I'm a lasagna boy!

In which we encounter a bascule debacle

Matier and Ross have a great piece on the much-delayed, over-budget Fourth Street Bridge, part of the MUNI Third Street Light Rail project -- itself much-delayed and over-budget.
The Fourth Street Bridge is a Strauss Bascule bridge, named after the patent holder, Joseph Strauss.

Word Freaks and patzer

patzer, a bungler, and specifically an amateurish chess player. I learned the word in reading Stefan Fastis book on competitive Scrabble™ play, Word Freak (note the tactful singular in the title; I first read it as a derogatory plural), which has several dozen words I had never before encountered, and probably never will again, with the exception of patzer. Scrabble™ vocabulary is not conversational, but is tactical: use words to maximize point value, but not to show off vocabulary. For this reason the World Championships attract many players who do not speak English fluently, who acquired it as a second, or third, or fourth, language, and who may not be able to define many of the words they play on the board.

At times confusing, other times almost confessional, the book is ultimately a let-down. I enjoyed reading about strategy in the game, but found the author's three-year odyssey through the anxiety-inducing world of competitive game-playing almost patronizing. He tells a good story, and he tells it well, but he undoubtedly takes the perspective that people have to be weird, or unusual, to play this game with this intensity -- and here he goes, crossing over, and feeling himself becoming less socially adept, mawkish, and inept.

A widely-read and impressively-travelled correspondent sent this to me last year, but I only uncovered it while excavating books a few days ago. I am going to send it on to my peripatetic Scrabble™-playing sister, who has devised an excellent variation of the game well-suited for pub play. It's sort of like the Anagrams game described in Fastis' book: using tiles from one Scrabble™ set, players draw seven and begin forming words on the table. The words may intersect with other players' words; as soon as a player has used a tile, draw enough to continue with seven. Turns do not exist: play is fast and furious. First person to finish and not be able to draw additional tiles wins. Insert ale as necessary.

In which the singular are back

was posted on a door along Market St. in San Francisco, and the clashing singular of "THIS PREMISE" and plural "SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS" made me chuckle.

Surveillance cameras are all the rage in San Francisco these days: our Supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, is a tentative proponent of using cameras to 'deter crime', especially in the theft- and graffiti-plagued neighbourhood of the Lower Haight.

UPDATE: I snapped a better photograph this evening while I walked past transexuals turning tricks, odiferous oafs, slobbering junkies, dazed disenfranchised, and pungent perverts, really putrid. I have grown to intensely dislike the hopscotch I must play while walking between the bus stop at Eighth and Market and home -- I was trying to find an endpoint there, but the nastiness does not really stop until I cross Scott Street after Duboce Park. All along the path home, and especially in the "bike way" between Church and Market, the sidewalks are teeming with unhappy faces.

Phaidon Design Classics

I finally got my paws on the "special edition" of the Phaidon Design Classics ,a href="http://www.phaidon.com/designclassics/" title="Offsite: Phaidon Design Classics">three-volume compendium of industrial and product design. Incredibly, indelibly, unbeliveably ironic that a book on design comes in such a backwards, poorly-design case. The designer Konstantin Gricic is to blame for this: "The collection comes in a specifically commissioned carrying unit exclusively designed by Konstantin Gricic."

Apparently one needs to destroy the case in order to read the books! On the way home, I used the plastic handle to carry the books by the carrier, rather than support them from beneath. The carrier completely fell apart: the plastic dowels holding the top and bottom separated from the base, and the books almost fell out.

Surprisingly and embarassingly poor product design. Damned thing is not even recyclable.

In which we are stunned into silence

Tomorrow is the Tour de Fat in Golden Gate Park.

In which we take a trip to Holland

To soothe my aching digestion, or perhaps to ease my addled mind, I took a trip down to Holland's Best, which I found through the internet: a "Dutch market brought home [to San Jose]". The shop turns out to be a small store in a strip mall, tucked in between Big Al's Record Barn ("everything 50% off except fixture's") and a Skin Diving Store. Holland's Best is far from a boutique: the dingy shelves are crammed with Dutch and Indonesian groceries, sambals, stroepwafeln, Delftware (shudder!), and bag after bag of candy.

I picked up a sackfull of Chocomel and a small bag of DubbleZout "extra salty" liquorice.

In praise of the box set

I finally opened up two box sets that deserved close listening: the anthology of The Fall Peel Sessions, and the Billy Bragg box set.

The Fall are, according to myth and legend, a favourite of Radio One personality John Peel, and recorded music for his show no fewer than six gazillion times. A set of six discs collects these appearances.

The Billy Bragg box, from our friends at Yep Roc, not only collects the EPs and album that made up the US release Back to Basics, but adds outtakes, concert recordings (audio and video, including two DVDs), and plenty of descriptive propaganda.

In which we are profiteering

To get on board a ship or helicopter, Americans must sign a note pledging to reimburse the U.S. government. They will be charged the price of a single commercial flight from Beirut to Cyprus — usually $150-$200, although officials refused to specify.

If they have no money to fly onward, they also will be asked to guarantee reimbursement of the price of an airline ticket from Cyprus to the United States.

$150 is about the amount that Halliburton makes in a fraction of a second. You can see the monetary cost of the Iraq War to the United States in action at Cost of War dot com.

In which I toast your health

One of my colleagues brought in a sack full of New Glarus Spotted Cow Wisconsin farmhouse ale -- a cask-conditioned, bottled beer that has a delicious fresh taste. It's only sold in the vicinity of the brewery, and I feel rather excited to open a bottle (with its patent cap --!).

