I'm a lasagna boy!

In which strange things happen as the clocks jump around

Daylight Savings Time, the autumn incarnation, is more interesting to me than the vernal. The mystery of the extra hour: what happens?

I was wakened by weeping, loud enough to hear up and down this block, an adult weeping.

Four squad cars and an ambulance are now in the intersection of Page and Scott, and the car that was idling on the eastern side of Page St has moved to the kerb. Earlier, the woman who was crying got into the back of the car, perhaps for protection: as I arrived at the window, a man (the driver?) got out and flagged down a passing prowler. Another arrived almost immediately, and then took off with lights ablaze -- perhaps to find the assailant?

The paramedics and police all left, suddenly; the woman left with the police, I think; I did not see where the man went, but the car is still parked haphazardly at the corner.

In which we play merry[-]hell

The reason I earlier stumbled through several online reference dictionaries, including the Hobson-Jobson, was to determine the origin and punctuation of the phrase play merry hell. Does a hyphen belong between the latter two words? In that case, is merry-hell a particular sort of hell?

The Peevish Dictionary of British Slang cites this as a verb phrase: "To be very angry". Most citations or uses of this phrase on the internet omit the hyphen.

Where does this term originate? It does not ever seem to mean "wreak havoc", as the phrase "raising hell" does, but strictly "to be mad".

mephitic

In between checking references in the Dictionary of Difficult Words, the Hobson-Jobson Dictionary (of words coming into English from Hindi), I came upon mephitic, an adjective meaning "miasmic; poisonous, foul-smelling, having an unpleasant odor"; also "capable of killing by poison"; this word seems most appropriate for the coming All-Hallows Eve, which is a typically boisterous celebration in San Francisco. With the preternaturally warm weather we have enjoyed it may well be a particularly fine night out.

In which our hero is a Chrome Tubby

When the extent of my apartment was a record player (sadly broken on my move to San Francisco), an amplifier, and pair of ten-year-old speakers (now almost twenty, and still rockin' steady), oh, and probably a bed and a lamp, I would sit on the floor and listen to a few songs again and again.

Metronomic Underground, the lead track on Stereolab's yellow glitter double elpee, Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- I have a nagging sensation that my purchasing this record with Aram's coöperation (and massive employée discount!) led to some difficulty back in Chicago --;

Viva Last Blues, the rockin' incarnation of Will Oldham;

The Serpentine Similar, the magical and precise difficult full-length by David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke that introduced me to the Louisville-Chicago-Oberlin triangle;

and Travelling Light, a heartbreaking (and, some would say, wrist-slitting) single by the wretched Tindersticks. (Whose second, untitled album I bought because Mark Athitakis unhesitating recommended it, and because the NME review cited on the sticker read "Total F***ing Godhead!", a phrase apparently coined by a SubPop exec to describe Soundgarden, but, eh.)

In fact, at one of the house parties we threw on Wightman Street, I received a visit from the local police, responding to a complaint by neighbours that our music was too loud. At the back of the house we found someone lying on the floor of my bedroom, playing the only available record at earsplitting volume: Metronomic Underground (aka Chrome Tubby).

Now here I am listening to Metronomic Underground again and again. Apparently the lyrics are Socialist and complicated, but I really cannot ever make them out enough to interpret. I stopped Laetitia once outside a San Francisco gig, but she was (understandably!) more interested in feeding the baby than in redacting her poetry, and left me with a signed tour single that reads "Help Salim! I am a rock!" as she dashed back to the tour bus. That's it, that's the law, that's the whole of law.

Whoops. Different song.

None of my record players has an endless repeat feature. The first one I had -- the only record player in the family, an all-in-one hi-fi unit with a tuner and amplifier and pair of speakers -- cheerfully accommodated 78s as well as big-hole 45s and longplays, and had an endless repeat. One could also go all out and stack the records one atop the other!

I rarely listen to records these days; so many songs and albums are in my iTunes Library, and the songs that aren't I miss only rarely (but then, when I miss them, I miss them immediately and deeply. Tart's "Kite", a song that will never appear properly mastered on a CD, is one of these songs. I learned the word "inchoate" from comments scrawl across the WHPK radio station copy of the single; I think Will used it in his review).

CUT TO FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER: I have dug through several dusty boxes of neat, alphabetised forty-fives only to realise that I probably searched for this record sometime within the past few years, and thus probably filed it somewhere in the stack of records directly beneath the turntables.
Aha.
Here it is: Tart. "single." Michael Lenzi plays drums on this. Joy Gregory, who was teaching at the Lab School at the time, sings the delirious "I'm a kite, twisting, turning in the wind / maybe I can catch some lightning".
$3.25 from Ajax Records in November 1994.

