I'm a lasagna boy!

3 Rivers, 2 Wheels

Although they have one of the most irritating web sites ever, Bike Pgh! offers tools, a lending library, and advocacy for the City of Three Rivers. See if you can get the link about bike racks to work. I was pleasantly surprised to read that the city has a bike plan.

Was it worth it?

After weeks of hearing Greg sing the praises of public transit, I finally rode Caltrain's Baby Bullet express service today; it's the first time my bike and I have actually ridden this service.

My door-to-door time was one hour and thirty minutes, including fifteen minutes' waiting time at the Mountain View platform, where a Stanford psychology student tried to engage me in some sort of study. If I take the limited in the evening, the door-to-door time is about fifteen minutes longer, or, barring wait time, as much as half-an-hour longer!

Caltrain has a progressive policy towards bicycles on board: no additional fare and ample space for bicycles and gear. However, with the Baby Bullet, Caltrain has really let down cyclists. The rolling stock is significantly less bicycle-friendly: we have to move bicycles through the seating area to place them in cages which are significantly less roomy than the racks on the older carriages; the capacity has diminished, so that only 16, rather than 32 or 64 bicycles, fit -- as a result, cyclists line up 20 minutes early to board the Bullet, thereby negating much of the speed gain.

The faster travel time of the Bullet is due to its less-frequent stops; it runs at a top speed of about 70 mph, just as the regular locals and limiteds do, but stops only four times between Mountain View and San Francisco (irritatingly, at both 22nd and 4th streets).

(Past) Progressive writing

I picked up a copy of J P Dunleavy's Fairy Tale of New York, a rollicking book written mostly with participles. I really liked his Wrong Information Is Being Given Out At Princeton, with its antihero Stephen O'Kelly'O, and the succinct, vindictive Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms.
The narrative portions of the book remind me of William S. Burroughs in their lucidity, and in the way both authors eschew complete sentences.

Dr Dolittle

Despite the high praise accorded to Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle, I found it an excrescence, especially compared to its contemporaries. The level of sophistication does not approach Lews Carroll or Kenneth Grahame, as Hugh Walpole suggests in his Harper Trophy edition.

Bug book

Susan lent me an anthology of writing about insects: Insect Lives, "Stories of Mystery and Romance From A Hidden World". It contains passages from Exodus, the selfsame that JZ swore pointed to manna as being "insect shit!" in his trademark first-year lecture.

Amar Chitra Katha online

I read a lot of these classic Indian stories in comic-book form from Amar Chitra Katha when I was younger; it's how I learned many of the stories from the Mahabharata, and about Ashoka and Tansen.

Keeping your brains on the inside of your body

The Bicycle Kitchen in L.A.'s Eco-Village offers advice, tools, and alley-cat racing for urban Angelenos.

Now playing at a XXX theatre near you

Maureen Dowd feels my pain.

It always makes me feel slimy and humiliated, as though I'm in one of those cheesy women-in-prison movies, with titles like "Caged," "Slammer Girls" or "Reform School Girls."

First you have to strip, unzipping your boots, unbuckling your belt and unbuttoning your suit jacket while any guys standing around watch. Then you have to walk around in some flimsy top and stocking or bare feet. Then you have to assume the spread-eagled position. Then a beefy female security agent runs her hands all the way around your breasts, in between, underneath - again with guys standing around staring.

Flying on business, I've gone through this embarrassing tableau two dozen times in airports all over the country in the last couple of months. I've been searched more than Martha Stewart. I watched a Transportation Security Administration screener brusquely insist that my friend take off her blazer even though she had on only lingerie underneath - a see-through camisole - and the man behind her was leering.

Airport screening procedures are more reactive than imaginative. There's an attempted shoe bombing, so all passengers must shed their shoes. Two female Chechens may or may not have sneaked explosives onto Russian planes, so now some T.S.A. genius decides all women are subject to strips and body searches.

I get flagged for extra security every time I buy a one-way ticket, which seems particularly lame. Doesn't the T.S.A. realize that a careful terrorist plotter like Mohammed Atta could figure this out and use his Saudi charity money to pop for round trips even if the return portion gets wasted?

In two articles in The Times, Joe Sharkey has chronicled the plaints of women angry about new procedures in airport security that have increased both the number and intensity of the airport pat-down, or "breast exam," as one woman put it.

