I'm a lasagna boy!

In which we put on the fritz

Is San Francisco on its way to becoming the District of Columbia, with gaping potholes (does one ever see any adjective besides gaping or yawning next to that word, pothole? never patched, that's for-damn-sure)? The San Francisco Chronicle quietly points out that the city has fallen some $340mm behind in patching potholes, repaving streets, and generally keeping pace with the increasing weight of Americans in Hummers (a generalisation, yes). Combine this with the weighty problem of the sewers, and we have a looming infrastructure crisis to add to the ever-present fiscal crisis. Those adjectives should be th' other way around: the fiscal crisis should be looming, but how can we avoid the ongoing infrastructure problems? Everything about this city, this state, points to gross misunderstanding and mismanagement of our resources. How could we not anticipate periodic failure of sewer pipes and asphalt road surfaces?

In which I air grievances

* the ongoing dumbing-down of articles. The average article length shrinks; the vocabulary becomes less descriptive and more bland; and the sentence structure becomes less compound-complex and more boringly compound.

* the absence of location maps, and the constant referral to "Africa" rather than specific countries (this latter bit is a particular axe I have to grind)

* the incredibly complicated homedelivery web site, which does not work with Safari (fails to set necessary auth cookies); which perpetually tells me that for my security my password has been reset

* the silly TimesSelect change of access, which restricts what articles non-print-subscribers can see

In which we visit the crossroads of the world, and in which some of them wear no pants

At London's Heathrow Airport, I always expect to see someone I know -- and almost never do -- not someone as in the opening montage of Love, Actually, but someone unexpected, someone I have'n't seen in years. While standing in the mind-numbingly long line between Terminals One and Four (Advised transit time, including security re-screening, 75 minutes -- that was longer than my flight!) I did see a guy with a ROIR shirt featuring the Bad Brains logo. I hummed "The Youth Are Getting Restless" for the remainder of my time standing in the queue.

In which we press our trousers

Ira Robbins, dean of modern rock critics, has a nice listing of new and updated reviews at the online Trouser Press record guide.

Robert Christgau, self-styled "Dean of American Rock Critics", also has a searchable online database of his reviews.

The Jungle

The original published textThe Jungle is available online; but the uncensored edition restores several chapters from the original, serialized issue.

In which we eschew riding in the cold

I got no pix of the Omloop het volk, which has as its claim to fame one of the coldest starts in all European cycling.
The Belgian race was significant more interesting, somehow, than the local Tour of California. The prologue followed a route kind of similar to the tour de lunch that Phil and I rode almost daily in '01, returning sweaty and happy to our desks in SOMA after forty-five minutes of pedalling along the Embarcadero, along Fisherman's Wharf, and over to Aquatic Park and along the beautiful Marina.

In which we keep pace with the storms

After the romantic trip to Les Egouts de Paris, I have been thinking more about the ageing infrastructure in San Francisco -- and so has the city itself, which has mounted a publicity campaign to raise awareness of the deficiencies in San Francisco's sewers.

The storm drain capacity cannot keep pace with the growth in the city, and during periods of heavy rain many street corners will be under water. The City of San Francisco replaced some, but not all, of the miles of decaying pipe underground following the '06 earthquake; however, City records show a backlog of 70 miles of sewers that are undersized and require replacement. The Channel Force Main, a very large pipeline that transports much of the City’s wastewater has been broken and repaired three times in the last 16 years.

The photographs on San Francisco Sewers web site are instructive, if not terribly recent -- that in itself is a frightening indicator of how aged the pipes be.

In which we enter the labyrinth

The Scott St labyrinth has yet to materialize.

The Scott St. Labyrinth was the second phase of the playground project and called for replacing the condemned wooden play structure on Scott St. with a labyrinth. The project was approved at a community meetings in December, 1998 and September, 2003. The plan received initial Rec & Park Commission approval in 1999 and final approval in December, 2004.

The playground project was to be done in two phases. While the big playground was shut down during construction, the wooden structure on Scott St. was left standing since it was the only play equipment available in the park during construction.

Upon completion in 1999, the wooden structure was to be demolished since it is old and dilapidated, a safety hazard with splintering wood, and contains arsenic that was originally used as a preservative. The site was to be appropriately cleaned to remove any arsenic in the wood, the sand, and the surrounding ground. Rec & Park also agreed to prep the site for our labyrinth at the same time.

