I'm a lasagna boy!

How to be contrary in conversation

After a sociable cup of coffee (alas, not Chocomel!) outside in the sun-shine, I have a few suggestions on how to improve one's contrariness in conversation.

Use a twenty-four hour clock ("military time"):

Rather than saying "Why do'n't we meet for coffee at seven o'clock," say, "I will see you at oh-seven-hundred". In email, write 0700 or 07h00; do not write 7.00, which implies a decimal system.

Find words that startle the listener.

Use alternative pronounciations with vigor: bär-b?ch'?r-?t, h?-l?-s?' n?-j?n. Find words with varying pronounciations (does banal rhyme with canal or anal?) and work them into conversation.

Find unusual euphemisms and metaphors.

Toss in "we got along like a house on fire" or "This band is really the snail's eye-teeth" for descriptions.

Prefer localisation that is not your own. Provide a shifting sense of place.

Use non-local affirmatives: "Ayuh" works fine if you are in urban California, while "Dude" should be good in rural Vermont.

Do not let the dialogue inch along.

Provide directions in metric measure: "Ayuh, the coffeeshop is five hundred metres past the park. See you there at nineteen hundred."
Do not, however, attempt Babylonian measurement unless you enjoy watching eavesdroppers' heads asplode.

This is about being contrary, not infuriating.

Posted by salim at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

In which we phone home

Manas Tungare has published his freeware version of LoJack for Laptops: the Laptop Theft Protector. Not for the faint of heart, it requires knowing how to place and run a php script on a webserver. Other than that (and surely that can be automated even more fully, without the privacy concerns the author cites), it's oojah-cum-spiff, or a little bit of all right.

J'ai oublié mon chapeau.

J'ai oublié comment le froid me sent sans chapeau. Sacre bleu!

UPDATE: If you have a more pertinent, useful, or practical French profanity, please let me know. My sailor's vocabulary is sadly limited to English, despite years of reading Hergé comics.

How to run a neighbourhood business

From the perspective of the consumer, I offer these thoughts on the distinctions necessary for a small or neighbourhood store to succeed.

In this bold world of marketing, where small urban stores face competition from encroaching "big-box" retailers, franchise convenience stores, and online shops, neighbourhood stores can still add tremendous value and identity to a neighbourhood.
I have found some of my local stores disinterested in offering anything unusual either with service or with selection, and offer some suggestions.

Stick to the posted business hours.

If your sign reads "Sunday 12-5" and the door is still shut at 2:30, I'm less inclined to try again: how do I know you will be open again later that day? In case of an emergency forcing you to stay away from the store, have a neighbouring store-owner's number, and have them tape a "Sorry, closed for the day" sign on the door. If I see that, I will probably try again another day. This is also known as the "Health Wize" problem

Know your customers

If someone has come into the store three times and picks up the same items each time, remember that. Offer to have the items waiting for them the next time they come, if they are on a schedule. Make some indication that you know who they are and what they are buying. If they wanted to be surreptitious or anonymous, they would have might as well have bought the items online, or at CVS.
If you run a café or a lunch counter, acknowledgement that you have seen the customer regularly come in and order the same drink -- "lemonade, no ice" -- for the past three months goes a long way towards building a relationship. If I wanted bullshit service I could go to Harbucks or Burger King.
This is formally described in the literature as the "Bean There" problem.

Know your goods

Know what you are selling, and hire (and train!) clerks, assistants, and managers who know what goes on in the store. If I come in to Ye Olde Lower Haight Fromble Shoppe, I should well expect to find frombles of some description. If nary a one is to be found, I might reasonably expect the clerk to say, "Oh my, after last week's Fromble Festival we are out entirely, but both British and Scottish Frombles should be back in stock next week." Not: "Dunno if we have any. No, dunno when we will get them in."
This is sometimes referred to as the "Naked Eye" problem.

I hardly expect small retailers to offer lines of credit, or to immediately special-order items for first-time shoppers, but these attitudes are the hallmarks of small stores. Used judiciously, they make the difference between the bodega and large, anonymous retailer offering similar and identical goods. I do expect local shops to know their stock, to know their clientele, and to offer a level of customer service beyond what I will find anywhere else.
Otherwise, I go somewhere else. And neighbourhoods wither. I refuse to support local shops simply because they are local: I will support them because they are local and good.

In which a skateboard becomes a weapon

Several park denizens assaulted a couple with skateboards and knife: a man is in hospital as a result. This is the same intersection where some years ago a man hitch-hiking to Santa Cruz made a vampiric assault on his benefactor. At the moment this is the contentious site of a new supermarket development: will Whole Foods develop a multi-use building on the former Cala Foods lot?

UPDATE: The jackasaurus was buying drugs from vagrant youth when he was attacked with the skateboard.

