many DC license plates in California, but they crop up fairly frequently on the highways of New England. A striking element of their design is the use of the phrase "Taxation Without Representation" at the bottom of the plate:

While driving, I like to take everything in and then immediately spout it out again as quickly as possible, with or without sassy commentary. I have a joke with my lovely traveling companion that this is because I am like a shark. Apparently, if a shark stops swimming, it will die. I, by comparison, must continue speaking in order to stave off an untimely natural death.

"Taxation Without Representation - that's stupid. They left off the 'No'," I say dumbly. I naively assumed that DC was some kind of super patriotic unified force which would extol the virtues of American politics at all costs. I thought the license plate was simply an attempt to publicly share a civic exuberance about that famous revolutionary statement. But how retarded that they'd leave off the "No!"

"Maybe it's a protest, because DC doesn't have representation," my companion offers logically. I had never considered the possibility, but sure! Washington DC doesn't have seats in the Senate or representatives in the Congress! It's a protest! I found it difficult to believe that the city at the center of our national government could be so sassy in the company of the very men and women who oppress them, but later on the internet I did confirm the truth of this theory. There is a major movement in DC (and presumably from outside of DC) to establish basic voting rights for its citizens that the rest of us enjoy carelessly. There was even a movement a few years ago to add the curtailed phrase to a redesigned DC flag.

It's almost a cliche for most Americans that we have at our disposal the right to complain to our elected representatives. It's even celebrated in song lyrics like this one from "Summertime Blues" by Eddie Cochran:

Well I called my congressman
and he said "whoah"
I'd like to help you son
but you're too young to vote!

Evidentally this song didn't and doesn't resonate in the District of Columbia! I agree that it's ironic and sad that the residents of our country's core, the heart muscle that supposedly pumps a message of freedom throughout the country and world, themselves have no representative to complain to.

Powerless, all they can do is stamp a sassy phrase onto their license plates! So they do!

Moby Fly

2005-08-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

We went to Maine this weekend, marking my first visit to that great state. Driving north from Boston, you pass through New Hampshire briefly and then cruise into Maine. It's fun to blaze through states so quickly and observe the differing customs, road signage, etc.

New Hampshire's highway welcoming committee must be working overtime, because you are greeted by a huge sign as you enter the state: "You're Going to Love it Here." Just as you're thinking to yourself "and what if I don't?" a state-run liquor store appears with the assuring addendum "Open Sundays." You remember that New Hampshire has no sales tax, and you admit that maybe you will love it here after all. All states welcome you with vague promises of contentment, but there doesn't seem to be a guarantee associated with these promises. Some of the mottos are also vaguely frightening: driving into Connecticut you're informed that the state is "Full of Surprises." Like highway beatings, or free ice cream sundaes? Be on the lookout everybody, Connecticut is full of surprises. Sounds like a scary line out of Grimms fairly tales.

Some states seem to maintain an extensive inventory of slogans, which they present in rapid-fire succession, as if to ensure that you identify with the state, through one aphorism or another. Driving into Maine, you learn quickly that Maine is "Vacationland!" Moments later, you're informed that Maine is vaguely "The Way That Life Should Be." The licenes plates in New Hampshire say "Live Free or Die." I believe this is the official state motto, but I guess somebody realized that "Welcome to New Hampshire! Live Free or Die!" wasn't exactly Hallmark card material on a 20 foot road-side billboard.

Maine features some stunning landscapes, and the natural beauty is accentuated by the notable lack of advertising billboards on the side of the highway. Well, with the exception of the occasional "Vacationland!" reminder, or the strangely guilt-inducing "Are you wearing your seat belt?" and "Are your tires safe?" signs. It's as if the government decided the no billboards law was leaving the landscape too bare, and they needed to chip in a little signage to keep drivers awake on those long treks.

Our Maine expedition took us to the city of Augusta, the state Capitol. A little research on Wikipedia informs me that the city was named Harrington for a few precious months before being suddenly re-christened by drunken lunatics in August of that year. OK, I made up the part about the drunken lunatics, but it fits my mental image of a government that names its Capitol after the current month and erects roadside signs inquiring into your automotive maintenance habits.

We departed Augusta to hit the beach, despite it being a rainy, overcast day. We thought it might be nice to see the coast, even if we couldn't take a swim. Our hosts took us to Popham State Beach. Our naive optimism caused us to bring swim gear nonetheless, which is good because there was no rain to be found once we reached our destination. Just a hazy blanket of humidity hiding most of what is probably a very beautiful beach on a clear day.

