I'm a lasagna boy!

In which we read the comic strip's

I knew there was something I really liked about the Language Log. Their writers slag on punctuation propriety as often as I do.

In which we suspect a junky nurse rides the bus

Who is riding MUNI these days? Junkies.

Pointed warning: Riding on Muni means more than just getting a seat these days -- it means watching what you may be sitting on as well.

Just ask Tanya Houseman of San Francisco's Richmond District, who had a disturbing finale to her morning bus ride to work at the Convention & Visitors Bureau the other day.

According to Houseman, "before our final stop at Bush and Montgomery, the bus driver got out of his seat and said, 'Listen up, people. When you get on this bus going home tonight, be sure you check your seats. People have been putting syringe needles in the seats, and several people got hurt yesterday.'

"It was nice to know," Houseman said. "But I would have appreciated it a lot more if I'd been told before taking my seat. We're not talking about sitting on gum."

Muni spokeswoman Maggie Lynch said that she hadn't heard of the incident and that apparently neither had anyone else at bus headquarters.

"I'm not saying the driver didn't make the announcement,'' Lynch said. "But if anyone had been stuck with a syringe needle, you could bet that ambulances and everyone else would have been called out."

A Pelican At Blandings / Heavy Weather

More Wodehouse. The latest paperback editions of his books features an amazing and unfamiliar young Pelham Grenville, clad in plus-fours and standing on a Aubusson before a rigourously British mantle. A what-not and a deep armchair also figure into the picture.
These are amongst the few paperbacks I own that are quite literally falling apart. The others are Dorothy L. Sayers' mystery-novels, and Rex Stout's stories about Tecumseh Fox and Nero Wolfe.

In which we go underground

In addition to some excellent photographs, New York Underground has a good page of links.
I ordered the book from Routledge.

In which whom shuffles off it's mortal coil

Photographic evidence of the eroded distinction between who and whom:

Although not an ex-word, whom, the objective form of the interrogative pronoun, is a vestige of Old English. Modern English usage rarely calls for a clear distinction between the subjective and objective cases, nor provides inflections for words in different cases: word order and context indicates case, not word ending.

Still, I do appreciate a piece of writing that uses whom properly. In the Language Log post, Geoff Pullum (author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax), notes "There is an error in the plural of thief, too, but that one is in the direction of regularizing the irregular (regular *thiefs for the irregular thieves). Using whom for who isn't regularization. It's a desperately insecure clutching after a form that people no longer know where to use or how to control. Whom is like some strange object — a Krummhorn, a unicycle, a wax cylinder recorder — found in grandpa's attic: people don't want to throw it out, but neither do they know what to do with it. So they keep it around, sticking an m on the end of who every now and then when it seems like an important occasion. Columbus Day, for example, or when trying to impress a grammarian or a maitre d'hotel (whom will be our waiter tonight?)."

In which the center cannot hold

The old Carquinez Bridge is coming down: the original, 1927 span is being dismantled this week. The San Francisco Chronicle has photographs of the destruction and a useful chart. Caltrans will actually dismantle the bridge, cart it to Mare Island, and tear it apart for scrap.

The strait is now bridged by the Al Zampa Bridge.

In which the path between the seas widens

The Panama Canal, whose history I learned through Doonesbury's Zonker, is planning a massive expansion, adding locks and widening the canal. The Panama Canal expansion will accomodate the increasingly large trans-oceanic container ships travelling through the canal -- known as "Panamax", as they are the widest possible ships to squeeze through the current locks.

In which a confluence creates awesalaam aleikum

In honour of confluential Aram's birthday, Alberta poured drink after drink with her signature (and, indeed, award-winning) gin-and-cucumber mixes. She also threatened rabble-rousers with a stern speech that pointed out: a drinking straw has enough rigidity that if one holds a thumb over one end and jabs down, it can puncture the xyphoid process or sternum. Aram, where's the video?

