Went to the Re-Use Center yesterday to see if there were any diamonds-in-the-rough for travel luggage... picked up a couple random things, but found this in one of the pockets of a bag:
Somewhere in the back of my mind, there's a teenager who won't stop giggling. ("heh... they said 'bone' ")
Came home to a funny burnt plastic smell the other day. Everything was still on, no fuses blown, couldn't really find anything. Not until days later, shuffling things on the shelf and bumping cables that the IKEA Sansa lights went out. Hmm... what do we have here? Ah, a burnt stub falls out of the transformer.
Great, just fucking awesome. That lump on the end of the wire? That was the white nylon-ish screw terminal - you can see the other one still intact. It burnt itself up, and still kept working. It doesn't creep me out that it burnt, it creeps me out that whatever caused it to burn would still be powered up, and supplying current to the lights, and potentially continuing to heat things.
Fucking IKEA. Shiny things, cheap prices... this is what I get for it.
After the house fire years ago, it took a while to start trusting consumer electronics again. This, well, this makes me leery all over again. I'm not going to flee to the woods or anything, but... damn.
Ok, I'll admit it, it's out of perverse curiosity. That's the best reason I can come up with. I do this every now and then... knowing it's propaganda, I figured I'd see what people are spewing these days. Sometimes I'll turn on the radio late at night when driving through the bible belt, other times I'll wish I could get those guys in the bow ties to sell me a copy of The Final Call.
But this time, it was something that arrived along with all the other crap-vertisements in my mailbox, at some point weeks or months ago. A DVD - Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West.
So I watched the DVD. The parallels are really quite striking... between the rhetoric in Obsession, and the rhetoric of the Religious Right. Heck, between the rhetoric that Obsession deries, and the way they decry it:
From Obsession: "If you want to get people to fight, you have make them think there's a threat and they're in danger." hunh... no kidding. So... how is what they're (arbitrary "they") doing different from what you're doing? It's all rhetoric of fear to me. Es ist mir Wurst. ("it's sausage to me" - German phrase meaning: enh. whatever. same difference.)
This, along with the montage earlier that plays the "Tuesday morning, World Trade Center, NYC.... Thursday morning, Madrid train bombing... Thursday afternoon, London bombing... (some other day of the week) Beslan School - 200 children killed" What bugs me most? That the Beslan thing was so not a religious terrorist attack, but a nationalist seperatist group, and the deaths were caused by the Russian security forces and their misuse of tranquilizer gas during the standoff.
They compare the propaganda and global domination aspirations to Nazi Germany. They even interview a former Hitler Youth guy (now in his 70s) who, after montage of thronging masses at a rally, says "Now can you imagine: we were enlightened people, and we fell for this. Why wouldn't muslims fall for this." Nice one, buddy. "enlightened people"? Apparently you're not so enlightened, given that you seem to be a bigoted prick who considers himself superior to anyone who isn't like him. No surprise you were in the Hitler Youth.
The filmmakers hype up the way that mullahs preach about the divine blow to the enemies of Islam, and how eventually Islam will conquer the world. Hunh. Sounds a lot like what I saw in Jesus Camp.
More "death to the infidel", just this time, it's whitey screaming it from the rooftops calling for Jesus to conquer the world. More of the same, more of the same.
I look back on the time I spent watching this crap and wonder why I do it. I knew what kind of crap it was, and I watched it anyway. I guess I've got it out of my system now, but perverse curiosity has it's way with me every now and then.
There's nothing but economic gloom and doom in the news - it's almost like the election has taken 2nd place in the headlines... As the election draws nigh, I seek refuge in the darker, less serious, more snarky aspects of it all - sort of a Politique Noir? E
ver seen the bumper sticker "Cthulu for President - why choose the lesser evil?" Well I'm thinking... so if election law says that you can't display campaign propaganda within 100ft of a polling place - what about sarcastic campaigns for imaginary creatures? I mean, he/she/it isn't even on the ballot, and it's not like you can just write them in on a presidential race. So would campaign propaganda for a candidate that isn't on the ballot be permitted? Enh. I don't even have a T-shirt or button, so I guess it's a moot point.