In which we might eat outside

One of my long-standing complaints about San Francisco is its paucity of outdoors seating. Few cafés have tables on the sidewalks (and few sidewalks are broad enough to pleasantly accommodate this scheme); few restaurants have outdoor areas with table service. Too often the outdoors seating is like Squat and Gobble on Fillmore street: untidily arranged against a shopfront and facing a loud, stinking avenue. Even Zuni has to contend with derelicts and the odour of the city's failure to keep itself clean.
Ross Mirkarimi is introducing legislation to allow more businesses to provide outdoor seating: this could perhaps be one of the few topics on which he and I agree. Ross: now if we could get the "medical" dispensaries to follow some sort of licencing process, and if we could get the better ones to have outdoors seating too, everything* would be peachy.

* "everything" does not include everything. We still suffer shootings, stabbings, graffiti, so much graffiti, and the ubiquitous trash and filth. I would rather rid of neighbourhood of those than have swells supping on the sidewalk, but one takes what one can get, I suppose.

A Civil Action

Jonathan Harr's riveting narrative of a massive litigation case pits the small town of Woburn, MA against the Evil Conglomerates of Beatrice and W. R. Grace; the flamboyant and obsessive lawyer who eventually steers the case to the court holds our attention as much as does the medical trauma underlying the suit. Harr was an insider for the duration of the trial, and party to the litigator's various faults and problems. The story has an unsettling sense of failure hanging over it, but one cannot easily say whether the failure belongs to the families who refuse to move away from the toxic waste, the companies who have knowingly or ignorantly dumped the waste, or to the litigator himself. Perhaps each party has some degree of failure. This story is as exciting as any John Grisham novel, and has a plot with elements familiar from each of those books.

In which we cannot protect a single lobster

On the heels of Bubba the giant lobster comes this mottled lobster:

although the local supermarket will not sell me a live lobster, on the grounds of cruelty, I still do love eating them. With steak. And butter.
Or on a roll.
Or on a plate.

In which we are an Auto Tech Pilot

In which the snowbank is moving

This New Yorker story about accused tree-killer Grant Hadwin fascinates me, not least because of the protagonist's forceful personality:

[Grant] Hadwin was well known for outdoing his co-workers. Paul Bernier, a longtime colleague and close friend of his, told me, "He was in the best condition of any man I've ever seen." Bernier was with Hadwin when he outwitted a pair of charging grizzly bears by dodging across a stream and feinting upwind, where they couldn't smell him. In addition to consuming prodigious quantities of chewing tobacco, Hadwin was known for buying vodka by the case and going on spectacular binges that, even in freezing weather, would leave him unconscious in the back of his vintage Studebaker pickup or passed out in a snow-filled ditch, dressed only in slacks and shirtsleeves. There was a local joke: "Look, that snowbank is moving. Must be Grant."

Green Seattle also reprints the New Yorker story.

In which I twttr with laughter

Kind of like dodgeball (the web thingy, not the game we played at recess in grade school), but ... yeah, kind of like dodgeball.
UPDATE: I changed to the fancy 'chrome' badge. Duh.

Syd Barrett

Syd Barrett died a few days ago.

In which there be serpents

The SERPENT project, Scientific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology, has some intriguing photographs from a recent deep-sea photography competition.

In which we burn a cartoon flag

Amongst the usual self-indulgent signatures ("Sent from my Blackberry wireless handheld", the latest college football scores, the redundant email address) in colleagues' email messages, I found this gem:

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

The study by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum exists for the promotion of "religious, scientific, literary or educational purposes or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals."

The First Amendment provides us with the liberty to satire, so gleefully used in The Simpsons -- in one episode, Homer literally hides behind the Constitution.

In which our hero dives into the xml

Frustrated with the forever-limited export options available in Delicious Monster's Delicious Library media-management software, I decided to wade through the single XML file the program uses to store data. Hey, at least it's not a plist.
The file does not contain timestamps, but it does contain links, however inconvenient, to the hack-y "shelf" concept in the software. The xml file swells to about 12400 bytes per entry

Using perl's XML::Simple on my late-model PowerBook on the 4M XML file, a simple run of the parser takes several minutes: 106.13s user 1.62s system 57% cpu 3:07.57 total. I want to extract title, author, and ISBN information, as well as the date I added the item; but the XML output by Delicious Library does not conform comfortably to a structure that I can parse, and reading through the source to DeliciousExporter shows that the authors had to include plenty of special cases and output-munging in order to build the HTML pages from the source XML.

In which life disappears

Julio Bernavides Alvaran, a 65-year-old who came to the festival from Valencia in southeastern Spain, said he wandered the streets for hours looking for a place to sleep, then had the bright idea of using his credit card to get into an empty bank machine cubicle.

Still, he only had a couple of hours of rest before the run, which he described as the thrill of a lifetime.

''Life disappears, and you feel your blood moving in your veins,'' said Bernavides Alvaran. ''Either that, or it's all the whiskey.''

Aram sent the above quotation and context, which comes from the Running of the Bulls ritual at the festival of San Fermin. Yes, the links go to pages in Euskara (English here), because I am perverse. I do not read the Basque language.
But really, the whisk(e)y, man! And the running!

Props to Kukusumusu.

In which we set TIMEZONE

The standardization of time is of critical importance to electronics engineering, and especially to computing.

The United States Mobile Aeronautics Education Laboratory has
a brief quiz on time, and the Free BSD Diary has a succint piece on time zones in FreeBSD. I have relied on Kerberos for authentication, and Kerberos can be subverted by time skew.

Unhelpfully, the origin of "jiffy" remains unknown, leaving the etymology of an exciting and euphonic word a mystery.