A landscaped labyrinth seems a whimsical use of space on small corner plot like this. It may not achieve the proportions of a grand labyrinth such as Antoine Duvall's estate, home to El Labyrint d'Horta on the outskirts of Barcelona, but it might bring a little joy to a stinky corner of San Francisco.

UPDATE: now with an illustration:

frowst

Apparently a nineteenth-century British word, meaning "stuffy" or "stale" in a uncomfortable way. And the word frowst is used as an informal measure of air pollution.

In which I get a buzz

I drank a lot of Intelligentsia Coffee, the sort served at Istria Café ("Corporate Coffee Tastes Funny"). This tidy little café is bustling after five months on 57th Street, and will soon have a second location, also under the Metra tracks.

In which I bless government regulation

Under the general heading of "Things for which I thank the government" you will find few entries in my ledger, but California Public Utilities Commission has online complaint forms that make the task of arseing about a great deal easier.

In which I contemplate trains and lapin

How have I never, after years of attempts, never taken the Eurostar?
It seems the best connexion between the gastro-pub for lunch and the white tablecloths for dinner.

In which the secret is uncovered

The San Francisco Examiner's Tiffany Martini (what a name, considering her beat) sings about "Five hidden gems of San Francisco": widely-known secrets like the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company in Chinatown (warm fortune cookies!), and neighbourhood treats like Specs and (my favourite!) Hotel Biron (she also writes up Catalyst Cocktails, but that really is'n't anyone's neighbourhood bar).
I remember something Tami of La Moone told me ages ago. Sitting at her bar, I wondered whether to let everyone in on the secret of a great café I had found, lest I ruin it with the unwashed unappreciative masses. She said: If you really like it, the best thing you can do is share it with people. They will come, the place will prosper, and you ensure that it remains alive, at least, for you to enjoy. If you do not share it, then it might wither because it simply hasn't the momentum to make money.
So I do'n't worry about Specs being overrun with clean-collared downtown office workers, nor about Biron filling up with bachelorette parties, so long as I can pull up to the counter and have a plate of cheese and a glass of wine.

In which 'gullible' is not in the dictionary

How have I not been reading gullible.info? I re-re-discovered it through a Google Widget.

• To win a bet, composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) died standing upright.

• Biologically, zebras are black with white stripes, not white with black stripes.

and so on, to the point where one dubiously calls Shenanigans! and then is up all night wondering anyways.
Now, thanks to the wonders of the widget, rss, and whatnot, I can see more mindless nonsense than in a month of Sunday visits to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

In which I like things

The plan for the Dublin Grand Canal and the two-dollar bill.

F'r crying out loud, I am exhausted. My eyeballs are blistering from debugging (build, run, debug; code, build, run, debug; usw.), from stress-testing, from unraveling the threads that cause tangles in the network and deadlocks in the kernel. My legs should be tired from running back and forth, and my lower back from sitting nervously. I am exhausted, and one of the United States Treasury Department's most frequently-asked questions is "Why did the Treasury Department remove the $2 bill from circulation?" The last time I rode MUNI, I paid the exact fare with two coins.

In which we scrub it green and clean

Today is San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's Clean and Green day (you can read the the policy brief). The idea: produce something almost the exact opposite of, say, Market St., or of Octavia Boulevard.
And we should reform parking, not only along the lines of "no free parking", but more organised parking, with more aisles for transit.

In which it is obvious

The Examiner has an article stating the unfortunately obvious: you cannot rely on public transit in the Bay Area. And if I read the phrase "[Critics|Proponents] have called for a $5 million study ..." one more time, I will devote my life to putting the heads of desk jockeys and cheap-suited bureaucrats on pikes outside City Hall.

When will we finally reap the benefits of the TransLink card, which should have completed its trial run five years ago? This card promised seamless fare transfers and interchange amongst transit agencies, which would go a long way towards making transit in the seven-county region less hair-tearing. However, its backers dropped it after San Francisco fell out of the candidacy as a spot for an Olympic Games (one of the criteria for hosting the Olympic Games is providing reasonable public transit amongst all sites).

In which you cannot have revolution without babies

We are all going to hell: The Che Guevara onesie, from Lalaling, the same shop that brings you Paul Frank baby hoodies and Bob "One Love" Marley baby rasta hats. I guess it balances the hilarious Communist Party t-shirt at threadless.