But in the voting world, I stopped by the library to catch a screening of Election Day at the library. Call me jaded, but I had a hard time engaging it. So consciously lukewarm. Yes, voting is good. Yes, there were fucked-up problems at polling places in 2004. Yes, voter turn out is on the rise. And? Well, it didn't draw me in to have anything to discuss in the discussion afterwards.
But the one fun thing was that since I was in my car, I had to park, and seeing as how the lot across from the downtown library (William and Fifth) is open for business now, I thought I'd give it a try. While the voices ("please take your ticket") are far too loud, the asphalt surface is this cool permeable asphalt stuff that rainwater runs through. Cool, hunh?
Yup, asphalt was the most exciting thing of the evening so far. Bread in the oven, we'll see how that goes. Nowhere to go but up.
Family came to visit last weekend and wanted to check out some local attractions. One on the list included Cabela's down in Dundee. I'd never been there, but have heard about it, and as one who isn't averse to shooting, I figured it would be like a big outdoorsy hardware store with lots of gadgets. That it was, sure, but everything there is for sit-down outdoors stuff. Seriously - outdoors activities that involve a lot of sitting and not much moving. Deer stands, boats, ATVs, fishing poles, that kind of stuff.
Almost all the clothing is cotton, which means if you sweat, you'll freeze your ass off. Very little technical clothing - mostly just big bulky stuff.
I was puzzled by how all the stuffed animal carcasses are posed. They're all weird dioramas of rage and conflict - emotion in the animal kingdom. Even the scavengers (vultures) posed to pick at a carcass are assaulting the carcass. Kind of weird. Sure, there's rage in the human world, but what is the message? As a Cabela's customer, am I supposed to want to buy a gun and shoot the water buffalo? Or the lions? Both? It's the question of whom I identify with in the scene, to watch the harsh brutal nature of predators/prey and just let the scene play out, or to intervene and shoot something.
Okeedoke... just this one hope:
If I never ever, ever, ever ... ever see the phrase "Keep insert-name-of-municipality-here Funky", my life will be all the more better off.
Ok, I'm gonna go and co-opt some Youth Culture now for my own nefarious purposes.
Sheesh. People these days.
Municipalities installing bike racks - NYC and Ypsilanti. They've gone on a search for designs, trying to include some form of art, resulting in all manner of... well, I'll just call them contraptions. On the right, we have some of the finishers from the NYC competition.
Some sort of orange blog that surely is fun to look at, but if you aren't a usual locker-upper there, how do you know what is plop art and what is a bike rack? I'm going to start locking up to public art just for the heck of it.
And the chrome abomination... a pox on wheel-chenching bike racks. Something that you can only lock the front wheel up to - Shee-it. In New York? Yeah, right.
Speaking of cost - Ypsi went with a more conventional design "tree guard", but still - $300/piece for a bent tube and water-jet cut medallion doesn't sound right.
Alas, as a bike rack user, I'm giving my tip-of-the-hat to Detroit. Yes, Detroit. Down on the Riverwalk, they've got these fine, sensible, attractive, slanty stainless steel hoops. Fits bikes of all sizes, not painted so they can't rust, etc. etc. It's not rocket surgery.
It's not important that they be works of art. I mean seriously - no one cares what parking meters look like. Where's the uproar about parking meter aesthetics? We need to avoid the distraction of the touchy-feely and just make it useful. Spending city money should be on useful things, not projects that take these months and never really happen. The decision to go with this design was a while ago, but I've yet to see these installed. Heck, winter will come, Ypsi's perpetual budget distractions will prevent anything from happening, and next spring/summer, there won't be any improvement to bike parking dowtown Ypsi.
Heck, for my money, I'd go with the $99 hoop version just to get it done. Install 10-20 of them around town. If people want pretty ones, that can come after - start with the basic ones in the high-traffic areas, then if people want the fancy ones outside their storefront, then put a fancy one in and relocate the basic ones further from the center of downtown - people lock up there too...
Beetloaf sandwich from the Atlas Cafe and a nice pint of stout. Served in a sunny corner of a pub.
I do sorely miss that such a sandwich isn't available to me right now. It was... delicious.