CUT TO ONE DAY AND ONE GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH LATER:

In which we meet at the gate

Make a fake boarding pass and "demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless". Or meet your loved ones at the gate -- remember that romantic feeling, of walking down the jetway and seeing your beloved's face at the gate?
I sure don't.

UPDATE: Christopher Soghoian, the graduate student and security researcher behind the boarding-pass generator, had his apartment searched and computers seized by the Federales. Boing Boing have the scoop and follow-ups.

In which I get a tune wedgie

Erik sent me this link, as reward for an amicably naughty game we have been playing for the past ... oh, ten-plus years. I sometimes call him and leave brief messages with catchy song lyrics ("All the old paintings on the wall, ..." or "On a steel horse I ride! And I'm wanted ..."), just enough to get a song caught in his head. And he responds in kind, and gives it the name "tune wedgie".

More fun with music:

One of my favourite such songs features the line ... rumor around town says you think you might be heading down to the shore.. Have at it.

In which I get no S(MC)atisfaction

Although Apple's new firmware does not address the crashes on my MacBook Pro, it may help MacBook users who experience random crashes.

In which this song is only six words long

"Weird Al" Yankovic sang about this, Hemingway wrote about it, and several science-fiction authors have stepped up to the challenge: express a story in six words. My favourite: Eileen Gunn's submission.

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
        — Eileen Gunn

In which our late-night cup overfloweth

First NOPA adds flair to later dining, now the latest developments around The Horseshoe in the Lower Haight promise another late-night restaurant -- a proper restaurant, not a greasy spoon. Not that I have anything against six strips of late-night bacon at Original Joe's, mind you. The Horseshoe burnt last year in a spectacular three-alarm fire.

Boris Nemchenok, a sommelier and former manager of Mario Batali's Otto Enoteca Pizzeria in the Big Apple, is bringing the enoteca concept to San Francisco's lower Haight, opening Uva (grape in Italian), in the space of the Horseshoe Coffeehouse (568 Haight St.) next spring.

Nemchenok and his partner, chef Ben Hetzel, want the 49-seat wine
bar-style restaurant to be family friendly, with lots of antipasti,
panini, cheeses and salumi, with prices ranging from $4-$10 a plate.

They plan to start with 80 different Italian wines and work their way
up to 150. About 25 wines will be sold by the quartino (eight-ounce
decanters) for $7-$13. Bottle prices will range from $20-$40.

The best part -- Nemchenok wants to serve dinner until 1 a.m. daily.
Now that's Italian.

In which America is Stolen

I watched Stealing America, Dorothy Fadiman's documentary about the electronic voting irregularities in the 2004 US Presidential election. She skirts around some of the other problems with voting in the recent election, especially about how many inner-city voting precincts faced disproportionately lengthy waits (eight or more hours) to vote; disenfranchisement of US military personnel; and the unusual disinclination of mainstream American media to cover the electronic voting problems. The film does delve into the systematic and political problems with electronic voting, and exposes the grave doubts that many Americans have in the entire voting process.
I was amused and dismayed by the film's extensive use of footage from Comedy Central. Although the comedy bits from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert provided relief from the sometimes dry investigative commentary, they also made the gravity of the film weaker. The film only touched on Robert Kennedy's excellent Rolling Stone piece Was The 2004 Election Stolen? via his interview on The Daily Show, in fact.

office

While reading the delightful exploits of working-class sleuth Montague Egg in Hangman's Holiday, I came across an unexpcted usage of the word office: "We had the office he was expected this way," spoken by a police-sergeant describing how they suspected that one of the men in the bar-parlour of an inn was a criminal.

This usage may be the same as illustrated in the Cardshark online definition of office in their Gambling Glossary: "A secret signal passed from a gambler to his confederate".

In which the Lower Haight Blocks the House

Today was a beautiful day for the first (annual?) Lower Haight Block Party.
Aram, Greg, and David King, one half of the Museum of Small Things Davids, were collectively selling witty t-shirts (Greg looked quite natty in his "Straight Outta Haight" tee), and shared a colourful booth with Sarah and her beautiful glass jewelry, and a woman who stitched great patterns onto handmade bags (-- anyone have her URL?).
The street scene had plenty of kids running around, girls on roller skates, the necessary but still unsettling weird clown on stilts, and lots of loud music. The Tamale Lady strolled past with a couple of coolers of her finest. Little other food was available on the street, although most of the neighbourhood restaurants (and MCDs) were in full effect -- I was half-expecting some funnel cakes or italian ice.
David took a rattle-can to my duds and put The Bomber, a great design, onto my undershirt. That's street art.