Naked Lunch

I read the "restored text" of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, including the famous "Desposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" that outlines the junky Algebra of Need. This formula, concise and cogent argument remains a powerful element of drug-control politics to this day.

Junk is the ideal product ... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. ... 1 - Never give anything away for nothing. 2 - Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait). 3 - Always take everything back if you possibly can

The narratives of the book, its hallucinatory politics, surreal zoölogy, and painful degradation of character, all fascinate me, but I found myself ill-suited to the fractured "cut-up" writing style that Burroughs pioneered in this book.

One of the many deleterious side-effects of reading Naked Lunch is the painful, burning, itchy sensation of Steely Dan. How the hell could a) anyone like this music; b) anyone care enough about this pseudo-jazz rubbish to consistently reproduce it; and c) further devalue the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by inducting these poseurs?
On the other hand, the many interpretations of Burroughs' work, in the David Cronenberg film, various songs by Joy Division and by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphocrisy, "lyrics for the Velvet Underground all ran through my mind while reading this story. These are testament to the power of the story that William S. created in "Naked Lunch".

Five Go To Demon's Rocks

I read some of Enid Blyton's bucolic and context-free stories about young English lads and lasses getting into scrapes over their holidays: Five Go To Demon's Rocks.

Famously lampooned as idealistic, bland, and lacking any character-driven plot, the stories remain the best-selling children's books in the UK. They age well, perhaps because they have almost no setting other than the idealised British countryside.

longanimity

longanimity, or forebearance.

Desmond Dekker

The New York Times report that Desmond Dekker, the "King of Blue Beat", the "King of Ska" died. Through his song "007 (Shanty Town)" I first heard of the rude-boy culture of cool which held me obsessed through my college years. Somewhere I have a black-and-white photograph of myself with Desmond Dekker, backstage at The Metro or The Aragorn in Chicago.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Jamaican reggae pioneer Desmond Dekker, famed for the genre's first worldwide hit with ''Israelites,'' has died of a heart attack at his home in England, the Jamaica Observer reported on Friday. He was 64.

Dekker, born Desmond Dacres in the Jamaican capital of Kingston on July 16, 1941, was raised on a diet of such 1950s crooners as Nat ``King'' Cole and Jackie Wilson.

After working initially as a welder, alongside Marley, he began composing songs. He signed with Chinese-Jamaican music label owner Leslie Kong, and scored an immediate hit in 1963 with ``Honor Your Mother and Father.''first taste of success in Britain with ``0.0.7. (Shanty Town),'' which was inspired by student riots in Jamaica. It eventually peaked at No. 14 on the U.K. charts, and was featured on the soundtrack of the 1972 film ``The Harder They Come.''

In 1969, he enjoyed his biggest success with the propulsive reggae classic ``Israelites,'' four years before Marley truly brought reggae into the mainstream. The song's hard-luck lyrics -- ``Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir'' -- delivered in Dekker's mellifluous voice, resonated around the world. It topped the charts in the U.K. and many other countries, and reached the top 10 in the United States.

``It's about how hard things were for a lot of people in Jamaica -- downtrodden, like the Israelites that led Moses to the Promised Land,'' Dekker said in the liner notes for the 2005 career retrospective ``You Can Get It If You Really Want.''

``I was really saying, don't give up, things will get better if you just hold out long enough.''

Many of Dekker's hits, including ``Rude Boy Train,'' were about rude culture, which grew out of the Jamaica slums in the early 1960s. The term ``rude,'' as in ``rude boy,'' referred to someone who was cool or hip.

Dekker also enjoyed a U.K. hit in 1970 with a cover of Jimmy Cliff's ``You Can Get It If You Really Want,'' which he recorded only at the behest of Kong. He settled in England about this time, but his chart success was largely over.

In which we provide a public-service announcement, with GUITAR

Fasier Spiers's FlickrExport plugin for uploading snaps to flickr directly from Apple's iPhoto application has a whole new progress meter setup, and also measures bandwidth usage (cool!).
Despite the iPhoto claim of supporting 250 000 images, my wee little Mini simply cannot cope with my thirty-odd thousand photographs (six years, and that's all I have saved? Heavens! That's probably 15% of the total shutter clicks.)

I started an album of feral cats in Istanbul. Such cute, flea-bitten li'l beasts.

In which we study the design of trains

A Parable by Edsger W.Dijkstra, sometime in 1973.

Years ago a railway company was erected and one of its directors -- probably the commercial bloke -- discovered that the initial investments could be reduced significantly if only fifty percent of the cars would be equipped with a toilet, and, therefore, so was decided.

Shortly after the company had started its operations, however, complaints about the toilets came pouring in. An investigation was carried out and revealed that the obvious thing had happened: despite its youth the company was already suffering from internal communication problems, for the director's decision on the toilets had not been transmitted to the shunting yard, where all cars were treated as equivalent, and, as a result, sometimes trains were composed with hardly any toilets at all.