A weekend past, of cabins, friends, bikes... pie. A trip up northward to Mackinaw. Sure, it was two weeks ago, but it was delicious nevertheless, and I'll reminisce if I feel like it.
So yeah... umm.... pie. Emily and Amanda made this awesome 1 of a 2 pie series with some apples from the farmstand up in the neighborhood. That rocked. Take some Euchre, add some Bourbon... let the trash talkin' flow as the cards slap down... And in the morning, the leftover pie makes a pretty awesome breakfast. Heck, what we need here is the apple (or peach... yeah, peach would be good too) equivalent to the calzone. A handheld pocket of goodness. Yesh. but I digress...
Bikes were rode. On the road and otherwise. On the way back, we stopped off at a trail and found that the Shingle Mill Pathway is a good place. No crazy rock gardens or anything, just nice trail, pretty forest, etc. etc. Definitely a place where camping and MTBing go together. Heck, if you're into fishing and such, it's probably for you too, what with the Pigeon River in the neighborhood.
Note to self - spend more time there. When it comes to camping these days, I find I can't tolerate the RVs and whatnot - the people who want their wilderness to be close to the Starbucks, where wood for the fire is bought instead of collected. What I want when I look for the forest is birds tweeting and leaves rustling - no cars, no hootin' and hollerin' - just leaves rustling and brooks a-babblin'. So USFS, you are the people for me.
But then, in the nicest possible way, the badness happened. If I'm going to have spoke pull out the rim and make the wheel almost unrideable, I'm glad that it happened on the last trail of the trip, on the way back to the trailhead, within 1 mile of the parking lot.
It was pretty awesome riding, but alas, it'll be the last mile for that wheel. That, and after I got home, I... uhm... proceeded with a bent derailleur hanger re-straightening technique that turned into a hanger breaking technique. So that bike is good and broke for the moment. Bummer. If absolutely necessary, I can make a singlespeed, but maybe it's just time to put that bike down. Heck, it's 20 years old. A good run, but it might be over.
Alas, the distractability compounds, and it seems I've moved on to a regime where I have no patience for anything. Waiting, sticking with, muddling through, etc. Heck, I've been annoyed with iPhoto ever since I bought a Mac product, and it crashes ever so more often the more photos go in it, but my patience falls apart when I have to learn how to use Fink before downloading other software. So again, I'm dissatisfied with iPhoto, but it sits there, holding photos, crashing eventually, sucking up memory in the meantime. Argh.
By now we've seen enough YouTube videos of Palin/McCain rallies where the supporters are spewing essentially naked hatred. But here I am parked at the pub, enjoying a pint on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the room quiet, and this guy, too loud to be ignored, spouting some sort of Osama/Obama bullshit. Un-fucking-believeable. If he wasn't standing up and about to walk out, I was *this close* to making a point of getting up and calling him out on it - but he got away. I'm sorely, sorely tired of the closet racists who are spouting what is, ultimately, closeted racism. With the current theme for a lack of patience, let's just say that I've got my "are you a complete fucking idiot?" ready for the next moron that encroaches on my eardrums.
Reminds me of the last time I was in a situation that I couldn't quite believe it was actually happening... or at least, the last time I made a note to myself about it...
I'm at the bar on St. Paddy's Day, stopping in for an obligatory pint, chatting with a friend. They leave, I stay to finish my pint, and the guy on the corner of the bar gets chatty.
At the time Kwame Kilpatrick is in the news, still in office, but the scandal is heating up. Conversation on the barstools drifts to current events, and since AA/Ypsi is sufficiently far away from Detroit to allow a certain amount of detached amusement at the goings-on, it's like talking about the weather, right?
he notices my U of Illinois hat... "You from Illinois?"
"Yeah, near Chicago... grew up there. Moved here a while ago."
"Is there as much of a problem with blacks there?
What... the... fuck. The assumption that a clean-shaven white boy would be assumed to share the same closeted racist opinions just shocked me into dumbfounded silence. I should have gotten up and walked away in disgust. I should have said any of a dozen different things, but all I could come up with was "I think you and I don't share the same opinions about race." Now, in 2008, this kind of shit exists? Alas, it does. I'm not naive, but I'm just surprised at how close to the surface it is.