Alberta's drinks have won her renewed acclaim, most recently from none other than Geo. "Tiger" Shultz:

Announcing the winner, former Secretary of State George Shultz determined: "The results are as clear, crisp and unambiguous as an Italian election."

not to be confused with Charles Shultz, really, although how can you say "I'm a big fan of your work" to Geo. without thinking of Iran-Contra, (shudder) Jeane Kirkpatrick, or Sandinista!

Happy Birthday, Aram. You will have a very good year. -- even if the only present you get is a first-class ticket with "Sixth Circle" stamped on it, in return for coining the "awesalaam aleikum" phrase that made me chortle and Alberta wince.

In which we have a thousand sanguinary guillotines

The enigmatic Françpois-René de Chateaubriand gives his name to a most delicious preparation of tenderloin. A very different recipe from the traditional "Pittsburgh" rare steak of my youth.

Portraits of this playboy noble show him looking rakish and dissolute -- quite probably from eating his chef's fantastic (and extravagant: anecdotal history says that the chateaubriand recipe called for three pieces of tenderloin in the preparation: two thinner pieces of meat charred, leaving the thick, inner pieces succulent) meals. The imprimatur of the aristocrat remains, but the name of the chef is lost to history.

Chateaubriand is also a noted author: a royalist, he wrote An Historical, Political, and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and Modern, putting the Jacobins in historical context. His monumental, posthumously published autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-tombe formed a theme of Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions.

In which our neighbours play the 'tag -- you're it!' game

The west wall of the New Santa Clara Market at the corner of Haight and Scott streets has long and proudly worn some sort of uplifting mural. About a year ago, some ruffians with impaired aesthetic values tagged the mural: others responded, through the same medium, that tagging murals was lame (and, implicitly, post-modern and thus unhip). And so on, to the point that the mural became a graffiti mess of sprayed tags and balloon characters.
I was further dismayed to return to the 'hood and see that the building's owners, no doubt under pressure from the city to remove the offending graff tags, painted over the mural -- but lazily: they painted the lower half of the wall with the same stock brown (the recycled brown from Sunset Scavenger?). Which was promptly tagged.

seiche

The word seiche describes the sloshing motion of water following a seismic event. The word comes from the French, or perhaps Swiss-French.

On the North American Great Lakes, seiche is often called slosh. It is always present, but is usually unnoticeable, except during periods of unusual calm. Harbours, bays, and estuaries are often prone to small seiches with amplitudes of a few centimeters and periods of a few minutes. Seiches can also form in semi-enclosed seas; the North Sea often experiences a lengthwise seiche with a period of about 36 hours.

In which we could cut it with a knife

(04-20) 21:07 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

The United States Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that
it does not support the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

In which we investigate the public art

The bicycle-and-sculpture photo comes from public art on a pier in Weihai, China.

Waiting for the Weekend

After returning from a too-short holiday, I read Witold Rybcynski's essay on the evolution of the five-two split week, Waiting for the Weekend.

Rybcynski, now a professor at Wharton, addresses the need for separation of leisure and professional pursuits, but does not delve into why some cultures work to the point where leisure is necessary. Needing balance between the strains of careerism and the pleasures of family has become more precarious, it seems, in our moyen âge. Rybcynski is a sensitive and perceptive cultural historian, and an outstanding essayist. He has also written recently about the notion of place, both in his book Homeand in works on urban renewal.

Especially after a colleague and I chewed the fat about the American attitude of compressing leisure into the weekend, rather than taking (and enjoying!) extended holidays -- two or three weeks, or the four- to six-week holidays prevalent in post-war France and Germany, Rybcynski's book impresses me with its précis of economic and social changes that led to the week that we know and love. Although the initial changes were probably brought about through adherence to religious doctrine, more recent developments in the workweek come from economic pressures. The weekend as we formally known it accompanied the industrial revolution. At the beginning of 2006, Madrid repealed the government worker's siesta privilege, partly in reaction to changing economic pressures (read: homogenization of Western workplace culture?).