He described the experience of Patti LuPone, the singer and actress, at the Fort Lauderdale airport, who resisted taking off her shirt and got barred from her flight, and of 71-year-old Jenepher Field, who walks with the aid of a cane, being subjected to a breast pat-down at the airport outside Kansas City, Mo. (Do we have intelligence telling us that grandmothers are part of Al Qaeda now?)

Even a stripper complained in an e-mail message to Mr. Sharkey that she found her experiences degrading: "On one occasion a screener flat out asked if they were fake."

Somebody tell me what quantity of explosive material they have found through these strip searches, because I've got a hunch it's zero. How many billions are they wasting on this?

Maybe we're not at the Philip K. Dick level of technology yet. But how about some positive profiling? If airport security can have a watch list for the bad guys, why can't it develop a watch list for the good guys? Can't there be a database of trustworthy American frequent travelers who are not going to secrete things in their bras? After all, no one is going to sneak anything in there without our knowledge. Can they at least get a screen?

I know it's not just women who are uncomfortable; a guy I know said a male screener at the Miami airport recently stuck a hand down the front of his pants, making him feel "totally manhandled." And I heard the sad tale of a red-faced Washington businessman who took off his shoes, only to show the room the red painted toenails he had forgotten to wipe off.

Barry Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. told Court TV that the new procedures are not only "an open invitation for harassment" - there are not enough female screeners, so sometimes men are doing the pat-downs of women - but they're also "not particularly effective."

I've never wanted to complain because I assume there are inconveniences that go along with greater security. But I would feel less creepy if I thought this were part of an effective overall strategy of protecting the country. I don't.

Iraq is draining money we should be spending protecting ourselves. Only 3 to 5 percent of containers coming into ports are checked, and only a tiny percentage of air, rail and truck cargo is inspected. Congress is turning homeland security money into another avenue of pork. Tom Ridge is still making fuzzy ads telling people to have a plan of action and referring them to his Web site, which hasn't gotten much beyond duct tape.

If we were buttoning up the borders and making the airlines safer, unbuttoning in public would be more bearable.

Malady of the month

Malady of the Month features photos and a layman's explanation of a different disease each month. Syphilis, aka "The Pox", has long fascinated me. A friend called up a few months ago, saying, "I found a book and immediately thought of you." I swung by to check it out, and it was a 1950s US government publication entitled "Syphilis"; I already had a copy.

X-Ray OJ

File under: Travelling While Brown.
I wear shoes that don't have any metal in them, so that I don't need to remove them when passing through airport security areas (Typical exchange: "Sir, we highly recommend you remove those shoes," in the same sotto voce a sommelier might use with the cuvée primiere and a sole meuniere; me: "These shoes don't contain any metal." and thinking to myself, "Can't they just violate me once the metal-detector / explosives-sniffer sounds the alarm?" But instead I'm summarily pulled aside. First the shoes come off (and, as I refuse to stand barefoot on carpet, a supervisor is summoned); then they ask me to remove the jacket, the sweater; then the belt; then "please unbutton the trousers." This is too much. They've put two different metal wands around my body, patted me down, and passed me back and forth through a metal detector. My OJ goes back through the X-ray machine, my laptop undergoes further scrutiny, and we all make our way to a small closet behind the line of waiting passengers. Here my shoes are screened again (because, they explain, I put them back on in order to walk to the closet; But, I point out, you were with me the whole time. Yes, but this is the procedure. That phrase recurs.); my belt, trousers, and sweater are again patted down and a wand sweeps over my body.
The underlying agony lies in the boring, boring manual nature of all this: after a mad scramble to install automatic explosives-sniffing devices, advanced metal-detecting scanners, and all sorts of traveller-profiling systems, where are we? In a back room at SeaTac, at Sky Harbor, at LAX, with two surly naturalized citizens triple-checking my travel documents and looking for any reason that I should be further detained.

ESP Game

From the ESP Game FAQ:

Q: Does the ESP game work in Mac OS and Linux?
A: Not always. The ESP game is written as a Java applet, and the versions of Java included in some of the browsers for Mac OS or Linux are slightly incompatible with the current implementation of the game. We are working hard to make the game available everywhere.

Warning labels for books

Like Mad Magazine, but funny, these warning stickers for textbooks should come in handy in a Fight Club sort of way

Both men were known to the police.