In which we eat ice-creams

While en route in the famous Mitchell's Ice Cream parlour, I cursed Sunday drivers but stopped short of throwing stones: just a moment before I had pulled a strange half U-turn which resulted in my blocking a crosswalk in a busy residential neighbourhood. And I did so in front of two prowlers! (One drove slowly past and gave me a look so dirty bleach was necessary to remove it -- but, luckily for me, they had bigger fish to fry.) I made the bizarre turn reflexively, perhaps because it was exactly what I would have done were I on a bicycle. But I was not, and I narrowly escaped 2 points and a whatnot from San Francisco's finest, who, thanks to the blossoming Lower Haight neighbourhood group, are patrolling in full effect.

Usually the driving path to the outer mission takes one along Guerrero, or Dolores, both of which are beset upon by double-parking Baptists. What gives them licence to occupy a lane of traffic? Why can I not do so of a Friday evening, for example, if I wanted to duck into Tartine for a coffee? But those who live in glass houses, et cetera, so I kept quiet for once and wound up rather enjoying a chocolate-dipped chocolate caramel cruch ice-cream cone.

In which we explore the world, remotely; or, the armchair hacker

Romeo vs. Salling Clicker for couch-surfing supremacy. The former offers a plugin architecture; the latter, stability and support.

... and I rediscovered some (non-os-specific) toys for use with photos, and with flickr in particl'r at Flagrant Disgregard.

A Taste for Death / The Murder Room

I have been reading more P D James, whose stiff and thrilling detective novels feature haughty antagonists, a steely yet mysteriously charismatic detective, and evocative London settings.
Her mystery-writing lessons unravel the icy tone and meticulous research of her books. P D James excels at the sort of mystery that Agatha Christie pioneered, with a closed group of suspects and a geographically restsricted setting. She often further closes her group by involving family members, typically from a mildly dysfunctional upbringing. After the aristocratic London of A Taste for Death and the suburban setting of The Murder Room, I am next going to unpack my copy of Original Sin for its Docklands setting.

In which it takes the (ice-cream) cake

Coup des glaces, the well-organised winter cycle sports event, sounds more daredevil than the X Games.

... I think I have ice-creams on the noggin because the weather in San Francisco these past few days has been anything but wintry. At nine o'clock th' other evening we found the inspiration to jaunt down to Mitchell's: Chocolate-dipped alpine whatnot, yum.

In which we play at favourites

The Sagan Piechota Architecture building between Fell and Linden, near Gough, is my new favourite -- and not only because it contains the Blue Bottle Coffee counter. The inside looks airy and spacious, minimal and natural; the façade is friendly; and the building across the street has a fascinating garage-elevator: cars drive in to a lift, and then descend to the parking area. Nifty.

I shoulda gone out to Maverick's yesterday: the reports are wonderful. The pictures are pretty swell, too.

And Greg had his first signal encounter with Raccoons in the 'Hood.

In which we head out to the bike shed

A colleague insisted I read Poul-Henning Kamp's post to FreeBSD mailinglists on collaboration (and pettiness, and time-wasting, and ... ). The "bikeshed post" has become canonical.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast,
so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and
rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody
else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P.
Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point,
examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over
a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no
matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with
your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is
doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint". It is about
personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point
somewhere and say "There! *I* did that." It is a strong trait in
politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just
think about footsteps in wet cement.

In which I become a television personality

Five minutes here and I was a super-star:

In which consensus is forgotten

The San Francisco Examiner looks into the ongoing problems of Octavia Boulevard planning and whatnot.

Even groups that fully embrace the plan are frustrated with the timeline.

“It’s taken forever,” said Paul Olsen of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association.

City officials are frustrated as well, citing lack of resources that held up the plan.

“What we’re concerned about is the length of time it takes,” said Amit Ghosh, head of long-range planning for The City. “By the time we finish the plan, consensus is forgotten.”

On the bright side, at least the pagoda is gone.
A cabby said to me the other night: "Sure, it's pretty, but why does it end right there? And who put a playground there? And why are the lights not synchronized?" But he did think it was good to look at.
I also think that Traffic Planning 101 says: if you are building a boulevard, level the roadway. Straight, unrippled roads tend to have faster through traffic.

In which we review public transit to the airport

I complain that a city without efficient public transit to the airport is worth hardly a damn. Two editorial pieces in the Los Angeles Times discuss transit and the airport: Dan Turner's well-written and astute piece on Taking the rail to the airport and Ray Bradbury's cockamamie and unscientific paean to the monorail. (My favourite pesudo-statistic: "Anyone who has ridden the Disneyland or Seattle monorails knows how quietly they move. They also have been virtually accident-free. The history of the monorail shows few collisions or fatalities." Per passenger-mile, I bet that driving a tank through Afghanistan is safer. Monorails are so uncommon that accident stats are close to useless. Didn't the Seattle Monorail crash into itself a few months after the same monorail caught fire? The Monorail is now "closed for repairs" with no word on when it will open.