Despite the haze, we had a lot of fun running around the shallow sandbars. It was high tide, so we could walk about 300 feet out into the water before we even got to real waves or water much higher than our knees. The beach also features a river, which was evidently venting a lot of rain water from back up where we had driven from. It was fun to be able to navigating waist-high river rapids, knowing that the worst that could happen is I'd be washed out to waist-high sea a few hundred feet down the beach.

I paused from the excitement of navigating waves, rapid, and shallow pools. I lay on my back at a smooth sand bar and etched semi-circles with my fingertips, snow-angel style. I looked up at the sky as it became clearer, and zoned out to the sound of rushing water on three sides of me. Then I got hot and decided to go back in the water.

As I headed for the water, a crazy giant fly/wasp thing lumbered about my head. It looked like a giant fly, but it had wasp-like eyes and fangs. It was about the size of a giant bumble-bee, and was fixed on me. I thought I could ditch it, so I darted left and right, running up the beach looking behind me periodically to see it tracking me, mere inches behind my head at any time. I felt like Luke Skywalker as I raced around the beach, jumping into and out of the water. No matter where I flew my ship, the X-Wing fighter was always right behind me. I immersed myself completely, only to come up for air and find my nemesis, Moby Fly, hovering above me. It chased me and I felt I had no option but to run for the cover of my towel. My lungs burned and I could barely run, but for some reason any movement at all seemed to keep it in tentative pursuit. I dared not discover what awaited me if I simply stood still - what the hell is this thing?! I got to my towel and wrapped up in it jumpily looking around me for the thing. It had disappeared.

I sat on my towel and heaved. I felt safe for the moment. Moments later a green-head fly appeared. I'm also terrified of these, but they're much less vicious than Moby Fly. For those who aren't familiar, a green-head basically looks like a normal housefly but it has an iridescent green head. I first learned about these in Cape Cod when I sat happily reading a novel, before feeling a slight pinch on my leg. I looked down to see blood dripping down my calf. Son of a bitch! At least since then I've learned to kill green-heads, but Moby Fly is new and terrifying to me. I don't know how to cope!

I killed a couple green-heads and looked out at the ocean. My three companions waved at me and motioned me to join them. I was scared. I didn't really want to do anything but leave the beach. I had never encountered a fly like that before. Something so relentlessly vicious. I looked around again and decided that I might be safer near them than I was alone. I stood up and started walking leisurely toward them. I wasn't more than 10 feet from my towel when the lumbering beast appeared again. As if it had been waiting for me all the while. I darted back towards the towel, back towards the sea, and back towards the towel again. My companions later told me they thought I was exhibiting a child-like enthusiasm for the beach and exercise. In a stroke of luck I darted back towards the sea a final time and watched as Moby Fly buzzed off the opposite direction. I was safe for the moment, but I made my way out to sea much quicker this time, looking frantically behind me at every spare opportunity.

Maine.
Vacationland!
Scary fucking bugs that will not rest until I die!
The Way That Life Should Be.

Mormon Whoopie Pie

2005-08-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

New specials at Foodmaster.

It's not every day you get the opportunity to buy a Mormon sounding ice cream brand with flavors like "Whoopee Pie," discounted at a price of one-third the number of the beast.

As much as I enjoyed the fabricated irony I created in observing the sign, I ended up walking out with vanilla frozen yogurt. Frozen yogurt?! I think this is the first time I've ever bought frozen yogurt! I just had so much dang fruit sitting around the kitchen, and I have to get rid of it by making a smoothy. Is this how you do it? I'm finally turning Californian!

Second Sight

2005-08-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

Shortly before our move to Somerville, I lost my sight. That is to say, both batteries for my now-antique Canon PowerShot S110 went dead simultaneously. No pictures for me! Just at the moment when wandering around new environs most provokes the desire to "permanently see" things, I was blind.

I could have run down to the local "anything electronic" store and picked up a new battery the day I noticed it, but being the cheapskate that I am, I decided to order from a shady PayPay-only web vendor, in order to save a few bucks. Well, weeks later, and I'm happy to report that my camera is now seeing again!