First time as I can recall shots being fired west of Fillmore on Haight. And it was the cops that done it.

A San Francisco police officer shot and wounded a fleeing man Monday night after the man backed his car into the officer's partner and dragged the officer several feet, police said.

The incident began on Haight Street, just west of Steiner Street, at 9:10 p.m. when two officers spotted two men, one of whom was wanted, in a passing vehicle. The men parked their car in a driveway and the officers stopped to question them, said San Francisco police Sgt. Neville Gittens.

As one of the officers was questioning the two men, the driver suddenly backed up the car, knocking down the other officer, who was standing alongside the car, Gittens said.

The officer was dragged 10 feet, police said. His partner fired two shots at the fleeing car, slightly wounding the driver.

As the men in the car fled, the uninjured officer called for backup, police said. Responding officers located the wanted vehicle and chased the suspects, stopping them at Central and Lyon streets, where they were arrested.

Gittens said both men were known to the police. He said one of the suspects was wanted on an arrest warrant Monday night when they were initially stopped.

Police did not release the identities of the officers or the suspects. They also did not describe the severity of the injuries sustained by the police officer or the suspect, both of whom were transported by ambulances to hospitals.

G-Cans

War on war

We have a war on drugs, a war on poverty, and a war on terrorism, but why don't we have a war on single-occupancy vehicles?
Maps, 8-second maps, more maps, and advocacy are just the beginning. We should make transit free within the downtown -- Portland and Seattle already do. Federal regulations require a 25% farebox revenue contribution towards overall operating costs (and, in fact, most transit systems barely manage that!). Why not make MUNI free in the downtown area? Or across the entire system?

subfusc

subfusc: a. dusky drab; n. formal academic dress at Oxford University.
I read the adjective in Dorothy Sayers' "Have His Carcase"; although I knew the second, nominative meaning (probably also from Sayers, perhaps "Gaudy Night", a novel replete with Oxonian trivia), the description of a cheap overcoat threw me.

(Jack's) Elixir Celebrates It's Resurrection

If anything, I'd expect "Authentic" to appear in quotation marks. The "new" paint job at The Elixir (neé Jack's Elixir), at the corner of 16th and Guerrero, lacks the boisterous appeal of the old.

Fish highway

What is a fish highway?

Who needs TV when I've got T Rex?

Went out for drinks with Tyson; hadn't seen him in years, years (and wasn't certain if I'd recognise him, even). He asked what I'm listening to, and I must confess that there isn't too much in the way of new music that I've found compelling. Telling him about Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie was like taking coals to Newcastle, and sort of old news anyway, and then I thought about what's been playing a lot in the ol' iTunes: Bowie (and Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, Eno); Zappa, Beefheart; Sonic Youth (and Wilco). Tortoise, of course. Some Neutral Milk Hotel.
Oh, and a lot of Shellac.

These are the people that you meet, Pt. VII

Left the casa this afternoon to walk down to the Mission with Jonathan: saw Leda and Yasmin down by the coffee shop; Erica at the burger joint; Tom driving slowly near the Pilsener looking for a parking spot; Chris (with hair! and a girl!) near Cama, the new bar on 16th; and the waiter at the Sunshine, where we ultimately ate, who asked where'd I'd been lately ("we haven't seen you in so long!"). On the return trip, saw Eric (who always circulates in that neighbourhood) and his translucent hip-top; while we were chatting, Greg rolled past on a blue blue bicycle.

Words Without Borders

Words Without Borders is the online magazine for international literature; supported by the US National Endowment for the Arts, its editorial board includes Chinua Achebe, Edith Grossman, and William Weaver.

"... later eat their ears for dessert."

File under seafaring adventures: BoingBoing has a nifty post about the outlaw sea.

Note to Turin

Dear Turin:
You can have your blessed shroud. We've got a grilled cheese sandwich.
      Signed, Miami.

Aujourd'hui, j'ai reçu une télègramme:

TURIN TO MIAMI

RESEMBLANCE HEDY LAMARR POSSIBLE LILLIAN GISH STOP DEFINITELY

NOT VIRGIN MARY STOP USE SPELLCHECK WHEN POSTING TO EBAY

Cup runneth over in King County

Seattle has to choose from a monorail, dedicated (and sometimes free) busways, and a light-rail system. Or a combination thereof. I'm jealous.