February 5, 2006
GETTING THERE
Taking the rapid out of transit
An Antarctic expedition is tough, but try going to LAX by train or bus.

By Dan Turner, Dan Turner is a Times editorial writer.

LIKE MANY EPIC JOURNEYS of exploration, mine began not out of necessity but out of curiosity — the ancestral human urge to test the boundaries of endurance and knowledge. My quest: to get from my house in the Hollywood Hills to LAX, using only public transportation.

"I had not anticipated that the work would present any great difficulties," said Sir Ernest Shackleton after surviving his harrowing, failed attempt to reach the South Pole in 1915, his icebound ship by that time at the bottom of the sea.

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Nearly a century later, I, like Sir Ernest, would learn the folly of underestimating the awesome power of natural forces — in his case, the treacherous ice floes and brutal cold of the Ross Sea, in mine, the mindless dysfunctionality of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Trains ferry passengers in and out of most big airports across the country, including Atlanta's Hartsfield, Chicago's O'Hare and even San Francisco International. But not at Los Angeles International Airport. It is the fifth-busiest airport in the world, with more than 60 million passengers a year, and more people start their flights there than anywhere else — yet it is not served by any rail line. Like reaching the Pole, getting to the airport using only public transit is a feat requiring courage, fortitude and very bad judgment.

As most of history's great explorers have quickly discovered, a lack of proper equipment can have tragic consequences. Overconfident, I leave the house with only one real piece of survival gear: a cellphone, which, I figure, I can use to call a cab if all else fails. Soon after reaching the bus stop, I recognize my first mistake. The most critical piece of equipment when riding L.A. public transit is — a book. Or a magazine. Or a newspaper. Anything to relieve the crushing boredom.

Twenty-four minutes later the bus arrives. Knowingly, I put $1.25 in the slot and take a seat. Leaving the bus at Hollywood Boulevard, I ask the driver for a transfer. He fixes me with a fishy stare. MTA buses do not issue transfers. You have to buy a day pass, which is $3. I hold out a $5 bill. The driver looks at it as if it's a used tissue. He does not give change.

So begins the 1.5-mile trek to the Hollywood and Highland Red Line station, with not a sled dog or Sherpa to lead the way. Yes, I could take another bus, but I'm still steamed about the day-pass snub. Along the way, I pass a fearsome reminder of the perils of this expedition. A sleek black Lexus has just been in an accident, looking like a seal carcass half-eaten by polar bears.

The MTA had tested my mettle, and I had failed. It would not happen again.

At least I didn't have to contend with bus drivers anymore. Riding the escalator into the bowels of Hollywood, I enter the Mercedes of L.A. public transit, the $4.5-billion Red Line subway. The 17.4-mile system is fast, semi-clean, quiet — a wonder of efficiency with nearly 120,000 boardings a day. It would attract many thousands more if only it went somewhere. Originally planned to run all the way down Wilshire Boulevard, the city's densest corridor, it instead ends with a whimper at Wilshire and Western Avenue, its spine hacked off by community opposition and weak-kneed politicians.

Inside the station, I insert my $5 bill into the ticket machine that dispenses a $3 day pass. Again, the bill is found wanting. The adjacent machine finds it distasteful too. As does the next. Everywhere I turn, my path is blocked.

At last I spot it across the room: a change machine. I insert the bill, gingerly, with Lincoln's face pointed in the instructed direction. The bill disappears like a dogsled falling into a crevasse. "Out of Order," the machine blinks.

Ten minutes later, I wait at a platform, having tracked down an MTA worker to rescue my cash. From here it's 17 minutes to the 7th Street station in downtown L.A., where I transfer to the Blue Line. Eight minutes later, I'm flashing through downtown at 25 mph.

It is on the Blue Line that I discover my second equipment oversight. A man wearing wraparound sunglasses and a backward baseball cap raps at the top of his voice, alternating from English to Spanish and demonstrating an encyclopedic, bilingual knowledge of profanity. By the Slauson station in Huntington Park, I try to puncture my eardrums with my house keys to make the noise stop. I look around at my fellow passengers. They are pod people, staring ahead, seemingly without awareness. Then I notice the wires leading from their ears to devices tucked in pockets or purses. Not pod people at all — they're iPod people.