The first thing I wanted to do was to start documenting the ever-changing, usually amusing Foodmaster Supermarket marquee. The current selection isn't too great, but I gotta start somewhere:

After the Foodmaster, I took a stroll down the street to the Praça Portuguèsa. I am going to start collecting all-things-Portuguese so our Brazilian friend can be amused and more tempted to visit

Enough with the wimpy parks, though. It's time to cruise over to Lincoln Park, where an architect friend of ours you may also know will soon be living again (OK, near the park, not in the park!). The park is pretty big, and includes a number of playing fields, basketball courts, etc. It's also sort of snuggled up with a school and I can't tell where (if) one begins and the other takes over. One of the most fascinating attractions of Lincoln Park is this circular arrangement of concrete pillars:

When I first stumbled upon the park, I thought it an odd bit of public sculpture. Then I found this strange little post with a "push button to walk" type doodad on it:

Tentatively, I pushed the button. Yee-haw! A cool mist is washing over me! This ridiculuous circle of cement pillars is awesome!

And as my yelps of relief shatter the air, the Somerville wildlife looks up in curiosity and wonderment:

You Can Get To There From Here

2005-08-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

The East Coast has had a "hella" long time to grow. What do you get when you mix fertile soil, a non-desert like climate, and 500+ years of American sweet lovin'? Cities and Towns, Everywhere!

When you drive east from San Francisco on I-80, you hit Oakland, then Berkeley, Berkeley-lite, then hella-nothing, then Vacaville. Notice how the city's web page makes the place look like some kind of paradise. It looks like a Windows XP commercial, or a Prozac ad! This is what it really looks like. Absence has not yet made my heart fondly reminiscent of those arid, redneck road-stops.

When you drive in any direction from Boston, you get to something. OK, it's probably a boring bedroom community which looks identical to every other boring bedroom community in the state, but it has a name! And this is where the executive bankers and their children live! And it probably has lattes! Hooray for yuppie civilization! I used Google to map out identically scaled swatches of land centering around San Francisco and Boston, respectively. Have a look at the difference:

The Boston area is a overflowing with cities and towns. They can't fit them all on the map.

San Francisco, on the other hand, has few enough neighboring towns and cities to practically count on two hands.

Now, to be fair, I notice that the San Francisco map is missing some gems like Daly City. I mean, you get Daly City. If you drive anywhere from the Boston area, you might go through podunk nowheresville, but before too long you're likely to be coming up on the outskirts of a city. A real city. Not a Daly city! Well, at least a large town - and maybe Jack Kerouac is buried there.

In California there are historical points of interest even in the middle of nowheresville. You may be amused to stop and learn that Benicia was once the state's capitol, for instance. Or you may recoil in awe at the unbelievable oldness of something that was built in the late 1800's.

In New England they also have this habit, but instead of learning things like "John Muir slept here," you learn things like "Washington died here," or "this is where the first American flag was erected," or "hella revolutionary war blood right where you're standing." In New England, things from the 1800's are hardly vintage, let alone antique. They've got bulldozers that are older than California, for chrissake! The towns are all in the habit of putting the date of incorporation on their "welcome" signs. I've learned quickly that if you're any newer than the 1600's, you're a full-on New-England-Newbie, and you should get the hell out.

The truth is, though I'm trying to talk myself into believing that Boston is better for driving to fun and exciting places, it's only partly true. I can find plenty of boring-ass depressing destinations in the Boston area. You can make wherever you live into an exciting day-trip locale.

So, in the spirit of encouraging us all to explore our surroundings, I'm going to play a little un-scientific game where I pick at random 3 spots from each of the maps I linked to above. I will close my eyes, move the mouse around a lot, then double-click to center the map on some spot. Then I will zoom in as far as google will go, and look for the closest "town or landmark" name. I will then type that name in to google images, and paste the most intriguing photo of the area that comes up:

Boston, You Can Get To There From Here:

Those are: Dracut, MA - Harvard, MA - Bellingham, MA.

San Francisco, You Can Get To There From Here:

Those are: Vallejo, CA - Union City, CA - Sugarloaf Park, Walnut Creek, CA

Have a nice trip!

Dateline: Somerville

2005-07-23T03:23:00.000-07:00

So we drove across the country. After four and a half days of metal-pedaling my poor little Escort station wagon, turning off A/C to get up hills, and crossing my butt-cheeks for luck as we blazed through desolate America, we arrived in Somerville, MA on Monday evening - just in time to unload the station wagon and grab a beer and bite at the Thirsty Scholar.

Monday was the hottest day of the year. At least, that's what all the locals said. The Home Depot checker, as I bought my first A/C at 8:30AM the morning after we arrived. The parking permit office lady. The cheerful older couple at the RMV (DMV for states who aren't obsessed with using Harry Potter words like "Registry"). Yes, Monday was a scorcher, but Friday was also the hottest day of the year. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of those this Summer.

