I'm a lasagna boy!

In which we set dummy type

The history of Firefox extension.

Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz died. His lush portrait of Cairo rich and poor is the image I have of the city, steeped in colonial misery, and in the throes of invigorating social and political change.

baculine

I still do not know the word "knouter", which I read in "The Most Dangerous Game" -- for the first time probably twenty or more years ago! -- but now suspect that it relates to the word "baculine", which relates to punishment by a rod or cane. This would make a knouter one who flogs or beats. I found baculine through the Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form, which is on its way to presenting definintions of English words in limerick form. Delightful stuff.

Octavia Boulevard and Rose

This sign presents the passer-by with two options: risk certain injury and stand in the road; or trample the flowers and stand in the foliage. To read it, I walked around the other side, where the text is duplicated, and wondered: why bother installing the sign in this position? Why not rotate it ninety degrees, so that both faces are easily visible to pedestrians?

The art which it describes are the ghinlon / transcopes of Po Shu Wang. I do enjoy sitting in the median amongst start-stop city traffic, sucking in the exhaust and contemplating light refracting through the 'scopes.

In which we defend and relocate

I started out with Bastro Diablo Guapo, and then The Serpentine Similar, and then followed the Louisville-Chicago connection through Bitch Magnet, from the Oberlin spur. From there to Seam, to Tortoise (and their excellent Lazarus Taxon), and then winding up with the Lounge Ax Defense & Relocation CD, which is consistently outstanding. The first five tracks all hug the course of mid-nineties Chicago indie rock, with grinding guitars and start-stop rhythms: The Jesus Lizard, Shellac, Sebadoh (unexpectedly concise, and a neat fit to follow the "surgically precise" rock of Shellac of North America), June of '44, and the Cocktails.

The Compact Disc was put together to save the Lounge Ax, a remarkable club on the stretch of North Lincoln which had more than its share of debauchery and rock'n'roll. I spent many, many evenings here, arriving on bicycle, in a private automobile, via the L, even on a university-sponsored shuttle bus. I heard The Red Krayola on my 21st birthday; I took strips of grainy black-and-white pictures in the photobooth; I bugged Adam, that guy who recorded every show, to hook me up with a tape of the ear-shatteringly cool Yo La Tengo set in which Richard Rizzo of Eleventh Dream Day joined Ira for some first-class guitar wig-outs: the two of them freaked out on their instruments while studiously jumping on the dozens of pedals on the floor. I nodded off to sleep after moving apartments one steamy June or July afternoon and then heading up to catch a Combustible Edison set; I sprawled out on the steps lining either side of the club for dozens of shows; I think I even drank a drink there on occasion. Most of all, I rocked out, just as the CD does. For a compilation CD it is pretty consistently awesome; I could do without the four minutes of Guided By Voices, though.

In which we have more adventures with MUNI

Last night, Anna and I were returning from a film and a walk at the Embarcadero when we decided to take MUNI back home. Nothing could be simpler, right? At the Ferry Terminal, the eastern edge of San Francisco, a half-dozen light-rail lines (and the F-Market historical streetcar, to boot).

The light-rail stops running after ten o'clock due to ongoing track work, but that's no problem: MUNI runs shuttle buses.
However, the surface buses skip the Financial District entirely, and the 71 first alights at Fourth. So we walked a few blocks, hedging our bets that the F would not show before we got to Fourth. And it didn't. Neither did the 71, though, and that's what burned us. We waited for more than half an hour.

My Dark Places

James Ellroy's superb confessional work dances around every other piece of autobiography I have read. Ellroy's staccato style, reminiscent of a telegraph minus the STOPs, lays bare his ugly emotions, his raw desire, and his rich ascent to society after the gruesome murder of his mother.

Ellroy digs deeply into his unravelling mind as he examines the circumstances of her death. He looks hard at the Los Angeles (and area) Sheriff's Department; at the LAPD; at the local law enforcement; he digs into his father's unruly life; and finally he spends more than a year working intimately with a former cop to re-open the investigation into the killing.

Many of the details are lurid examples of Los Angeles noir: the Black Dahlia killing; the Bloody Christmas episode; and the infamous cocaine-deal murders surrounding "The Cotton Club"; Ellroy digs up myriad other incidents, and sprinkles them liberally through his narrative. The narrative: imagine William S. Burroughs amounts of physical and mental cruelty in the story, but with a much greater grasp on the narrative flow. The development that Ellroy shows in his characters as the story progresses amazes me: he has a phenomenal understanding of the characters, and of the world of Los Angeles crime.