In order to solve the problem, a bit of information was associated with each car, telling whether it was a car with or without a toilet, and the shunting yard was instructed to compose trains with the numbers of cars of both types as equal as possible. It was a complication for the shunting yard, but, once it had been solved, the people responsible for the shunting procedures were quite proud that they could manage it.

When the new shunting procedures had been made effective, however, complaints about the toilets continued. A new investigation was carried out and then it transpired that, although in each train about half the cars had indeed toilets, sometimes trains were composed with nearly all toilets in one half of the train. In order to remedy the situation, new instructions were issued, prescribing that cars with and cars without toilets should alternate. This was a move severe complication for the shunting people, but after some initial grumbling, eventually they managed.

Complaints, however, continued and the reason turned out to be that, as the cars with toilets had their toilet at one of their ends, the distance between two successive toilets in the train could still be nearly three car lengths, and for mothers with children in urgent need -- and perhaps even luggage piled up in the corridors -- this still could lead to disasters. As a result, the cars with toilets got another bit of information attached to them, making them into directed objects, and the new instructions were, that in each train the cars with toilets should have the same orientation. This time, the new instructions for the shunting yard were received with less than enthusiasm, for the number of turntables was hardly sufficient; to be quite fair to the shunting people we must even admit that according to all reasonable standards, the number of turntables was insufficient, and it was only by virtue of the most cunning ingenuity, that they could just manage.

With all toilets equally spaced along the train the company felt confident that now everything was alright, but passengers continued to complain: although no passenger was more than a car length away from the nearest toilet, passengers (in urgent need) did not know in which direction to start their stumbling itinerary along the corridor! To solve this problem, arrows saying "TOILET" were fixed in all corridors, thereby also making the other half of the cars into directed objects that should be properly oriented by the shunting procedure.

When the new instruction reached the shunting yard, they created an atmosphere ranging from despair to revolt: it just couldn't be done! At that critical moment a man whose name has been forgotten and shall never be traced, made the following observation. When each car with a toilet was coupled, from now until eternity, at its toileted end with a car without a toilet, from then onwards the shunting yard, instead of dealing with N directed cars of two types, could deal with N/2 identical units that, to all intents and purposes, could be regarded as symmetrical. And this observation solved all shunting problems at the modest price of, firstly sticking to trains with an even number of cars only -- the few additional cars needed for that could be paid out of the initial savings effected by the commercial bloke! -- and, secondly, slightly cheating with regard to the equal spacing of the toilets. But, after all, who cares about the last three feet?

Although at the time that this story took place, mankind was not blessed yet with automatic computers, our anonymous man who found this solution deserves to be called the world's first competent programmer.

I have told the above story to different audiences. Programmers, as a rule, are delighted by it, and managers, invariably, get more and more annoyed as the story progresses; true mathematicians, however, fail to see the point.

Dijkstra developed the concept of semaphores for inter-process communication. He also described the problem of deadlocks, as eventually retold in the Dining Philosophers Problem.

In which we open the hotel door with a carton of cream cheese

I was inadvertently locked out of my hotel room a few days ago: I had left the heavy brass key at the reception desk, and planned on returning before the clerk left for the night at 2300. However, sunset at the beach in Kijkduin was late, and I spent too long watching the windsurfers. As I hastily arranged a ride back to the hotel I imagined covert ways to get in to the room: with a thin credit card? with a picklock set? with my pocket-knife? with someone else's key?

I did not, however, contemplate using cream cheese:

[Lukas] Grunwald cowrote a program called RFDump, which let him access and alter price chips using a PDA (with an RFID reader) and a PC card antenna. With the store's permission, he and his colleagues strolled the aisles, downloading information from hundreds of sensors. They then showed how easily they could upload one chip's data onto another. "I could download the price of a cheap wine into RFDump," Grunwald says, "then cut and paste it onto the tag of an expensive bottle." The price-switching stunt drew media attention, but the Future Store still didn't lock its price tags. "What we do in the Future Store is purely a test," says the Future Store spokesperson Albrecht von Truchsess. "We don't expect that retailers will use RFID like this at the product level for at least 10 or 15 years." By then, Truchsess thinks, security will be worked out.

Today, Grunwald continues to pull even more-elaborate pranks with chips from the Future Store. "I was at a hotel that used smartcards, so I copied one and put the data into my computer," Grunwald says. "Then I used RFDump to upload the room key card data to the price chip on a box of cream cheese from the Future Store. And I opened my hotel room with the cream cheese!"

Much more about RFID hacking in WIRED.

On methods of Human-Computer Interaction

Smack your MacBookPro and switch desktops. Oooh, visceral.