Moving from San Francicso to Somerville is like moving to a foreign country for a California boy. The climate, customs, and language are all different. The bums are different. The stores are different - and the brands in the stores are different. They even spell Hummus differently (Hommus, all brands)! Trash night is different.

Arriving almost a full two weeks before the bulk of our stuff, I'm typing this now from the floor of my office, a cardboard box holding up the keyboard as I hunch over it and glare down at the monitor below. Fortunately, Somerville has free yard sales every night. It's always trash night somewhere. Unlike San Francisco, which moved from having twice-yearly "big trash" pickups to a policy where individual households schedule big trash pickups as needed, Somerville accepts big trash every week! And we don't pay for it! Apparently the property tax pays for it, or something. You can put out whatever you want every week, so people do! We decided we needed some "tide me over" stuff, so we went trolling around the block on trash night. We came home with an awesome blue velour rattan chair with matching table, a vinyl 60's dining chair with gold glitter flowers, which you might find for resale in SF at some place like "The Apartment," a folding chair, and a working color TV! All this in the space of about 15 minutes. It's easy to take it when you know that you can just put it back out in a week when trash night rolls around again.

Trash night (Wednesday) was also the night of our near demise. In front of the building next to us, somebody had put out a mattress and boxspring (we should have taken it! we're sleeping on an air mattress). We were just settling into watching our new street-TV while sitting on our new street-chairs, when we notice the reflection of flames in the building across the street. We get up to look out the window and notice that the mattress next door has erupted into flames, and all the piles of trash near it are igniting now, too. I grabbed my cell phone and started calling 911 when I heard the people who had already run outside confirming to each other that the Fire Department was on the way. Then a bunch of neighbors got together and pulled hoses from a couple houses to put it out. When the FD got here, they quickly raked over the doused fire, to be safe, before giving a quick congratulations to the amateur backdrafters and heading on their way.

The owner of that building insisted that "It was arson, it had to be! Mattresses don't just burn themselves!" going on to rationalize that mattresses are flame retardant. I bought this theory tentatively, but then I decided that a box spring is like, God's kindling: a web of dry wood surrounding a cavity of oxygen. Boy scouts should be so lucky! Now most of us think that one of the tenants of that building was out smoking and flicked their butt into the heap thoughtlessly. It was cool to see the neighborhood come together, though.

Last night our first-floor neighbors invited us over for a party. We didn't know what to expect, but we decided to be social, since "we're new around here." It was an incredibly hot day, as I previously mentioned. The neighbors had decided to show outdoor films for the party. This is where I explain another Somerville oddity that we get to benefit from. Our house is situated directly behind a Foodmaster Supermarket. This means we get to overlook a relatively industrial-looking cinder-block building, though it's actually pretty well framed by some large trees. Nestled behind the supermarket is a large asphalt "mini-lot" accessible only through the backyards (limited in size as they are) of the 3 or 4 houses that abut the market. Apparently this is "Somerville public space," which Foodmaster had to designate as part of an agreement for building here originally. Whatever! It basically means we have a funny little recess lot in which neighbors have placed a basketball hoop, some trashy patio furniture, etc. It's a "park" for our 4 buildings. Anyway - great for parties! The downstairs neighbors decided to project DVDs on a sheet, which they managed to attach to the cinder-block wall of the Foodmaster. When we arrived at the party, a bunch of chairs filled with people gazed up at the wall as the sounds of Shaun of the Dead crackled over boom-box sound system. A barbecue was cooking up all kinds of meaty things, and a slight breeze was finally taking the edge off the blistering day.

About 5 minutes later, I was treated to my first "flash thunderstorm." The twenty or so party guests were clamoring for space on the back deck, which is covered and spans the entire width of the building. Not quite enough space, so some folks moved up to the 2nd floor deck. If necessary, they could have expanded all the way up to our deck, and we'd have a full multi-level theatre sans ushers. We sat in the protection of the porch, getting just bit of mist and splattering raindrops as the heavens unleashed their watery fury. The projector shone strongly through the rain and the image was completely unaffected. We watched the rest of Shaun and all of I Heart Huckabees while insane sheets of rain texturized the air everywhere but where the movie actually appeared on the wall. Quite a surreal and enjoyable ending to our first "week" in Somerville.

Anul Krap

2005-05-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I had a habit of killing the long minutes that it took me to walk places - like, from school to home - by performing mental gymnastics with the names of streets, businesses, whatever.