A good study of the development of the Western calendar is David Ewing Duncan's book Calendar (gloriously sub-titled: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year).

In which we remember Lot's wife

As Lot the righteous evacuates his family from the burning Sodom and Gomorrah (cities which have given their names to the webservers that run this site, in fact), his wife turns to a pillar of salt when she looks back.
What happened to her? As inexplicable as are many passages in the early, murkier pieces of the Bible, what is the literary precedent for being rendered into spice? Orpheus looked back and saw his beloved reclaimed to Hades; other protagonists who failed to adhere to the "Don't look back ...!" advice may suffered similar, more understandable consequences. But a pillar of salt?

... all this from listening to the Gang of Four's superlative "Return The Gift" early this morning. I was so completely wrong about not wanting to see their reunion tour.

The Professor and the Madman

After reading the first few disappointing pages of Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like it in The World, I returned to the lucid and elegant prose of Simon Winchester and The Professor and the Madman, which I first read when it was published in late '98 or early '99. Taken with the excellent The Meaning of Everything, this forms the poignant half of Winchester's narrative of the human efforts in the production of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In which our hero takes a turn in which our hero takes a turn

Tupper's Self-Referential Formula and quines (even in brainfuck!). The shell-scripting page is an especially good larf.
Oh my.

On disappointment, in the form of Octavia Boulevard

More complaints about Octavia Boulevard:
it causes backups on tertiary roads, such as Page St., preventing transit;
it provides limited visibility of the rolling main road, inhibiting traffic throughput;
the brief length of road and inconsistent light timing results in congestion;
it amounts to nothing more than a glorified free-way offramp, as it fails to connect multiple crosstown routes (if the Boulevard extended to, say, Geary, it would be especially useful);
and it ends in the risible Hayes Green, yet another pile of dog turd. I walked through the little square of green where oft children play, and squished my hapless way through several piles of poop, fresh and stale. It's a playground, but like every public piece of green in this city, amounts to nowt but crap.

Somewhat related: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has endorsed legislation for car-free Saturdays in the park and approved the continuous bike lane on Market Street.

In which the hero is framed

On the aerodynamics of bicycles

From The Boston Globe, whose online archives are inscrutable (and whose web site is irritating at best):

Figuring ways to go faster with the flow
By Phil McKenna, Globe Correspondent | April 10, 2006

Mark Cote a researcher at the MIT Center for Sports Innovation, has an impressive list of clients -- from Tour de France stage winners to some of North America's leading bicycle manufacturers. Now the wind tunnel specialist plans to use his expertise in fluid dynamics to develop and, he hopes, patent his own advances in aerodynamic cycling gear.

Not bad, considering that Cote, 21, is still an undergraduate.

A competitive cyclist since eighth grade, Cote, who wears a yellow ''Livestrong" bracelet -- a nod to cycling superstar Lance Armstrong -- came to MIT seeking an outlet for his passion.

''I didn't know if there was a wind tunnel at MIT, but if there was, I wanted to put bikes in it," Cote recalled. Two weeks after arriving on campus his freshman year, he became the bike specialist for the Center for Sports Innovation, whose mission is to involve undergraduates in the development of improved sports equipment.

Kim Blair, the center's director, said he was looking for a senior to fill the position but was won over by Cote's enthusiasm.

''Students that work for me who have a passion for sports -- particularly the sport they are working on -- tend to be far more productive," Blair, a former world-class triathlete and ex-NASA engineer, said.

Last fall, equipment designers from Specialized, one of the leading high-end bicycle manufacturers, brought their latest prototypes to the university's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel for Cote to test. He hustled between the tunnel and a connecting monitoring room, blasting the company's latest prototypes with a constant 30-mile-per-hour gale while explaining the significance of each new data set to the Specialized team. One of the company's ''aero" helmet prototypes yielded a whopping 13 percent reduction in the overall drag of bike and rider when compared with a rider wearing a regular helmet, Cote told them.