Istanbul: Memories of a City

Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul", sub-titled "Memories of a City", is wistful and poignant, but manages to be a memoir nor an autobiography. His stories meander, and characters occur and recur, but do not connect in meaningful ways. Some of the problems with this book due to the translator and editor: appositives start with a parenthesis and end with a comma or semi-colon; or the text introduces a Turkish word but does not define it, or even place it in a meaningful initial context.
I was looking forward to insight to a period in which Istanbul underwent great political and social change, both progressive and regressive: Pamuk leads us through some of this change from the limited first-person point of view, and does not always add the historical perspective necessary to fill out the details that the narrator missed. Some of the personal anecdotes come so close to presenting the upper-middle-class viewpoint for the changes in Turkey, but the promise is not always realised.

I visited Istanbul a few weeks ago. Some of my memories of the city: a boy pulling fish out of the Golden Horn; the tulips between the Haghia Sophia and Sultanahment (or "Blue") Mosques; the view of the Black Sea from a sixteenth-century fortress; and the 1€ fish sandwiches, dressed with a little oil and just off the grill just off the boat just out of the water.

On divers methods of coffee procurement

I could get a coffee-filled backpack like this and hose people down at early-morning meetings. Or fill coffee-cups:

In which we meet The London Police

I saw several pieces by The London Police over the past few days; thanks to the community on flickr, who immediately identified the artist of the above. Some of the larger outdoor pieces were absolutely glorious; the smaller, indoor pieces -- some on stickers -- were intricate and bold.

In which we do not participate in the community

The new vision for the Hayes Valley ("Market and Octavia") neighbourhood continues with adjustments to the six-year-old plan. The Planning Department is holding a community meeting on 23rd May to review and discuss the draft plan, as well as the (Draft) Environmental Impact Report.
Depending on which poster one sees, the meeting is either at the LGBT Center or at the Bahá'í Center, neither of which seems a particularly appealing place to visit.
The LGBT Center is an architectural excrescence at the corner of Octavia and Market: not only for the garish paint job, but for the horrid way in which the builders placed thoughtless modern extensions on the dilapidated Queen Anne rowhouses to make a garish Frankenstein of a building.
The Bahá'í Center sits on Valencia across from Zeitgeist. Why would one would choose to go to the former in lieu of the latter? Does the Tamale Lady visit the Bahá'í? Aha. I thought not. Does the LGBT have The Replacements or The Minutemen on the jukebox? In your face.

In which we provide sufficient thrust for a pig to fly

Some of the core problems of DNS include: cache poisoning, spoofed servers, answers tampered in transit, and the inadequacy of udp (for dns).

Secure DNS does not address software problems such as buffer overflows or some attack vectors -- Denial of Service, for example--, but does provide for authentication of data (intact xmission) from a guaranteed name server; and for non-repudiation (who and signed what data); and requires a chain of trust to the root. It anticipates the use of the DNS extensions proposed in EDNS0 in order to address reply packet sizes (>512 bytes). How about storing ssh-key fingerprints in DNS? This could be a poor-man's key-management system. Combining the functionality of DNSSEC with GPG, PGP, and SSH keys with DNS might solve the burgeoning problems of key management.
... but only the Swedish registrar offers a signed top-level registry. And, by some estimates, 95% of the .com zones probably do not want to be signed -- they are ephemeral or fly-by-night, and have no practical use for information authentication.

With sufficient thrust, a pig will fly. This phrase originates with Lewis Carroll or in Scotland, or both. It also appears in RFC 1925.

Generate keys:
Zone-signing key, key-signing key
RSA and SHA-1 1024-bit keys
dnssec-keygen -a -b -n ZONE # HOST, USER deprecated

In which we postpone the inevitable, again

Another item to file under "Public transit infrastructure that will not happen in my lifetime: the California High-Speed Rail. Their motto: "Fly California / Without ever leaving the ground!" makes a lot of sense, because this project is nothing but a flight of fancy.

He said the high-speed rail measure would have a better chance of passing in 2008, when it wouldn't be in competition with a $37.3 billion public works bond package approved by lawmakers earlier this month.

Torrico also said lawmakers were discussing how to provide about $116 million the state would need to complete engineering work and begin buying right of way for high-speed rail over the next two years.

Eventually, the project would link San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno, Sacramento and the San Francisco area with trains running at top speeds of more than 200 mph.

In which the Mayor gives it forty whacks

With his anti-environmentalist hatchet, the Mayor of San Francisco has axed the proposal to close vehicle traffic in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays. The stretch of JFK between the Panhandle and 14th Avenue has closed every Sunday and holiday for the past thirty-odd years; the Mayor objected to the extended closure on the grounds that its impact was not well understood, and that voters have previously voted against this.
However, with the new underground parking in Golden Gate Park, motorized vehicles continue to have access to the park's facilities, museums, and whatnot; Newsom's formal veto, which overruled the Board of Supervisors, flies in the face of his public person as the Green Mayor.