Symbology

Went down to Jay's new pad today. I arrived at the address, found a bar occupying ditto and transvestite prostitutes milling about. Jay came downstairs to meet me, and led me upstairs to a patio door with a brick wall behind it.
He's across the hall from a noisy Thai karaoke bar, and faces on one of the more dense and urban scenes in San Francisco.

Jay hooked me up with some grocery-bag panniers, which I am going to add to the Surly. I think I'll turn that into a 'round-town/grocery bike.

On the way back home, I dropped the chain on the Dutchess. A passerby hollered that he heard that shit up the block!

Aou Tou Blog Zat

vlogging and audioblogging.

Always too much to not read.

sage, a firefox plugin, vs. NetNewsWire, a beautiful cocoa app (free/shareware). Fortunately, each can read the other's OPML file.

Tell me what to listen to.

Once musicmobs has sucked in my iTunes Music Library, I can enjoy Mobster's telling me what to listen to (on a sliding scale of "Hipster" to "Mainstream", where, presumably, the former entails Decembrists and The Faint, the latter Coldplay and Interpol).

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan &c.

Thanks again to acquisition, I can listen to crap like .

Wu-Tang are for the children!

I suppose this article answers the question: "How do you write an obituary for someone named Ol' Dirty Bastard?"
Short Answer: You refer to him as "Dirty", not "Mr Bastard".

Ol' Dirty Bastard, a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan and one of the most eccentric personalities in hip-hop, died of unknown causes on Saturday in New York. He would have turned 36 on Monday.

The rapper, whose real name was Russell Tyrone Jones, was having difficulty breathing and complained of chest pains earlier in the day, according to his spokesperson.

Dirty was at Wu-Tang's studio, 36 Records LLC on West 34th Street, when he collapsed in the lounge at approximately 4:35 p.m. on Saturday. EMS workers rushed to the scene but were unable to resuscitate him and he was pronounced dead at 5:04 p.m., according to a spokesperson for the city medical examiner's office.

An autopsy conducted Sunday morning revealed no conclusive results. Toxicology and tissue tests will be administered and the cause of death is expected to be known within 10 days.

Jarred Weisfeld, ODB's manager, said that the rapper was entirely drug free and that he was committed to getting his life back on track. "He was the complete opposite of what people made him out to be. He was a teddy bear," Weisfeld told MTV News.

ODB, who arrived in the New York area on a flight from Denver at 10:30 p.m. Friday, had been scheduled to perform with the Wu-Tang Clan in New Jersey that night, but missed the show.

Wu-Tang members Ghostface Killah and Raekwon were among those seen outside the studio Saturday consoling ODB fans.

Cherry Jones, ODB's mother, was informed shortly after his death and called the phone call "every mother's worst dream." "My son, Russell Jones, passed away," she said in a statement. "To the public, he was known as Ol' Dirty Bastard, but to me, he was known as Rusty, the kindest, most generous soul on earth. I appreciate all the support and prayers that I have received. Russell was more than a rapper, he was a loving father, brother, uncle, and most of all, son."

Damon Dash, who signed ODB to Roc-A-Fella Records in the spring of 2003, also released a statement. "All of us in the Roc-A-Fella family are shocked and saddened by the sudden and tragic death or our brother and friend," Dash said. "Russell inspired all of us with his spirit, wit and tremendous heart. He will be missed dearly, and our thoughts, prayers and deepest condolences go out to his wonderful family. The world has lost a great talent, but we mourn the loss of our friend."

Before he was known more for his rap sheet than his rapping, Dirty was the most outrageous member of the Wu-Tang Clan, nine New York rappers who fashioned themselves as ghetto superheroes with magic rapping powers. As an MC, ODB was instantly recognizable with his garbled, manic and nonsensical style. His half-rapped, half-sung free-association growl was a key element in several of the Clan's most memorable tracks, as well as hits from Mariah Carey ("Fantasy") and Pras ("Ghetto Supastar").

Russell Jones was born in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York, and was raised on public assistance. His cousins, known now as RZA and GZA, introduced him to hip-hop and by the early '90s they had formed the Wu-Tang Clan. Jones took on the name Ol' Dirty Bastard because there was no "father" to his unique style, although he would assume numerous monikers over the years, including Osirus, Joe Bannanas [sic], Dirt Dog, Unique Ason, Big Baby Jesus and Dirt McGirt.