''In a 40 km time trial, that's two and half minutes and perhaps the difference between first place and fortieth place," he said. The company has since signed him on for an ongoing internship at their Morgan Hill, Calif., headquarters during winter and summer breaks.

While equipment is important, Cote spends as much time helping athletes fine-tune their position on the bike.

In the past three years, Cote has tested close to a dozen cyclists, including Ivan Basso, a favorite to win this year's Tour de France. Cote gave Basso the wind tunnel treatment in the spring of 2004 when the young Italian rider was, as Cote puts it, ''just gaining his wings in the cycling world."

The tests helped Basso shave 18 percent off his overall drag by doing simple things like raising his saddle and bringing his elbows closer together. The improvements helped vault Basso to a third-place finish in that year's tour. Cote still wears a hat given to him by Basso's Computer Sciences Corp. cycling team.

A mechanical engineering major, Cote takes a full load of coursework, including classes in marketing that he hopes to put to use developing his own streamlined gear. Not all of Cote's work is for the business world. An avid cyclist, he also keeps himself and his peers on the MIT cycling team streamlined on race day.

His work appears to be paying off. Last year the team won the eastern collegiate conference title and dominated in time trial competitions -- races against the clock where increased aerodynamics can yield huge advantages. This year they are a favorite to win next month's national championship.

''It's good to see that being a geek works out in the real world," Cote said.

El conocimiento nos hace responsables.

Two Years Before The Mast

After an interval of seven or eight years, I picked up Richard Henry Dana's workmanlike de-romanticisation of seafaring life in the mid-nineteenth century. Two Years Before the Mast has many thrilling passages, and much exciting nautical jargon: trowsers included, but mostly the names of the various sails, pieces of rigging, and bits o' ship: ges-warps; the efficient roband for "rope-band"; the ubiquitous oakum, and the unwelcome task of "picking" it; binnacle; studding-sails; usw.

His description of the California coast and Santa Barbara is beautiful.

Jan. 14th, 1835, we came to anchor in the spacious bay of Santa Barbara, after a voyage of one hundred and fifty days from Boston.
...
In the middle of this crescent, directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low, flat plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheatre of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather collection of buildings, in the center of which is a high tower, with a belfry of five bells; and the whole, being plastered, makes quite a show at a distance, and is the mark by which vessels come to anchor. The town lies a little nearer to the beach—about half a mile from it—and is composed of one-story houses built of brown clay—some of them plastered—with red tiles on the roofs. I should judge that there were about an hundred of them; and in the midst of them stands the Presidio, or fort, built of the same materials, and apparently but little stronger. The town is certainly finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheatre of hills behind. The only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before, and they had not yet grown up again. The fire was described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach.

From this book I learn that sempstress is a synonym with seamstress.

Five Red Herrings

The wikipedia has a Scots edition. Ho' diggity. Just as I was refreshing my tastes with Dorothy Sayers's "Five Red Herrings", a tale of artistic ne'er-do-wells in Scotland.

Alphabet in Color

Vladmir Nabokov's Alphabet in Color.
Nabokov claimed he could "hear" color: this lavishly-produced book explores his perception of individual letters. After moving to the States, Nabokov wrote in English and translated his work into Russian.

In which we must make a decision

Is it Art or Crap?

In which the police investigate

SF POLICE INVESTIGATING EARLY MORNING HOMICIDE

04/01/06 7:05 PST
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

Police are investigating a murder that occurred early this morning in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.

The victim was shot at a bus stop near the intersection of Fillmore and Hermann streets around 4:20 a.m. Investigators were still at the scene two hours later, police said.

Police were initially searching for a 1980s Mustang that fled the area, but there are no reports of suspects in custody.

If you heard or saw anything that might be related to this incident, please contact S.F.P.D. Inspector Cleary at 415-553-9569