I might be an able-bodied college-educated straight-acting adult white male, but that doesn't mean I share your assumption of closeted racism. Or sexism. Or homophobia.
But here's the rub: for minorities or women or LGBT folks, they also see the able-bodied college-educated straight-acting adult white male with a haircut and assume that I'm not an ally.
So yeah... it seems I've got no patience for anyone these days.
I hear that there are people out there, desperate to conceive children, but in their desperation and longing, they find themselves so obsessed with the idea that they can't help themselves. They make field trips of going to playgrounds, sitting on the sidelines, and watching other people's children play - fantasizing about how their own future children might play. How Janey or Johnny might be at 2 years, 4 years, 6 years old.
Well, I had a little taste of that craziness myself, out in SF. Emily and I were out and about for a coffee and then a sit-out-in-the-park in Dolores Park, and we spied two professional dog-walkers each with their dozen or so dogs in tow, out romping and playing in the park, all dogs of different shapes, sizes, personalities... none of them the same.
So we sat there and watched, each of us with our own personal fantasies about the perfect dog, neither us being able to exactly bring dogs into our respective lives. Me, I've got an apartment, no yard, but no roommates. She, in a relatively new town and with a house-full and relationship.
Wistful. Creepy. But pleasure in the fantasy, no doubt about that.
Mmm... puppies. Gotta get me a couple of those.
I don't have any Jewish grandparents, but Sarah Silverman makes me want some... Heck, she makes me want some Sarah Silverman.
The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.
Sitting on a hill in a park in Dolores Park an ambulance goes by, wailing it's rising and falling Song of Urgency. But in the dense urban city, the flat hard buildings form the audio equivalent of fun-house mirrors, echoing the siren.
Coming toward me is the single-minded and onrushing regular version. As it passes, rushing away, the doppler shift changes the tone from higher pitch to lower pitch, but the reflection off the buildings in the distance is only the echo of the original urgency.
The result - a two-tone discordant song of a split personality. Urgency ahead, lament behind.
I missed the Wilderness Volunteers trip to Escalante this year, and I'm sad about that. A really, really beautiful place, and while it's a "work" trip to kill the invasive Russian Olive, it's work that has good results, so that's fun. It's really the results that are so striking, how the river is profoundly changed from it's choked, invaded, on-the-way-to-ruin state, back to its native riparian biomix, the way it was 50 years ago before the Russian Olive easily escaped from where people planted backyard shrubberies. Check it out:
Upstream view before and after.
Overhead view from the canyon rim before and after.
Gotta say - knowing what that damn plant is like up close, the choked before shot makes me twitchy and claustrophobic. The after is a big "ahhhh" sigh of the river in it's natural state before the damnable olive got a foot in the ecological door 50 years ago.
I had given the razor a rest while out on the West Coast. But all things come to and end, so... why not take the opportunity to experiment with facial hair sculpting styles?
A blank canvas
The soulpatch meets the friendly mutton chops
Friendly mutton chops (so named because they meet (shake hands) in a friendly way above the lip
The Fu Manchu - I'm pretty sure that I can't pull this one off for real.
Was tempted to walk around for a day or so with it, just for the heck of it.
And... my most hated of them all (but inevitable result of The Fu), the boring stupid Tom Selleck 80's caterpillar lip.
And for the navel-gazers out there who like analysis of such things, have a gander at Impressions of the male personality as a function of beardedness.
... and I lived in San Francisco, I would probably live here:
19th and Sanchez... go get you some, honeybunch.
It's in landscapes like this where your mind has plenty of time to wander. And wander it does. Things like One Letter Off variations on signage and names, a habit I first heard named by Gary as eulexia. (like dyslexia, but instead of a prefix indicating disfunction, it indicates pleasure) Currently, the chuckles come from Sitarbucks. You know, the place where you can get overpriced mediocre coffee and gratuitously pretentious world music. But inevitably, in the world of long road entertainment, the process of elimination leads to... elimination. Administration of, planning for, and crude references to... poop.