In which we party on MUNI (not)

Tonight is a MUNI MUNI Metro Party flash mob dealie.
I do not like MUNI. While walking about to the much-changed Magnolia (new chef, new menu, fewer sauces for the frites), one of my companions, a visitor from Seattle remarked on how fortunate San Franciscans are: "You don't know how lucky you are, with these quiet electric buses." I told him about the off-spec diesel monsters that MUNI half-assedly took delivery of to run on the 71L route, the same buses that whine past our corner at 80 dB. I complained about MUNI, about the intermittent service, about how one can't rely on MUNI to get from point A to point B in less time than walking.
I do not like MUNI, and the service worsens year to year. MUNI faces continuing budget problems, and still fails to address its core scheduling problems.

In which we examine the art of the shiv

The Art of the Shiv illluminates one of my favourite words, shiv.

In which we find Lazarus Taxon

In another joyous moment of serendipity, I noticed Tortoise's new release just as I was leaving the record shop, unhappily empty-handed. Lazarus Taxon is a gleeful collection of everything that realises Tortoise's redefinition of rock: video collage; concrete photographs (automotive accidents, so ultra-real that I thought they were staged, cinematic); remixes by punk-rockers (Mike Watt), noise ( Nobukazu Takemura), and Yo La Tengo.

Lazarus Taxon contains many of the more rare Tortoise tracks ("Goriri", from Macro Dub Infection Vol. 1; "Yaus", their awesome, slanted construction from the Stereolab split single; and so on), and some outstanding video compositions, including "Dear Grandma and Grandpa".

The Golden Spruce / albedo

John Vaillant's first long work of non-fiction, The Golden Spruce, tells the riveting story of Grant Hadwin, a renegade logger; the sad tale of the Haida and the Haida Gwaii, the Americans native to a gorgeous set of remote islands in the Pacific Northwest; and the epic of the majestic, luminous, and biologically unique golden spruce.

A fantastic set of circumstances produced the Golden Spruce, and an equally interesting set produced the man who swam across a freezing river, chainsaw on his back, to cut it down. We could not see the forest for the trees, he said: allowing lumber companies to clear-cut old-growth forest while leaving token, unique trees like the Golden Spruce was a hypocrisy. Why fetishize a single tree? We should preserve the entire forest, and not small stands: the massive ecosystem of a forest requires massive land.

Curiously, Hadwin the assassin might not have realised the strong connection the Haida have with the tree, which they believe to contain the incarnation of a boy who, fleeing his moribund village, looked back despite his grandfather's warning. The tree was itself several hundred years old, and a biologically admirable specimen. From Vaillant's book I learned the word albedo, "The fraction of incident electromagnetic radiation reflected by a surface, especially of a celestial body." (Alternatively, it's "the spongy white substance on the inside of a citrus rind" -- perfect! I can drop that in conversation quite nicely.)

Vaillant describes the proud history of the Haida, their ties to the land, and the recent revitalization of Haida Gwaii, their native islands (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). He discusses the social, environmental, and psychological factors that shaped Grant Hadwin, a rugged individualist who claimed to have cut down the tree -- and then subsequently disappeared. The story gripped me from the first I heard about it, almost a decade following the incident.

Aleph & Tentacles

Anagram Tube Map.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl's first novel, helpfully provided with illustrations that underscore the preopossessing mystery surrounding the characters, has echoes of pretension similar to Umberto Eco's fantabulous Foucault's Pendulum, but resonates more closely to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. Undoubtedly the product of a fervent, well-read pen with ample verve and imagination, the book, like its protagonist, sits uncomfortably in its own smartness, reminiscent also of Donna Tartt's first novel.

Blue van Meer, the protagonist, competes obsessively with her handsome, widowed father in poetry-quoting, pronouncement-making, and other car-tripping episodes as they move from one small third-rate university town to another. A radical professor and writer, her father keeps her at arm's length as they settle in western North Carolina for the majority of the story's action ('action' is exactly the wrong word, for as much of the story happens in Blue's parenthetical citations as in the narrative itself. The text has only three foot-notes, but also several 'Visual Aids', much like the figures of our textbooks). Blue settles in to a cunningly-named clique of elite students at an exclusive prep school, the first at which she has ever spent an entire year.