After the massive success of the Wu's debut, 1993's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the members began launching solo careers, first with Method Man and second with ODB's 1995 release, Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, which featured "Shimmy Shimmy Ya."

His second album, 1999's N---a Please, featured his biggest hit, the Neptunes-produced "Got Your Money" (which introduced Kelis to the world), but by then his music played second fiddle to his odd behavior and trouble with the law.

Dirty's best-known antic came at the 1998 Grammy Awards, when he took the stage and interrupted Shawn Colvin's acceptance speech to complain that the Wu-Tang Clan had lost to P. Diddy in a different category (see "Ol' Dirty Bastard Tells Why He Stormed Grammy Stage"). Along with being awkwardly timed, the moment will be forever remembered because of Dirty's peculiar declaration: "Wu-Tang are for the children!"

And back in 1994, ODB invited MTV News to spend an afternoon with him. On camera, he loaded several of his kids (he was said to have more than a dozen, by numerous mothers) into a limousine and proceeded to drive to a welfare office to collect food stamps.

While ODB was talked about for engineering comical moments, for a time his frequent arrests overshadowed anything else he did.

Although he was convicted of second-degree assault in New York in 1993 (the only violent offense ever proven against him) and was shot in the stomach by another rapper in Brooklyn in 1994, ODB's real tussles with the law started in 1997, when he was arrested for failing to pay nearly a year's worth of child support for three children he had with his wife, Icelene Jones.

In 1998, he pleaded guilty to attempted assault on Icelene and two months later was shot in the back during what he said was a robbery of his Brooklyn home (he walked out of the hospital, disobeying doctor's orders).

Later in 1998, he was arrested for shoplifting a pair of $50 sneakers in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and accosted a security guard at the House of Blues in Los Angeles and was charged with making "terrorist threats," charges he again faced only months later after he threatened to kill an ex-girlfriend.

In early 1999, ODB was pulled over in New York for a traffic violation and was accused of firing a gun at officers, although those charges were later dismissed when the police failed to prove their claims. A few months later, while being cited for a parking violation in Los Angeles, he became one of the first citizens arrested under a new California law that made wearing a bulletproof vest illegal for convicted felons (see "Ol' Dirty Bastard Arrested For Wearing Bulletproof Vest"). Two months later, he was picked up in Queens, New York, for running a red light and was arrested when police found crack in his Mercedes-Benz (see "Ol' Dirty Bastard Arrested; Police Claim To Have Found Crack In Rapper's Car").

After two more arrests for traffic violations, including another one where he was found with crack, Dirty was sentenced to three years' probation and one year in a residential drug-rehab facility in Pasadena, California. (During court proceedings, he was scolded by the judge for falling asleep and calling a female attorney a "sperm donor.") Ten months later, after a disagreement with the staff, he walked out of the court-mandated rehab and became a fugitive.

A month later, two days after appearing onstage with the Wu-Tang Clan in New York (see "Performance By Fugitive ODB Stuns Wu-Tang Clan Crowd"), he was arrested in the parking lot of a McDonald's in Philadelphia by an officer who recognized him because her son was a fan.

ODB was then sentenced to two years behind bars (see "ODB Gets Two Years For Fleeing Rehab, Violating Probation"). He spent most of that time at Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York (where Tupac Shakur once served). While in prison, reports surfaced that ODB was suffering mental illness and was suicidal, although his reps denied them.

When he was released from prison and psychiatric care in the spring of 2003, Dirty quickly signed with the Roc and began recording as Dirt McGirt (see "Ol' Dirty Bastard Hits Campaign Trail With New Album").

"I just want to get back out there and do it again," he told MTV News. "You know, how Mike Tyson came back, I wanna come back the same way. I want to hit 'em hard."

Dirty logged studio time Busta Rhymes, Ludacris and Pharrell (see "Ol' Dirty Lays Down Track With Pharrell Before Turning Into A Pumpkin"), and most recently collaborated with Macy Gray (see "ODB Duets With Macy Gray On 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' ").

The rapper's manager said that several projects that Dirty was involved with will move forward, including an album recorded with his friends, Brooklyn Zoo, a DVD and a reality show that was completed for Spike TV.

Before Friday's concert, the Wu-Tang Clan had reunited this summer, at a concert in California. A recording of the show, titled Disciples of the 36 Chambers: Chapter 1, was released in September.