In which I arrive in Delft

quiesce and shard

Some computer-science-industry jargon (different from the more general project-management jargon I encountered earlier):

quiesce

v.t., To quiesce is to put a computer, a program, a thread, or some other computer resource into a temporarily inactive or inhibited state. A resource that is in a quiesced state can be reactivated more quickly than one that has been completely removed from the system. Typically, any descriptive information about a resource that has been built by the system remains where it is during the quiescence. The reverse of quiesce is usually unquiesce, but reset and other terms are also used.

shard (as opposed to 'frag')

v.t., to split a single logical dataset into multiple physical stores. Each of the resulting sets is equivalent in size and responsibility to the others
sub, the component datasets resulting from sharding a database
fig. To split responsibilities for a project or service across several people.

In which I am married to the sea

Married to the Sea is great stuff, I tells you.
And drinking, it turns up everywhere. Including on bicycles.

In which we recall the darling buds of May

I had more than enough time today while waiting (from 1706 until 1718, at 8th and Market), so a sonnet rather than a haiku:

Shall I compare thee to a MUNI bus?
Thou are more timely and more fleet-of-foot:
Rough traffic shakes the snarling Boulevard,
And rush-hour's flight hath all too long a wait:
Sometime too clean the bus rarely arrives,
And often is the ventilation stifl'd;
And year by year our tariffs incline,
By chance or traffic's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy infernal wait shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fare thou owerst;
But shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long MUNI shrugs its responsibility.

Apologies to the bard. This is doggerel, not a sonnet.

In which we are kurious, oranj

Greg forwarded this article from Pitchfork about The Fall's recent, uh , tour-uh:

According to Williams, the peel-throwing was the culmination of days of frustration with Smith. In a MySpace bulletin entitled "FUCK MARK E. SMITH HE SUCKS," Williams wrote: "MARK E. SMITH a.k.a MR. BURNS has managed to piss off his band so bad they quit and left him in america with his crazy wife slash one fingered keyboard player... MARK pulled a corkscrew on his bass player poured beer and ashed on the head of his tour manager while driving (who has also quit the tour) and played only one full set without slithering off stage to his R.V. to dive into a bottle of scotch."

(The Fall's booking agent confirmed that the tour manager had quit, but countered that Smith had indeed played full sets at all of the trek's three previous shows.)

Williams continued, "the man is in his late 40's and looks older than my dead grandfather i'm sorry to those out there who are fall fans but you do not know this guy he is an idiot the three other members of the fall are great guys nice as can be and i wish the best for them..."

As far as the incident in Phoenix, Williams wrote, "i was told by the falls tour manager he and the rest of the band were going home without mark knowing and this would be the last show this really pissed me off BAD!!! if this had happened a few years ago i would have beat the shit out of him but i'm older now so i picked up a dirty banana peel ran onto the stage and threw it in his face as hard as i could and walked away he ran after me with some 1800's English boxing hands and wanted to fight i laughed and walked away knowing in my head this man has only a few years left..."

The Fall's official website said only, "Apologies to all for the curtailed set, caused by technical problems." I guess bananas do technically count as technology...if you're a monkey.

as Aram said: How will Mark E. extricate himself from this? hahahahahaha.

I will provide the historical anecdote that: one of the oldest usenet contributions I made was to the Fall FAQ, and to the Lyrics Parade (for "Cruisers Creek").
I just looked on the ipod and see something like sixty albums by The Fall. For crying out loud!

In which three speeds cover the world

From The Mirror:

10 May 2006
WORLD TOUR BIKE STOLEN
A MAN who has spent 44 years cycling round the world had his bike stolen within four hours of arriving in England.

Heinz Stucke has ridden 335,000 miles through 193 countries on the same three-speeder - the world's longest cycle ride.

But yesterday the distraught 66-year-old was desperately searching for the old-fashioned machine.

German Heinz, aka the Bike Man, said: "I'd just got off the ferry. It's an old clonker so I don't see why anyone would want it."

It was stolen outside his tent in Portsmouth. Police are now set to lend him a bike from lost property.

World Sausage, at the forty-way intersection of Market, 15th, and Church, has shuttered its doors. The eponymous world-weary bicycle that was hanging on its walls disappeared some months ago, and the word is that the genial owner had sold it to another couple. It is being remodeled as a old-style Fishe Restaurante.

In which we drink the coffee, slowly

Waiting on line at Blue Bottle Coffee always provides vicarious joy and entertainment. Sunday mid-morning, I was behind a lanky, jumpy man who told everyone that his wife had just given birth. "At 3:29 this morning!" He had two espressos, which he said reminded him of his student days in Zagreb: "We would drink five, six espresso and study all night."

This morning the talk was about the San Francisco Chroncle write-up on drip coffee, which credits the Slow Food movement with making coffee drinkers aware of the value of a just-made cuppa joe.