The book has a few, jarring homophone typos: "stationary" for "stationery", "illicit" for "elicit"; and an irritating use of nouns as verbs: "ivied", "jack-o-lanterned", as though Pessl were too lazy to spin our her similies in full phrases.

As the events of the narrative lead to the tragedy described on the first page, the death of the clique's adult member, the reader senses the unease which comes from standard family and school troubles, the unease of adolescence. But suddenly Blue finds herself in command, and living up to the promise of epic adventure that she spelled out, again on the first page of the book. Pessl's plot and prose are meticulous, and perhaps even under-achieving.

In which another one bites the dust

No, I cannot get a MacBookPro: in addition to the different power supply, the MBP has an ExpressCard/34 but not a PCMCIA slot, which I rely on for mobile internet access. Dagnabbit.

In which freedom is not free

Ted Rall's comic today echoes my current political idea: forming the Fascist Party of America (a cursory check via OFSE turns up zilch). What perverted idea of Freedom might a Fascist have that our beloved Democrats and Republicans (oh, and Independents, too, right) have not already thought up? Our civil liberties are eroding faster than a Malibu cliff, and all in the name of preserving freedom. I looked up the lyrics to that annoying song but they mention nothing about this bitterly ironic justification for imposing mindless regulation on quotidian aspects of American life.

I am not concerned that the American Way of Life is disappearing: I worry that it has changed to resemble the iron fist of fascism. We have a secret police, we have detention, we have government control of newspapers; we, the American public, have legitimized much of this through our election of figureheads who weakly act as conduits for the interest of big business, of central power, and of money, money, money. We endorse it tacitly by wallowing in our fear, allowing misinformation to sweep over us and render us helpless. The current administration reminds me most of the reign of The Great Communicator, in which the United States was parcelled out to private interests, rather than the interest of the community.

The illustration comes from David Lance Goines, and is one of my very favourite images. I first saw it hanging above the desk of my third-year Greek professor, Laura Slatkin: we were reading the Antigone.

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards has written an eminently readable novel about the very ordinary strife of a family: The Memory Keeper's Daughter">The Memory Keeper's Daughter. A family slowly unravels after the birth of twins, their only children, one of whom the father hides from the mother: the child had Down's Syndrome, and the father feared that it would not be part of the picture-perfect family life he envisioned. He had this image of a Norman Rockwell small-town existence after moving away from his dirt-poor West Virginia family and eventually becoming a successful, educated member of his community in Kentucky. His family was itself ruptured by the death of his sister, who also had a terminal congenital disease.
The characters in this book are plain, even as they dissemble and act covertly. They grow gradually, and we can see the shadows cross their hearts well in advance. Still, Edwards's lucid writing makes each of the characters sad, at times blameless: the reader can see their motives, alternatively selfish and selfless, and understand why they act as they do, even if we do not condone the actions.
Part of the novel is set in Pittsburgh, and features the magnificent view from the Fort Pitt Bridge (why don't I have a picture like that?!?!). And it features quiet Regent Square.

Uncomplicated by heavy metaphor (beestings aside!), but with rather more foreshadowing than I found comfortable, this book entertained me. The difficult decisions that the characters made are the sort that we might each face as we grow, and right or wrong can be very tricky to gauge. And the decision that is wrong now might well be right five years in the future.

anent

A preposition, meaning "with regard to"; according to the Dictionary of Difficult Words, it is "Archaic or Scot[tish]", and "archaic or jocular". (The combinations fascinate me: Jocular Scottish? Archaic Archaic?) The Columbia Guide to Standard American English notes that anent "has a stuffy, impersonal quality, [and is] inappropriate in many contexts". I first came across it in the crossword, filling space in a rather mundane puzzle. I dislike the New York Times more and more, but the crossword remains true to itself.

In which I note the signs of the journalistic apocalypse

I have long felt sad about the waning of the newspaper, even before the advent of news-over-the-web (n.b.: not nntp newsgroups). Local newspapers fold under joint operating agreements gone stale, editorial boards fail to uphold once-proud standards, and the quality of the written word deteriorates. I am also mad quite specifically about the United States's "paper of record", the New York Times:

Although Charlie LeDuff's writing for the New York Times has been discredited as the result of plagiarised rather than original work, he continues to write for them.