Now, these weren't mental olympic gymnastics, or anything. Most of my amusement came from quite lame observations. For example, I might look at the "Emily's Bakery" sign and ponder anagrams that could be formed out of it ... SLIMEY BAKERY! How amusing! Or I would look at a street called "Water St" and then walk a few blocks repeating incessantly in my childhood rain-man drawl "reTAW ... reTAW ... RE taw ... I live on reTAW street." Obviously this hobby wasn't particular easy or rewarding. Nonetheless, I still persist in doing it to some extent to this very day... Which is why it amuses me so much that Luna Park could so naively have named their business as they did. They make my stupid little habit so easy! Now, not all of you are rain-men like me, so I'm going to make this one real obvious:

It's one thing to choose a name that sounds funny backwards or provides an ironic commentary on the business. But how hard is it to pick from the 59 Million English words at your disposal, TWO that don't bring to mind defecation when read backwards? Anyway, I recently discovered the San Francisco health department's online restaurant health code violations, and it looks like Luna Park's name isn't the only dirty thing going for it. I'll stick to Puerto Alegre, with it's 100% no violations, and I can't think of any fecal jokes for its name...

Toilets = Marriage

2005-01-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

I was driving up 280 and I saw an anti gay-marriage bumper sticker that adopted the universal "restroom" symbols for man and woman. I couldn't help but read it as "Toilets = Marriage." I can't find that exact design, but this one also embraces the universal toilet symbology:

From this image we can also extract other pieces of sage wisdom. For example, when a man gets married, he stays the same height, but loosens up a little in the crotch. When a woman gets married she naturally shrinks a bit. If a man and woman start out with big heads, they're going to have to tame that a little bit if they want to get along. Especially the woman, to make room for the veil. This model is being sold on CafePress under the "RightWingStuff" brand. I can't argue with their marketing. The most amusing product on this page is this one:

Any straight person who shows up to church in that model is going to be instantly pegged as a fag or a lesbo. Or a redneck, I guess. We're all the same underneath our sleeveless T-Shirts.

Power Tools

2005-01-04T12:31:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I don't really have the gist of blogging, yet. Maybe I need to embrace the personal expressiveness it allows.To open up a bit and share some details about my personal thoughts and activities. Well, it's worth a shot!

There is a new appliance in our household. A long, phallic piece of vibrating plastic that brings me great pleasure in the bathroom - how did I ever live without one!?

The Sonicare Elite 7300 is an unadulterated (until now!), state of the art mouth vibrator. I had some vague memory of owning like, the 1983 model of this toothbrush back when I was a young one, so I was pretty skeptical when this bad boy appeared on the bathroom counter yesterday. There's no way a piece of carefully researched electrified technology could brush teeth better than me. I have perfect form:

Approach the mirror in drunken (evening) or hungover (morning) haze.
For optimal results, support the body's weight with one arm rigid, turned towards the mirror, planted as a pedestal on the edge of the count.
With the free arm, grind methodically into battered gums. At first sign of blood or pain, reduce pressure moderately, or just stop brushing.

All the same, when the purchaser of this device emerged from a maiden voyage with the thing, and declared that it was "like having your teeth professionally cleaned!", it was too alluring for me not to try. I checked into the bathroom for a little one-on-one.

Using the Sonicare Elite for the first time is sort of like I imagine bungee jumping might be. You just sort of take a big breath, strap yourself in, and hold on for the ride. The "sonic" in the Sonicare is (I think) supposed to be these inaudible sound waves that go through your teeth and blast plaque cells or something. But for marketing purposes or just because the thing is so intense, a pitched whine emerges from the gizmo whenever it is turned on. It sort of says to me, "stand still, don't make a move and nobody gets hurt." It's a tentative journey, to be sure. I pick up the device and, thinking things through, I turn to lock the bathroom door.

There are three levels of bathroom privacy. At the first level, the door remains wide open as you pop in for a glance in the mirror or to grab an aspirin. The second level is door closed but unlocked. This is appropriate for things like washing your face, shaving, etc. Here, the door basically says "I'm going to be in here for a while, and you'd probably rather not watch me squint for the towel as soap suds stream into my eyes." This is the conventional classification for tooth brushing - but no longer!