This type of elixir is not for everyone -- this is no In-N-Out coffee experience. Because most filter-drip purveyors use only four to six filter cones and the beans are usually ground to order, orders can quickly back up. But there are plenty of people who don't mind, as a visit last month to the Ferry Plaza's Blue Bottle showed. Despite the rain and the long line, cup-at-a-time drip coffee fans continued to show up and wait.

"The waits are really epic on Saturdays," [James Freeman, owner of Blue Bottle] says. "If you're going to wait 30 minutes for an 8-ounce coffee, it better be really good."

Wait or no wait, Blue Bottle does not pretend to be a café: it has the atmosphere of the Caffe Zio I knew as a young 'un, drinking espresso from La Prima Espresso in Pittsburgh. A short counter, precisely-made ristretto shots of espresso, barely a menu. Yet the best coffee, the most personable and straightforward baristas, and the intended result: the joy of coffee.

This morning the talk was also about routine: a delivery-van driver came up to the counter, ordered a drink, another drink to take away, and a third drink to take to a coworker unfortunate enough to be leashed to a desk somewhere and unable to visit Blue Bottle in person. The delivery man said that he was recently offered another, easier route in Millbrae, but demurred, thinking "How am I going to get my coffee?"

In which we drink the nectar of poets

The stalwart Mr Looney suggested an outing to the Rabbit's Food Meadery, and we spent the evening in rare form with glass after glass of mead, sweet mead, cyser, and some devilish trouble that combined a lemonade of mead, lemon juice, and blackcherry cyser.

Afterwards in the queue for a double-double I was asked about IPA (silly me, I first thought of Imperial Pale Ale, not the International Phoenetic Alphabet) and the man of a certain age in front of us interrupted with a comment.
"You know about prefixes, right?" We nodded amiably. "And suffixes -- at the ends of words?" Again we nodded. "What about infixes?" I nodded and briefly explained, but he interrupted and said: "I looked in Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, and the only example of an infix they provided was fucking: unfuckingbelievable! unfreaking real!" He eventually sat down at the molded-plastic table with us and told us all about the Computer History Museum, where he works.

miching mallecho

The Night Writer has the best explanation of the curious phrase "miching mallecho": it means mischief.

As the play within the play begins in Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act III, Scene 2) and the players act out the poisoning of the king and the wooing and winning of the queen by the poisoner, Ophelia enters and cries, "What means this, my lord?" and Hamlet answers, "Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief. Thus Shakespeare himself supplies the definiition (sic): mischief. Mallecho was derived from the Spanish noun malhecho (evil deed), base on the prefix mal-(evil) plus hecho (deed). Miching (MICH ing) is an adjective made of the present participle of the verb miche, meaning to "skulk" or "slink," thought to be a variant of mooch (British slang for "slouch about" or "skulk," differing from the American slang usage, to "scrounge," both, however, coming from the same source, Middle English michen, to skulk or hide)...

Thus, miching mallecho means "sneaky mischief." You may never run into this eloquent phrase in contemporary literature, unless you happen to read An Awkward Lie by the English whodunitist Michael Innes (b. 1906), where his detective Sir John Appleby, considering the mysterious disappearance of a corpse from a golf bunker, wonders about this "elaborate piece of miching malicho." Malicho is a variant of mallecho, or vice versa. Some authorities say that it is vice versa, mallecho, influenced by the Spanish, being a learned emendation of malicho, the form favored by Michael Innes.

I know it not from Innes, but from Dorothy Sayers, who uses it for a provocative heading in Unnatural Death.

In which the good-looking trees are staying indoors

The Toronto Star has a story on why suburbs are deracinated: Why suburbs will never have tall trees explains the geology of suburban development and the resulting arboreal shortcomings.