"Through Wu-Tang and his own solo career as an artist, songwriter and producer, ODB came to not only define a generation, but a musical movement that continues today," Steve Rifkind, who signed Wu-Tang to Loud Records, said in a statement. "We will miss him."

[This story was updated on 11.14.04 at 1:18 p.m. ET.]

— Corey Moss, with additional reporting by Shaheem Reid and Joseph Patel

More on hax0ring the MTA

from disinformation:

Apparently the exploit is a result of the system being unable to read bent or damaged cards. To compensate for that error there is a built in fail safe that if a card is swiped 3 times and the computer reads a certain code that tells them it was damaged, on the 4th swipe it lets the swiper through. I guess they figure if someone is using a empty card they they wouldn't swipe it 4 times. Guess again!

Here's how it works:

1) Bend the bottom right corner of your metro card up to the f (f part of the word facing). It is a 45 degree angle. Close the bend hard
2) Swipe it 3 times and it says "please swipe again"
3) On the 3rd time it says "please swipe again at this turnstile"
4) Swipe one more time with the bend open and it says balance= $0.00, previous balance $2.00. GO
5) Go.

How many MetroCard exploits are there?

rub-a-dobe

I suppose that Adobe Books in the Mission needs a shtick to attract some attention.

We will be celebrating the opening of this enormous art installation. For one amazing week in November, Adobe Book Shop in San Francisco has agreed to allow it's estimated 20,000 books to be be reclassified by color. Shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, the books will follow the color spectrum continuously, changing Adobe from a neighborhood bookshop into a magical library—but only for one week.

Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco’s Mission District, and all of its contents, will be transformed. It will take a crew of 20 people pulling an all - nighter fueled by caffeine and pizza all following a master organizational plan - but come Saturday morning it will be like a place that would only exist in a dream.

Adobe galls me. The staff's general lackadaisickal attitude towards their books -- piled on the floor, with bugs all over them -- is one thing, but the overall shabbiiness of the shop speaks to a general disrespect of books, of people, and of the admittedly-dirty neighbourhood. Brian, who ran the late, lamented Chelsea Books, stepped away from the disintegrating Adobe more than a decade ago.

One thing leads to another

This

is what I look like after using all of these.

Where ye be shopping, matey?

Worth1000's photoshop contest "If Pirates Ruled".

hax0r pub|1c trnzt

The New York Daily News reports that pretty girls don't ride the subway:

A scrolling marquee sign in the West 4th St. station was even less helpful than usual, after it got pwn3d by some hax0rs. Sez one rider: "I'm pretty, and I take the subway every day." Word. And you're probably also rich.

UPDATE: This meme turned up everywhere: engadget, Gothamist, usw.

A change of clothes

Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, and others all receive credit for this 'un, but today I was singing it on the way back home: "I need to slip me out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." And so I did, parking the ol' bike in the Mission and downing a cold glass of Hendrick's.

He drinks a whiskey drink

Something to keep your eyes on, especially if: you have kids, you like kids, you are a kid, you cherish freedom, you enjoy having all your limbs, you enjoy not killing other people, or you value not being shot at by other people.
Note that sentence contains clauses conjoined with an option. And the 'e' in whisk(e)y is for Canada, eh, you dodgers.

Oblique Strategies

At Moe's in Berkeley, I found a Loeb of Longus' Daphnis and Chloë. This story was the reason I wanted to study Greek in college. I have another Greek edition around here somewhere, but so far my favourite edition is Christopher Gill's translation, in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels.
The Loeb editions have a well-deserved reputation as a compromise: the handy pocket-sized cloth-bound book with the miserable translations.

And while they prayed, they laboured too and cast about to find a way by which they might come to see one another. Poor Chloe was void of all counsel and had not device nor plot. For the old woman her reputed mother was by her continually, and taught her to card the fine wool and twirl the spindle, or else was still a clocking for her, and ever and anon casting in words and twattling to her about marriage.

Pachamama Landscaping Van

Urban post-mortems

Exercises in Forensic Archaeology, but really they're just really nice pictures by Julia Solis.