Using the Sonicare Elite is, like nudity, drug use, and defecation, an act of total and complete personal humiliation. Securing the door guarantees against the embarrassment of somebody walking in to find you slack jawed, head hanging over the sink, eyes searching for security in the mirror reflection of the ridiculous spectacle. Everything about the machine is foreign to me. I foolishly attempt to treat it like a regular toothbrush and it rebuffs me. I place a small dollop of toothpaste on the small head of the brush, and start up the "engine." Before I can blink the toothpaste has flown off the brush and landed against the mirror. Am I even supposed to use toothpaste with this? I'm a wee babe, lost in the woods. Against manufacturer advice, I decide to load it up with toothpaste, stick it in my mouth, and ignite it "in the safety of my own mouth." I prepare by widening my mouth as much as possible, to give it room to move about. This may be the first time I've ever attempted to increase the gap between my cheeks and my teeth. Try it! It's still not wide enough, but I position the Elite in a relatively conservative position and flip the switch.

Ah! It's alive! It's vibrating not only my teeth, but my gums, my jaw, my skull, my whole body? I look at the mirror and realize that my body and skull in fact appear completely still. Frozen in place no doubt by the fear of what might happen if I make a wrong move. Every 30 seconds the machine beeps to tell you "it's safe to move about the cabin." Actually, it just means now would be a good time to move on to another part of your mouth, but I liked to think of it as permission to disengage for at least a brief moment. My manipulations of the device are ridiculous and, like an amateur rodeo athlete, I let the beast run wild around the mouth as I try to aim it towards its next intended direction. As I start to gain control, I realize that different parts of my mouth have different reactions. I can't help but laugh out loud as it tickles the inside of my gums. Sort of like the uncomfortable feeling sucking on a hard candy can give you. The outside of my front teeth is like paradise. Oooh yeah, that's nice. Keep it right there. BEEP! Time to move along.

I realize to my satisfaction that although I have sensitive gums and there is a wild animal loose in my mouth, nothing really hurts. It's just intense. Super Intense! Drool is flowing steadily out of my mouth as I stand there cock-headed, allowing the machine to finish taking advantage of me. I feel very smart for having had so much water earlier in the day. I'll have to incorporate that into my new Sonicare lifestyle. I look like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, yet I'm thinking to myself that I'll never brush my teeth any other way again. What kind of sick, perverted bastard am I!?

I finally finish after mistakingly doubling the recommended brushing time (4 minutes instead of 2). The Agony. The Ecstasy. The Defeat. The Victory. I feel sort of proud of myself for having survived. I wipe the drool from my chin and take a deep breath. I kind of can't wait to do it again. (I felt the same way after I first shaved with a Mach3 Razor). Convinced that my new Sonicare lifestyle has really taken off, I resign to taking in a little bit of the product marketing. I pick up the box, still resting near the bathroom counter. So - what is this thing doing for me? Clean teeth, yeah I'm for that. Fights gingivitis. Yes, thanks. Rechargeable. Aha, what's this? "Easy-Start®"???

"Easy-Start gently increases power for first 14 uses, to ease into the Sonicare experience."

My extensive description above is all part of my being gently eased into the Sonicare experience? I have no idea what to expect on my next brushing. Do regular vibrators work like that, too?

America Lost

2004-11-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

The United States Flag

2004-07-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

I often think about how the US flag should be redesigned. Because not only am I a communist and a traitor, I also have a vivid imagination. So I look at that rigid, busy symbol of our alleged patriotism with a sort of amusement as I imagine its eventual evolution or extinction.

First, I think the colors should change. For instance, wouldn't it be great if we had a "pride" US flag flying over the White House? Colors of the rainbow - that's something we can all get behind! Besides, most of us would have an easier time naming the seven dwarves than the thirteen colonies. They're antiquated! And we've got all 50 in the "star zone." Vote YES on the US PRIDE FLAG!

Then I think, wait a minute, why did the gays have to pick such, ehm, uh, GAY colors? I mean, couldn't we all get along and respect each other, you know, life healing sunshine, nature and spirit all in harmony with a palette of colors that Martha Stewart would approve for the den? I guess there are good reasons for the PRIDE flag to be BOLD, but it's fallen way out of sync with the Apple logo, and it's just so ... gay. Besides, kids would start passing out if they had to sing "every heart beats true, under red, orange, yellow, green, violet and blue" at 4th of July assemblies. We need to strive for less complicated, not more.

Red, white, blue. To change colors now would be too disruptive. We might as well call the whole country off. So, we've got our colors, we're feeling pretty good about that. Red, white, blue. Could we switch the order around?
It might require a few adjustments...