Why suburbs will never have tall trees
May 7, 2006. 07:18 AM
KENNETH KIDD

Drive through the outer suburbs of Toronto, and chances are you'll find a familiar scene, one replicated across the continent.
Behind the signs announcing a new subdivision, monstrous tractors and earth-moving equipment will be chugging across the landscape, preparing what might have been a farmer's field for a sea of houses.
Off to one side, there'll be a giant pile of earth — all of the topsoil that had been scraped away and set aside so the machines could grade the site for drainage, sewers and roads.
Then the houses duly go up, some of that topsoil gets put back for the lawns, and in come the happy new homeowners dreaming of a green and leafy suburb to be.
There's just one snag: It may be decades before the place will begin to support the kind of trees the homeowners want.
"It's really not the first generation of trees that's going to be this spectacular canopy that you see in those old neighbourhoods of any town or city," says Richard Ubbens, chief of urban forestry for Toronto. "It's going to be the second generation that starts to form that canopy."
In other words, it could take more than a century — and generations of homeowners — before that subdivision starts looking like verdant Riverdale.
The problem: The kind of soil that trees need and the way they actually grow both happen to run counter to a lot of popular misconceptions, and headfirst into modern building techniques.
This is why Todd Irvine, an urban forestry consultant with Bruce Tree Expert Company Ltd. in Toronto, is pointing to his forearm.
When they're small, "Roots are as small as the hairs on my arm," he says, "and people don't necessarily realize that. They think of them as these big things pushing through cement, and they're not."
In order to grow, the roots of trees need soil that contains a lot of oxygen and free space, not just water and nutrients. They also need room — or rather, a special kind of room. The roots don't go very deep, with most of them in the top 60 cm or so. So they try to spread out as far on all sides as the tree is tall.
Now consider what's happened at the subdivision. Once the topsoil is removed, you're left with the rock and clay underneath, which hasn't seen the light of day for thousands of years. Landscapers call it "hardpan," and from an engineering point of view it's an ideal material to mould into the site's drainage plan.
Run heavy equipment over material like that, and it quickly gets compacted into something with much the same consistency as concrete.
Once the houses are in place, the topsoil gets put back, but usually to a depth of only 20 cm., which is the typical municipal standard and enough to support healthy turf.
The rest of the stockpiled topsoil is usually sold off and eventually ends up in nurseries, but only after it's been rehabilitated by adding manure or peat moss or sand. That's because the soil became anaerobic after sitting in a pile for so long. "There's no oxygen within that pile anymore, and eventually all the living microbes and organisms in that soil die," says Ubbens.
So you end up with less-than-ideal topsoil spread thinly over a layer of clay hardpan that often includes pieces of brick and other debris. "In our business, we call it `builder's loam,'" says Ubbens. "It's unfortunate that it's so bad that it's even got a name."
Planting trees in that is like sticking them in a clay pot. "We bore a hole in that heavily compacted clay, put the tree in with a certain amount of soil, but the tree will eventually start to decline," says Andy Kenney, senior lecturer in urban and community forestry at the University of Toronto.
Sometimes, those holes can fill up with water, drowning the tree. Or the roots, unable to penetrate the surrounding clay, will keep circling around and end up girdling themselves. Even those that manage to survive will be stunted.
Irvine's parents live in a Mississauga house built in the early 1970s as part of a new subdivision, for instance. It used to be an apple orchard, and not long after the houses went up, in came new trees planted in the boulevard.
"There are Norway maples in front of their house that should be 50, 60 feet tall," he says. "They're 10, 12 feet tall."
Why then, are the trees in places like Riverdale, High Park or the Beach so tall?
It's partly a function of how the houses were built, and the technology available a century ago. Armed with only small steam shovels, horses and manpower, developers essentially plopped houses onto the existing terrain. The original grade of the land, and much of soil, was left untouched, and a lot of the existing trees were spared, says Ubbens.
"So you have these unique communities in older parts of towns and cities, not just Toronto but all over the place, where one house is higher than the next because there were hills and valleys and little undulations in the terrain."
That's why older neighbourhoods had to be dotted with little pumping stations to handle water and sewage, which wouldn't otherwise flow the way it needed to go, and why there'd be variations in water pressure. Quaint in the city, perhaps, but not the kind of selling point that gets highlighted in the brochures for a new subdivision.
There was another advantage in the way builders operated back then. Not just the soil, but the structure of the soil was left intact. The ideal planting medium, says Ubbens, also includes a gradual transition from the topsoil down to the underlying material, rather than a sharp divide between topsoil and the more mineral-laden soil underneath.
That transition has been built up through the work of decaying plant material, frost, worms and the like. Recreating it isn't easy. "If you're dealing with a clay soil, that soil can be pretty hard and tough, and it can take decades and decades before you have any kind of decent soil profile again," says Ubbens.
To wit: his own house in Rexdale, built a half-century ago. "I'm starting to see a little bit of soil profile around my place," says Ubbens. "My piece of property was graded, originally, so I'm not one of the lucky ones."
Some trees grow well on less hospitable sites, such as ashes and honey locusts, which is why you tend to see a lot of those in new subdivisions.
And there have been surprises. Silver maples usually do well in wet soils but somehow seem to survive in drier, compacted soils. One theory, says Kenney, is that with their normally wet feet, these maples were already adapted to deal with lower levels of oxygen in the ground.
But relying on a relatively limited number of species has its own potential problems. The number of ashes that have been planted, for instance, is an open invitation to the emerald ash borer, now wreaking havoc around Windsor and working its way east.
Tony DiGiovanni figured he knew better when he bought his house in Newmarket. He is, after all, the executive director of Landscape Ontario, the umbrella body for the landscaping industry.
"I was smart enough when I went to buy the house that I put in the offer that I wanted a foot of topsoil.
"First of all, the agent looked at me as if I was crazy, and I said, `No, I want a foot of topsoil.' It really doesn't cost that much to put a foot of topsoil on."
It proved a fleeting victory. "What happened was that, after the topsoil was down, they drove these huge machines over it, so they compacted it like cement anyway."
DiGiovanni ended up having to till it all up himself and bring in additional topsoil. "In retrospect, I look at it and say, `You know, it's impossible for these guys to build the way they build without these machines,'" he says. "You need the machines."
There are solutions, but soil quality isn't top of mind for most homebuyers, if it occurs to them at all. It's all hindsight. "If they knew they were buying a house where it was going to be that difficult to grow things, I think a lot of homeowners wouldn't be happy about that," says Irvine.
"They just think they're going to get soil, and soil is soil is soil. But it's not."
Nor has soil got a lot of attention from municipalities and homebuilders. The Greater Toronto Homebuilders Association, for example, doesn't have any soil guidelines. It relies instead on the municipal standards in various communities, which are only now being revised to be more tree-friendly.
In Toronto, Ubbens says his department is pushing to have the minimum topsoil standard raised to 30 cm., or about a foot, from the current 20 cm.
But he knows policing any new standards will be tough. "I don't have the staff to go onto private property and supervise the installation of top soil."
And the ultimate solution — machines called "sub-soilers" — won't be common anytime soon. There are a variety of sub-soilers, but the basic idea is the same. Think of a giant tooth cutting a metre into the earth and vibrating, breaking up all that compacted soil.
The City of Toronto uses them on its new planting sites, then mixes in additional peat moss or sand before putting about 15 cm. of mulch on top. "What you get is this incredible root growth," says Ubbens. "It just allows the roots to get down and get established very, very quickly."
DiGiovanni doesn't need convincing. "Sometimes, I think if we could just do one thing to improve the environments in subdivisions, it's the sub-soiler."
But sub-soiling is expensive, and it has to be done after the houses have been constructed, so you have to worry about cutting into any underground utilities. "I don't know anybody who's doing it now," says DiGiovanni.
As Irvine puts it: "Arborists are pretty low on the totem pole. You have a site where you have architects, engineers, lawyers, urban planners, traffic consultants.
"Arborists don't have that clout. But if we want to live in healthy neighbourhoods, a big component of that is big trees."