The Metropolitan Diary, where once appeared delightful vignettes of New York city life, no longer features Phil Marden's poignant and witty illustrations. The single large illustrations no longer have the brevity that fits the stories, and the stories themselves have lost their verve. A new editor, perhaps? The byline has disappeared, too, in the past two years.

The persistent use of an apostrophe to denote a quantity following an acronym is wrong: the New York Times has been writing "New DVD's", rather than "New DVDs". This sort of poor editorial style has led to an unwelcome dumbing-down of the newspaper. I once considered that reading a newspaper was an achievement, representing one's ability to grasp current usage in valid context, but no longer, at least no longer with The Times.

UPDATE: After some thought-provoking comments from Aram, I need to remove the criticism of Charlie LeDuff while I reëvaluate the merits of the plagiarism charges. The New York Times has made quite a fuss recently about rediscovering their journalistic standards, and holding reporters accountable for vetting their sources, but I still have doubts that the newsroom is doing all it should to foster sincere reporters.
Aram also noted the change to my comment form. Wait 'til you see what happens next.

In which we wonder: is it animal? or vegetable? or mineral?

Willi Hennig was an entolmologist who developed a theory of phylogenetic systematics, describing how species relate to each other, which has led to the study known as cladistics.
This story about a deep-sea-dwelling blind antarctic sea spider underscores the difficulty of classification.

On the Burry Man

The quasi-mythical Burry Man of Edinburgh needs to answer Nature's call.

South Queensferry hosts the strange annual procession of the Burry Man during the Ferry Fair. This unique pagan-like cultural event is over three hundred years old, but its true origins are unknown. The name "Burry Man" is arguably a corruption of "Burgh Man", since the town was formerly a royal burgh. A local man is covered from head-to-toe in burrs - the hooked fruits from the Burdock plant - which adhere to undergarments covering his entire body, leaving only the shoes, hands and two eyeholes exposed. On top of this layer he wears a sash, flowers and a floral hat and he grasps two staves. His ability to bend his arms or sit down is very restricted during the long day and his progress is a slow walk with frequent pauses. Two attendants in ordinary clothes assist him throughout the ordeal, helping him hold the staves, guiding his route, and fortifying him with whisky sipped through a straw, whilst enthusiastic children go from door-to-door collecting money on his behalf. The key landmarks on the tour are the Provost's office and each pub in the village.

I wonder if "Burry Man" is an eggcorn, from "Burgh Man", or an eponym from the ceremonical character's covering of burrs. Either way, the idea of walking about all day with one's arms outstretched, drinking whiskey through a straw, is far from tantalizing.
And now for something completely different: trivia about Gloucester cheese rolling. Pass the scrumpy.

In which I find the only widget I will ever use

I have not become accustomed to using the OSX Dashboard Widgets, despite the proliferation of almost-there ideas expressed as mini-applications. I am still quite enamoured of the widget idea, and wrote a handful to ease some routine tasks at work -- actually, it did nothing for the tasks themselves, but take the scripts from very small pieces of shell code to bloated applets in a very pretty presentation layer.

I found this, the Disable Dashboard Widget, and voilà!, hundreds of megs of memory become free, and I am can remap a function key (f12) to something useful, like a screen-lock script.

In which I see dead transit ideas

The TransLink system, designed to unify the byzantine Bay Area transit systems, will shake its death rattle this autumn. How transit planners can hope to obtain useful data from such a small sample is beyond me, but they are trying to have a go at it with AC Transit and Golden Gate Transit riders. Since those two systems have almost no meeting points (except for the massive and depressing Transbay Terminal), I cannot imagine how useful this test will be. Why not MUNI, BART, Caltrain, and AC Transit?

MUNI has myriad problems of its own, from route management to budget deficits; from its aimless and useless web site to its perpetually-late buses. Easing integration amongst systems, and providing more reliable measurement of transit-system use, may go a long way to making transit more appealing. The integration will help passengers on the complex journeys around the Bay Area: a single ticket means less overhead for planning a trip. Measurement of ridership and activity will allow the transit agencies to plan more effective routes, determine how routes should interact, and allocate rolling stock to areas that need it.

The Chronicle has a story on the Transit Effectiveness study, which really should be called the Effective Transit project, but perhaps I split semantic hairs.