Read my lips. More new taxes

Advice delivered from the stoop to the newly-elected President:

One lesson yet unlearned involved the nation's growing debt. Through the eighties the United States had been unwilling to take action to reduce its rising debt. If the U.S. Government had placed a tax of one trillion dollars on wealth of Americans before the crash and designated half of that trillion dollars to reduce the national debt, Americans would have been outraged. Yet the markets, in their brutal, inexorable fashion, had taken exactly that action and confiscated half a trillion dollars in national wealth. And the debt still remained.

An embarassment

The Department of Transportation's Transitweb project awarded four agencies special recognition for their web sites. Unsurprisingly, three are in California:
www.bigbluebus.com, www.sfmuni.com, and www.vta.org. If these are the best, we're in trouble. Hell, we're in trouble anyways. Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus site stands out for its functional map.

The West Virgina agency cited by Volpe, Mountain Line, doesn't even adhere to web standards. The information is poorly-organised, inaccessible to people with disabilities, and out of date.

Hey! You! You can't leave that on the train!

Who was the idiot on Caltrain #271 today, carrying a complete electric range with accessories?

Less is less

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that, for want of a shoe,the horse will be killed.

... the nation's 14th-largest transit system is proposing to become one of the nation's most expensive transit systems with a $2.50 base fare. ... the authority proposes to eliminate service on weekends and holidays, and drop weekday service after 9 p.m. unless Gov. Ed Rendell and the state legislature provide tax money to fill a $30 million budget deficit. The fare increases are to go into effect about Feb. 1. Service cuts, which include eliminating 70 of 230 weekday bus-trolley routes, would begin in early March. These changes, combined with cuts in Access program transit service for aged and ill riders, could mean $54 million in revenue and savings, thereby keeping the authority solvent for a while longer.

The Pittsburgh area, which has a remarkable system of dedicated busways, has faced trouble over its transit spending the past several years; investment in infrastructure and reliable service is the way to increase reliance on public transit. However, when transit cuts fall too easily to the budgetary axe, people learn not to use public transit.

Similary, San Francisco faces similar cutbacks in MUNI (and other) service, as well as higher transit rates.

Cease and desist yr emotronica

The New York Times reports on indie-rock experimentation and trademark law.

Postal Service Tale: Indie Rock, Snail Mail and Trademark Law

November 6, 2004
By BEN SISARIO

About two and a half years ago, Jimmy Tamborello and Ben
Gibbard began to make music together despite the distance
between them. Mr. Tamborello, who makes electronica with a
group called Dntel, lived in Los Angeles, while Mr.
Gibbard, who sings in the emo band Death Cab for Cutie,
lived in Seattle. They sent each other music through the
mail, completing songs bit by bit, and after about five
months, they had finished an album.

In honor of their working method they called themselves the
Postal Service. Their album, "Give Up," was released by the
Seattle-based Sub Pop Records in early 2003 and became an
indie-rock hit, eventually selling almost 400,000 copies,
the label's second biggest seller ever, after Nirvana's
"Bleach."

Then they heard from the real Postal Service, in the form
of a cease-and-desist letter.

"It was really polite," said Tony Kiewel, an artist and
repertory representative at Sub Pop who works with the
band. "It said that the Postal Service is a registered
trademark of the United States Postal Service, and that
though they were very, very flattered that we were using
the name, they need to enforce their copyright."

The letter arrived in August 2003, and for months the label
and the band fretted over the consequences: Would the band
have to change its name? Would Sub Pop have to destroy its
stock of the album?

The outcome was as unusual as the band itself: this week
the United States Postal Service - the real one, as in
stamps and letters - signed an agreement with Sub Pop
granting a free license to use the name in exchange for
working to promote using the mail. Future copies of the
album and the group's follow-up work will have a notice
about the trademark, while the federal Postal Service will
sell the band's CD's on its Web site, potentially earning a
profit. The band may do some television commercials for the
post office.

The group also agreed to perform at the postmaster
general's annual National Executive Conference in
Washington on Nov. 17. The attendees might not realize what
a rare treat they are in for since the Postal Service does
not play many gigs. Mr. Tamborello and Mr. Gibbard are busy
with their regular bands: Dntel, with its atmospheric
electronic dance music, and Death Cab for Cutie, which has
become a college rock favorite for its heartfelt, jangly
punk rock known as emo.

Gary Thuro, a manager of communications for the United
States Postal Service who handles licensing and promotion,
said the publicity would be valuable.