With that, I bring you Phase 2 of the culinary adventures from last week. Long time ago in a midwestern state far, far away, Matthew and Sandra inadvertently showed me how completely easy it is to make seitan (yes, it's pronounced "say-tan", like the devil). So I thought I'd give it a try. Easy enough, but I have to say that if you're going to try it yourself at home, don't fashion the dough into cylindrical shapes, regardless of how much you might want to have round slices to cut up and pan-fry. What you end up with is a cylindrical piece floating in soy sauce/broth, and well, it looks like poo floating in the bowl. Tasty and good for you, but you have to get your head past the visual similarities.
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We move next to the metaphorical toilet, the Toilet of the Mind. It's the metaphorical flip side of that metaphorical tender pelvic region boys on bicycles know well as the perineum, but which Jethro or Bubba would refer to by colloquial nomenclature as "taint". You know, "tain't one, tain't th' other". Something I've been meaning to delve into because it's eminently bloggable, but just haven't gotten to.
It all started when I was chatting with a friend of mine who, among her many fine qualities, happens to be a woman, a scholar, and a post-second-wave feminist. In the midst of our conversation there was some reference to something in popular culture that was possibly phallic, which then led to a discussion of penises.
As a penis owner-operator, and (for the sake of conversation) representative of penis owner-operators everywhere, the question was posed to me "what does your penis MEAN to you?" [emphasis added]. Which easily led me to an introspective self-debate over what "mean" means. (thanks to Bill "that depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Clinton, for making epistemology acceptable in pop culture) We got back to the original question... eventually. Discussion ensued about penises as Instruments Of Oppression, references in art, literature, criticism/analysis thereof, and other meanings assigned in unrelated settings.
The crux of it though is that the best, most honest, most accurate answer I could come up with to describe my own is: "my penis is an earlobe". Seriously. While it's a happy, useful and recreational piece of my anatomy, it doesn't have any crucial day-to-day symbolism or significance. In a removed, academic sense, one can fetishize, iconify, celebrate, or demonize a penis, but on a personal level it doesn't guide me, it doesn't decide things for me, it doesn't define me any more than other parts of anatomy. It's like an earlobe. I use it, it's part of me, I would miss it if it were removed. But I don't think about it actively. Sure, I think sexual thoughts every 7-9 minutes just like every other American Male, but my anatomy plays only a supporting role in those mini-sodes; fantasy mental movies are more likely to have an ensemble cast of anatomy or epic drama of dialogue than be a superstar biopic. Other than it's critical participation in urination and fornication, my penis is an earlobe.
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And lastly, the words of others. I was riding somewhere on an errand and/or adventure with G and her sprogs E and O... adult conversation going on in the front seat, kid conversation going on in the back seat, two separate galaxies. It's where they crossed over that we'll leave off today. The point where the adult conversation ended with "did you hear what I think I just heard?"
You see, the kid conversation was mostly background noise until it got to a puzzling exchange.
O: "I'll be the hamster."
E: "I'll be the toilet."
... someone figure that one out for me and let me know what I must've missed right before that, mmmkay?
Wow, South Dakota is a big state, long to get across, and pretty damn boring. Yes, we're swinging North. If I never see another "Wall Drug" billboard in my life, I'll be ok with that. The "Corn Palace" was immensely disappointing. Sure, it had corn stuck to the outside of the building, but it's no longer made of corn, and basically just houses a basketball court, which also serves as a big assed gift shop. Annoying.
But they do have these nifty little ears of corn molded into the concrete of the bases of the streetlamps. There's that.
Emily is keeping track of states by which ones she finds a geocache in, and SD and MN were on her list. WY too, so we're there. So we made a couple of special-purpose stops along the way to find a geocache or two.
As a California native, she'd never been to a Cracker Barrel "Never? [gasp of a midwesterner]". "Nope." well, ok - here we go. Never got to finish the checkers though since the chicken-fried something-or-other arrived surprisingly quickly.
Took a slightly-nausea-inducing spin on a playground. Tip for kids out there - either close your eyes or look at the horizon - fussing with a camera on a spinning piece of playground equipment can make a body more than a little bit woogey.