Hooray for the blue, white and red!
How we wish all non-Christians were dead!
Hooray for the blue, red, and white!
May we never pass up any fight!
Hooray for the white, red and blue!
I suppose you're okay, you're a Jew!
May our foes all wear stretch khakis too!
Their the emblem of,
The land we love,
Hooray! For those stretch khakis too!

Speaking of diplomacy - can't we just take some other country's flag? Let's keep the Red, White and Blue, but take over the French, er, I mean Freedom Flag. We're pissed at them, right? The tricolor! Yeah, we're cool with that! We thought of it first! It's ours now! Nuh uh! Finders keepers, loser's weepers! History, schmistory! Yeah we gonna get our flag on!

The Freedom Flag's colors are referred to as the "blue, white and red." That is so clearly backwards. We'd fix that in a hurry. The colors represent Paris and the King. We can work with that! It's about time Elvis got his due, and a small town in Texas will be very pleased! (They found their idiot!)

My country, 'tis of thee:
Elvis and Tommy Lee;
Of thee I sing.

Land where the oil wells dried
Land where no prisoner's tried
We love our chicken fried:
I'll take a wing!

It's looking pretty peachy from where I stand. But inevitably, somebody would get pissed about the stars. "I done liked them stars! Gimme my stars!" We just about crammed as many stars as we can into the flag. Why do you think Puerto Rico will never be a state? It's not political, it's practical! Nobody wants to figure out where to put the extra star! "No problemo," dice PR, "no debimos estrella." Pero we know they'd want one eventually. They all want a star eventually. Then we're fucked. It's probably best to keep the stars - if we got rid of the stars, people would start trying to sneak in states left and right. "Nobody will notice one teensy little extra state." The US flag, in addition to being the very symbol of everything I would sacrifice my life for, serves as a balance to thoughtless imperial expansion! Nobody gets a state until we figure out where to put the star!

So we're stuck with the red. The white. The blue. The stars. Maybe this flag changing business is more work than I'd bargained for. It's not so bad the way it is. Really. It mostly stays out of the way. Doesn't cause no harm. It burns real well. I likey BBQ. It has a strange, some might say eerie correlation with a number of patriotic songs - it's almost as if they were written with this particular flag in mind. I guess the old gal's really grown on me. Really become sort of a part of the family, hasn't she?

Yes, the flag is here to stay. Until the next flag, that is. Which will be red and white striped, with 50 smaller blue stars meticulously arranged in the shape of one larger star.

Puerto Rico's star.

The Poorhouse Fair

2004-07-02T06:58:00.001-07:00

I just read "The Poorhouse Fair," by John Updike. I think it's his first novel. This edition has a copyright of 1958 on it. It's an old paperback - a "Fawcett Crest" edition.

One of the first most striking features of this book is the antique censorship of some obvious and surprising "profane" words. Any instance of the word "fuck" becomes "f." So you see things like "He's a f.er", or "I don't give a f." The main character's name is "John F. Hook," who is a 90+ year old convalescent living in a public retirement home. Sooooo to make this otherwise boring novel more interesting, I like to imagine that the middle initial is actually a profanity-censor, and everybody actually refers to this thoughtful, biblical minded old man as "John Fucking Hook".

Other words like "shit," definitely get the treatment. But then there's one or two that get the treatment when it's not immediately obvious what the vulgarity is. It's a profanity puzzle! C.S.er was pretty easy - just took a moment to figure it out in context: "I'll kill the C.S.er." But, the best thing about censored profanity is you can make up your own if you want it to be even more obscene! "Son of a bitch of a cat-killer, brave bastard run your a.h. off." I prefer to read it as "run your anal hemmerhoids off!" That'll show 'em!

Being the brave seeker of depravity that I am, my eyes couldn't help but stutter at the sight of this paragraph. Just the opening phrase is beautiful in it's ease of misreading, but the paragraph goes on to offer up choice snippets for the ill-minded to relish in. I've quoted the paragraph verbatim, with just one of many possible interpretations color coded in red:

Conner stood by two men screwing, with painful slowness, colored bulbs into sockets strung on long cords. They were maneuvering this chore in the dead center of the main walk. Surely they needed at least advice or one of the nimbler men - Gregg, for instance, who had been, come to think of it, an electrician in Newark - to mount the shaky ladder lying on the lawn, stained by dew, when the time came to string the lights on the posts. He asked aloud how they proposed to get them up. The two went on fumbling without reply.

The moral of the story? Even the most boring book about a day in the life of a convalescent home can become an enriching experience with a little censorship and wicked-mindedness. Happy reading!