"We're always looking for ways to extend our brand and
reach into areas we don't typically reach," he said, "like
teens and people in their 20's, who are typically doing
business online and are not familiar with the Postal
Service."

Not familiar with the Postal Service?

"I have three kids, and they do most of their
correspondence online," Mr. Thuro said.

He said the post office had been looking to promote its
brand through popular culture tie-ins and cited the
campaign for the 2003 film "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat."
The post office is ending its sponsorship of Lance
Armstrong's cycling team at the end of this year.

The agency's only concern, Mr. Thuro said, was that a rock
band might prove an inappropriate mascot for a federal
agency. But when executives met with Mr. Tamborello and Mr.
Gibbard in Los Angeles earlier this year, they were set at
ease. Soft-spoken, well groomed and unusually polite, they
are two of the least offensive rock stars imaginable, and
their music - bubbly yet pensive electronic pop with
earnest vocals by Mr. Gibbard - is unlikely to dissuade
anyone from buying stamps.

Mr. Tamborello, 29, said the band was happy to comply with
the agreement.

"Doing promos for the post office seems a little bit
weird," he said. "But it's a funny story for them to have -
it's a good story of how you can still use normal snail
mail."

He noted that the regular mail is inexpensive and easy to
use, and that packages containing their working discs
arrived in a couple of days, a comfortable margin for their
unhurried schedule - although when finishing the album,
they did use Federal Express a couple of times.

"Just to get it back and forth as quick as possible," he
said. "It saved a day."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

So divorced from everything electronic.

Not just because I like the logo

I'm installing Knoppix Security Tools Distribution to old laptops that I have lying around. I've uncovered vast amounts of old NICs, power supplies, hard drives, dongles (!!), and random computer crap in my apartment. Every time I think I've cleaned up, there's more.

Els Quatre Gats

barça. It's also available via Atom/RSS. I'm in heaven. I gotta figger out how to feed this in to my screensaver, and then I can run three monitors' worth of barceloca while I daydream.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who snaps photos of stray cats in Barcelona.

Maybe partying will help.

Today I could not marry. Today I did not obtain reasonably-priced drugs to treat my health problems. Today I bought an assault rifle. Today I did not have an abortion. Today I have no health care. Today the library was closed (but the Wal-Mart was open). Today the French spat disrespectfully in my general direction. Today my children learned nothing in school, because the schools have no money. Today the government failed to audit big businesses.
Today the 1% of Americans who have a lot of money got to keep that money; the rest of us are paying more in taxes for fewer public services. Today the bus broke down, the highway was in disrepair. Today the pollution from the factory clouded the air.

Tomorrow you will have no health care. Tomorrow you will not be able to marry¹. Tomorrow your neighbour will have an assault rifle. Tomorrow you will have no friends overseas. Tomorrow you will have no friends in your neighbourhood, because you distrust everyone. Tomorrow the exhaust from cars moving slowly choked the air.

Notes.
1. Unless you are Christian^TM.

Electioneering.

Google has information on how to find your polling place, as well as blogs about election shenanigans. The photograph above doesn't show the line that stretched down the block, past the placard-waving idealists, in front of the honking cars, around the vandalised taqueria, and ended with an old woman sitting in a lawn chair. Once inside the polling place, people were pushed up into every corner, furiously filling out the four voting sheets. Some people didn't know to remove their voting receipt from the ballot before feeding it into the Eagle vote tabulator, and did not receive proof of voting as a result. The official Board of Elections sign above the tabulator had the cart before the horse: "Insert ballot into Eagle / Remove receipt" it read in three languages, but really one had to remove the receipt first, and then feed the Eagle.

I've voted early and often in the San Francisco General and Consolidated, but never have I seen this energetic and this involved a line. The day-labourer election officials were, of course, overwhelmed and even more flustered that usual. Voters were well-behaved, but it's early yet (writing this from a phone while waiting in line!).

Una más!

On the 10.37 Caltrain this morning, I sat next to a young father and son. The kid was about 2 years old, on his second train ride, and endlessly excited: "bicicletas! Una más!" he cheered as cyclists boarded. He said that he has taken the train to see baseball, and that was "awesome." He had quite a vocabulary! He pounded the palm of his hand against the window as we pulled out of the yard and saw trains undergoing repairs; his father explained that some of the trains need to be fixed so that we can continue enjoying them.