In which our hero explores fast-food combinatronics

One can use the Greedy Algorithm to generate the McNugget Numbers, a set of numbers obtained from combining the quantities of McNuggets chicken thingies.

Songs I have heard at Zeitgeist

Some music is indelibly marked in my mind with sitting outside at Zeitgeist. It was while drinking a quart in the shade of the eternally-resting tow truck that I heard the bouncy rock and roll of "I Will Dare" and promptly bought all of The Replacements albums on CD. A few years prior, I rediscovered The Minutemen when I heard "This Ain't No Picnic" blaring over the cook's holler.
The title track from the silly "Must've Been High" album by The Supersuckers suits the quiet anarchy of Zeitgeist very well; the plaintive cowpunk of The Geraldine Fibbers, who have now disappeared from the jukebox.

Another outstanding jukebox is the wee ipod at Hotel Biron. Th' other evening when I walked in some part of XTC's "Skylarking" was playing.

kapok

kapok is a tall tropical West African tree; the fibre obtained from its seed pods can stuff zafus and other cushions. It is also the national tree of Puerto Rico.

Market and Hyde / 8th

Two of my favourite pieces of agit-prop art have disappeared:

painted over. And I never did get a decent shot of them; both of these were taken with a point-and-shoot pocket camera, using a digital zoom.

In which everybody smokes crack today

If I could coördinate this:

a smoke-out day in which everyone smokes crack. I really do not understand the Federal attitudes towards drug use and possession, and the criminalization thereof. WSB had it right, of course, and desperately exhorted officials to address the head of the pyramid -- the distributors -- rather than the ever-spreading base, the consumers.

Yet misguided drug policy, in this country and therefore in many others who depend on our aid, continues to aim at the base.

If we could distribute crack to everyone in the country, and defy the government to prosecute and incarcerate all of us, we could show 'em. Or we could at least unveil the purveyors and distribution system, and the guv'mint could throw them all into the slammer, and we would have streets free from crack (and the steps to our apartment would be forever free from those irritating small vials).

Next: the whole nation tunes in, turns on, and drops out: Acid For All.

In which I am full of bile

Perhaps it is a side-effect of being in West L.A., but my fellow man has me chafing, irritable, and ready to swing a wooden bat in their general direction. Before I reach that extreme, however, perhaps I should enumerate my grievance, all of which concerns courtesy:

holding a door open

this is a small piece of consideration: as one passes through a door, one notices another behind you, and at least prevents the door from abruptly closing in that person's face. Not so: many times I have needed to scramble in order to keep the door open. I am taken aback that the oversized shades many people wear are not protection enough, as the sun blinds them to anyone but themself

holding a door open, the corollary

When I instinctively held the door open, I never received a smile, a thank-you, or a similar acknowledgement that the other person and I existed on the same plane. ... Perhaps that is because we do not.

assuming the world is your ashtray

(To borrow a phrase.) The number of people who cut in line, at the coffee-shop, at the valet (what is it with the ubiquitous valets?), at the maître-d', all saying, "I'm just getting a [something apparently small], I'll only be a minute, I am more important than you anyway".

Driving

Descartes ("cogito ergo sum") had it wrong. Ago machinam ergo sum is the Divine Equation of Existence.
At one point I found myself feeling sorry for someone driving a dilapidated old Nissan down the streets of Brentwood, and shook myself back to reality. Fuck cars, fuck private transport, and fuck Los Angeles for buggering the street-cars and buses. Repeatedly. Fuck 'em in th' ear.

Jogging in the street

Hopeful, I think that they might meet some disaster with the boobs who are driving as though they are all alone. Especially the jackasaurus jogging down San Vicente with his baby in a stroller, precariously just within reach and just within the door zone.

Theme music for this list: Why You'd Want To Live Here.

No, fixie.

Bike Portland reports that a Multnomah County judge has fined a fixed-gear rider for not being equipped with brakes. The judge additionally censured the rider for having a store-bought trucker cap, faux alleycat cards in her spokes, powder-coated rims, and for not living in the Mission.

The ramifications for San Francisco, where forty percent of the 15,000 new fixed-gear and track bicycles were sold last year, are tremendous. No-one wants to look like a sissy, stopping at traffic controls or using a caliper instead of a skip-stop -- or simply going hell-for-leather through traffic.