The Poorhouse Fair

2004-07-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

I just read "The Poorhouse Fair," by John Updike. I think it's his first novel. This edition has a copyright of 1958 on it. It's an old paperback - a "Fawcett Crest" edition.

The moral of the story? Even the most boring book about a day in the life of a convalescent home can become an enriching experience with a little censorship and wicked-mindedness. Happy reading!

Blogging With Mr. Henshaw

2004-01-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Henshaw,

I can't tell you how I really feel because half the internet is reading. But well, you know, today is going pretty good. I had orange juice and toast for breakfast. No non-fat yogurt for me! I am really excited about the rest of my life because it seems like it will be such a solid, stark contrast to the pre-rest of my life. I wonder if other people feel the same? I was walking down the street today and this guy would not get out of my way, so I ... well, let's just say I had very impolite thoughts about him, and they might have included references to his inbred mental deficiencies. I hope that doesn't offend any of my ret-... retired readers out there!

A funny thing happened in the bathroom today, ... anywhoo ... what else to say? I am getting nervous about some of the crap that's going on in my life, but I'm kind of afraid to talk about them here because I know half the internet is reading. I mean, did I say afraid? I'm not afraid of anything - come on! I am an American! Not that I have anything against any Anti-Americans who may be reading (hi, Osama, I read your journal, it was hot!), but suffice to say I wouldn't want to show any weakness here, that would be embarrassing, and I've heard rumors that identity thieves prey upon weak internet victims.

This ... friend of mine ... is having a lot of trouble with his job. His boss is a total A-HOLE and won't shut the hell up. Or so he says. I mean, what would I do in that situation? I'll tell you what I'd do, I'd take my fu-bleeping keyboard and shove it up his fruity patootie, that's what. I'd get up out of my desk right this minute and walk over to his office and I'd give him a piece of my mind. Why I ought to... tell my friend how I feel about that.

One but not both of my parents (are you there? I love you!) are driving me up the wall! I can't believe him/her! When is s/he going to leave me alone and let me live my own life? Suffice to say the OTHER parent is fantastic! I love them both but s/he has always been my favorite (hi!). Anyway, if you are reading, mom, dad but not both, we should really talk this out because it's eroding our relationship. I would tell you how I really feel, but half the internet is reading!

With cordial but not lovey-dovey feelings, your friend,

RainbowTrout79

The Magic of Harry O

2003-08-08T07:30:00.002-07:00

So I am going to a wedding with my girlfriend that is "black tie", meaning I have to either buy or rent a tux. I decided to buy one. I was just going to do the Mens Wearhouse generic route until I happened to stumble into "Harry O Menswear" yesterday (on 2nd btw Howard & Mission). This place is fucking unbelievable! (emphasis on the swearing)

Harry O is a tall, goateed man with a sort of manic swagger and high pitched Bronx accent. He is the first menswear salesman I've met who uses profanity in every spoken sentence. I went in yesterday and asked if he had tuxedos, "Fuck man do I have tuxedos? Shit, look at this, I got notch collar, I got shawl collars, I even got some pimping shit over here."

So of course I was instantly sold. I thought it over, and decided to go back today and buy one. He proceeds to take out a couple tuxes and show them to me. "We can go with the shawl collar or the notch collar", he says as he lays them on the table.

"I was thinking I would just go with the notch."

"Fuck the shawl collar, who wants that shit?" He yells as he tosses it aside. So we pick a tux and he gets me set up for a fitting. Getting fitted at Harry O's means trying on the suit and having an espresso (or mineral water, or whatever) while he painstakingly fits you. This was NOTHING like Men's Wearhouse where they turbo fit you in a jiffy. He spent like almost 45 minutes just adjusting little things and then spying over my shoulder into the mirror until finally he stands up straight, claps his hands together, and proclaims, "FUCK I'm good!"

I asked him about the Italian brand on the suit, and he looks up at me, eyes brightening, and says:

"This shit is pure Dago, man! this is the real Italian shit. Pure Dago."

So I get back into my normal clothes and head up to the counter to pay. He gives me the 20% discount which is going right now, which helped, because it knocked $100 off the price of the tux. Then he gave me a little discount on the alterations, which he may in fact do for everybody. After I'd paid and was about to leave, he thanked me for coming in, and I told him I really appreciated all the time he spent on the fitting. He responds, as I am leaving:

"Fuck, baby, you know I love you! I'm Harry O!"