In which they are made of ... !?

Watching the short film "They are made of meat" th' other evening, I recalled the original story by Terry Bisson. As the end credits rolled, I saw, much to my surprise, the familiar name of Tom Noonan, co-star of a film I saw once at DOC that has puzzled me since.

In which we the heroine returns to the funny pages

Beekeeper Comics' second instalment ("Motel Art Improvement Service") follows the our heroine as she cycles from Manhattan to San Francisco.
The first book, Shutterbug Follies, appeared several years ago, and the online strip petered out last year.

In which we encounter a Byzantine problem

Leslie Lamport, on the pluscal page, provides a 21-character string on which to search for the page. The string, which he requests others refer to as "the string obtained by removing the - from uid-lamportpluscalhomepage".
The use of a string like this to identify the page strikes me a strange, betraying a lack of trust in the algorithms that allow quick and efficient search of the internet, and especially strange considering that Lamport is an expert on algorithms and systems.
He presents the scenario of distributed decision-making in The Byzantine Generals Problem. The issue of fault tolerance in large, necessarily distributed, and often diverse systems presents fabulously difficult challenges.

Lamport's private search string turns out to be a googlewhack, which "existential manatee" is not.

On eggcorns

The eggcorn site features this introduction:

In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported (Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???) an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense. Mark Liberman’s colleague Geoffrey Pullum chimed in and suggested that this type of linguistic error should be called an eggcorn. Then Arnold Zwicky, wrote an enlightening article (Lady Mondegreen says her peace about egg corns) in which he gave his blessing to the term eggcorn and explained that new labels for spontaneous reshapings of known expressions are sorely needed, and listed the aspects under which eggcorns overlap with but yet differ from known classes of lexical creativity: malapropisms, mondegreens, folk etymologies etc. Mark Liberman subsequently gave some more thought to eggcorn terminology.

In which mí casa es su casa

This Land is Your Land:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me.
and protested the institution of private ownership of land with the verse,
As I went walking, I saw a sign there;
And on the sign there, It said, 'NO TRESPASSING.'
But on the other side, It didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the Redwood Forest to the New York Island
The Canadian mountain to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is made for you and me.
As I go walking this ribbon of highway
I see above me this endless skyway
And all around me the wind keeps saying:
This land is made for you and me.
I roam and I ramble and I follow my footsteps
Till I come to the sands of her mineral desert
The mist is lifting and the voice is saying:
This land is made for you and me.
Where the wind is blowing I go a strolling
The wheat field waving and the dust a rolling
The fog is lifting and the wind is saying:
This land is made for you and me.
Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking my freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land is made for you and me.
-- Woody Guthrie