Several days later — or maybe it's 24 minutes — I'm at the Imperial/Wilmington station in Lynwood, prepared to transfer to the Green Line. Thirteen minutes later, I'm on the train heading toward LAX. At last I can see it up ahead — the LAX/Aviation Boulevard station. But my adventure isn't over.

The Green Line from Norwalk was originally planned to end inside the airport, but in 1995, after the money ran short, so did the line. An $11-billion plan to remodel LAX, approved in 2004, called for a people mover that would carry passengers to the terminals from a big transportation center connected to the Green Line, but when most of the plan was recently scrapped to settle a lawsuit with airport neighbors, so was the people mover. Instead, there is a shuttle bus from the Aviation station.

On the wall of my office hangs a map that is as striking as a landscape by a Dutch master. Titled "Rail Plan to Connect Los Angeles," it is the public transit vision unveiled by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa during his election campaign last year. It depicts a Los Angeles of dreams — a place with trains that go from somewhere to somewhere, rather than from absolutely nowhere to just short of somewhere.

There is a line, as elegant as a Picasso brush stroke, on this marvelous map that runs from Union Station straight to LAX. It is a rail right-of-way that could be turned into a fast, efficient transit route. Like the rest of Villaraigosa's plan, it exists only in fantasy. If he has an idea about how to make the line a reality, he has yet to reveal it. Meanwhile, airport officials will soon unveil a new shuttle bus, called a FlyAway, that will run nonstop from Union Station to LAX. This means that if you can get to Union Station, you will earn the opportunity to creep through the surface traffic around LAX.

Or, like me, you can try taking the trains. My expedition from home to LAX takes two hours and 47 minutes, yet I am flushed with the thrill of accomplishment when the shuttle finally arrives. I am footloose and free, untied to a vehicle in a long-term parking lot. Records are sketchy, but I'm confident that no one else from the Hollywood Hills has ever attempted this journey. After all, they could drive or take a cab to LAX in about 40 minutes. Unlike Shackleton, I have reached my Pole.

Of course, I wasn't carrying any luggage.

In which we like art

Taliah Lempert paints bicycles, hers and her friends'. I wonder if her paintings are the ones shown at Maire Rûa last year? I really wanted one: the subtle views of a part of a bicycle, the seductive handlebars (track drops! bullhorns! no-groove rando!), the crankarms and chainrings.

In which ipod.NaturalLife = ipod.Warranty+1

The New York Times columnist Joe Nocera describes the "five stages of ipod grief," and, more importantly, how Apple has conditioned the public to accept a $400 device as, essentially, disposable.

wodge

In A Certain Justice I came across the "noun, mainly UK informal" wodge (variant wadge): a thick piece or a large amount of something. As in "She cut herself a great wodge of chocolate cake." P.D. James's vocabulary continues to confuse me. Why doesn't she just write "heaps" or "a whole bloody lot" or "great greedy amount" and be done with it?
Nat thinks that wodge is Kiwi slang, adapted for use in the blogosphere to mean "more than a snippet"; Merriam-Webster suggest that the word comes from "wedge", which, given how people use it to describe a goodly amount of some food -- cheese, chocolate, and cake all appear in the citations -- seems plausible.

In which we call the Penny Black

Microsoft Research are developing an anti-spam measure they call "Penny Black", a reference to the late nineteenth century shift for postal rates to the sender, rather than the receipient. The premise is that the senders of email, bulk ("spam") or no, should bear the costs. Microsoft's ideas are similar to the hashcash concept, which is implemented in SpamAssassin mail filters.

In which it's it

Catherine Poole, from Dunfermline, talks about the bad grammar that makes her cringe. Three cheers for her denounciation of the grocer's apostrophe. grocer's apostrophe!

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

After reading Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, I picked up a copy of P. D. James's A Certain Justice.

Although half a century and two (one, chronologically, but two for all intents and purposes: in Sayers's mileu, the First War weighs heavily on the characters, many of whom are just returned) wars separate the two, I find James's vocabulary more confusing: peppered with words like obsessional and rambustious, she doesn't evoke an era so much as puzzle the reader. The characters in her book are more complex than Sayers's, although both contend with class issues, civil responsibility, and the changing face of England.

In which we celebrate the arch at Ryder park

San Mateo has put some nice touches on Ryder Park, including this bridge.
The Al Zampa Bridge still looks great, but the centre bridge over the Carquinez Bridge still has not come down. And driving over the Bay Bridge is exhilarting when one looks out the window and sees the new eastern span under construction, but sobering when I realise that seven years -- at least! -- will pass before I ride (or drive, realistically) over it.