More belly-aching about the macbook pro

Oddly, Universal binaries on the MacBook Pro keep crashing, most notably Safari and the Finder itself. Third-party applications seem most stable: even Firefox remains running reliably.

The MacBook Pro has also developed a tinny, high-pitched whine that I cannot correlate with high disk or CPU activity, and drives me absolute batshit (I am also preternaturally sensitive to the "whine" of fluorescent lamps). Yuck. I am going to go play with a MacMini and see if that offers any relief.

nopa

After several months of rebuffed attempts to get into this place, Anna and I finally sat down in NOPA, first at the long bar and then at a two-top.

I got over the ridiculous name ("North of Panhandle" is off by a few hundred meters and a whole New York City concept). The drinks are good, and the menu promising, both for cocktails and for wine (the half-bottle selection is quite decent, even). In fact, the whole dining experience was pleasant enough that it renewed my enthusiasm for eating out in San Francisco. There are few enough honest restaurants of any price; I can think of Papalote, , the delicious pizzerias Pauline's and Little Star, and, the difficult-to-get-into Slanted Door -- well, I can't really think of too many other outstanding places to eat, places that advertise the quality of their ingredients and stick to their principles.

The Bay Area has many other fine places to have a breakfast (Ole's, say, or Kate's Kitchen), lunch (Mondo Caffé), and dinner; or to have a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, or even a glass of real ale. But we seem short on honest places to get an unpretentious plate of good cooking.

Nopa has yummy, good food made fresh in the kitchen (which we could see from our table), good drinks made right at the bar, and pleasant, attentive staff. I was impressed and pleased. Now if I could reliably get a table ...!

In which the the third time's the charm

The second MacBook Pro battery — Apple recalled the first version — began discharging completely overnight. The battery charge went from 210 to 39 minutes overnight, and in fact barely held 15 minutes once disconnected from the power supply. I swapped out the battery, and the third time's the charm. I hope.

In which computers meet containers meet construction

Sun announced their Project Blackbox, which will deliver a datacenter-in-a-container. Containers are re-used everywhere, for offices and for stores, for restaurants and for computing facilities. Containers and cranes are ubiquitous in the delivery and construction of our infrastructure, and I always want to point people at a decent, illustrated explanation of tower cranes, the poetic and succinct , metonymy for a growing city. I found a good presentation at How Stuff Works dot com.

In which we are subject to the undersound

The Undersound project is a station-by-station indexed repository of "localized interpersonal interactions" based not on conversation on the platform, but through the up- and down-load of music in the London Tube.

In which the best lake costume wins!

The Southern Exposure-sponsored Mission Lake Perimeter Bike Race takes place Saturday. The artist Ledia Carroll will supervise the race and celebratory barbeque.
This is a very cool piece of urban archaeology.

Another interesting water-themed fixie ride is the Los Angeles River, which has become a more-or-less annual event.

In which computers meet containers

Sun announced their Project Blackbox, which will deliver a datacenter-in-a-container. Containers are re-used everywhere, for offices and for stores, for restaurants and for computing facilities.

In which he rides 24 hours

My buddy David is riding the 24 Hours of Moab mountain-bike madness along with some of his co-workers, and they are keeping a blog. Crazy stuff: beer, mud, five-year-old kids on bikes, and non-stop rain. Plus these guys are punishing their bikes and bodies more than I can imagine.

In which evolution triumphs

Tom Lehrer sang "It's not against any religion to dispose of a pigeon", and got me started on the notion of urban wildlife. In the pigeon, have we humans produced the ideal pest, one who lives symbiotically off our excess food, our wasted resources, and our tall urban buildings? Once a source of food and a means of communication (really!), the pigeon has become a scourge on buildings and public squares in every metropolis.

The Public Art Program of the San Francisco Arts Commission has struck me as hit-or-miss, but the current kiosk exhibit along Market St. wonderfully reflects the challenges of urban art. One of the six posters shows a proud peregrine falcon, which eats pigeons and also prospers in downtown San Francisco.

This exhibit, which I see while traipsing the unfriendly blocks of Market St on my way home, coupled with an interesting piece on urban pigeon control in today's New York Times Magazine brought to mind the Tom Lehrer song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (mp3 recording), which first made concrete the inchoate notion I had that yes, pigeons are expendable pieces of Nature.

In which we may have another ticket

I hope that conflation of "flash passes" and "smart cards" in this Chronicle report of a new BART fare card refers to TransLink, and not some new system, or a variation of the BART Plus ticket. Six years ago, TransLink showed promise, and gave commuters who use more than one transit system great hope that they might have easier-to-manage fares. The system has gone nowhere, and even though it could significantly reduce face-collection costs for some transit agencies, and improve ridership reporting for all, it has not received the widespread adoption or promotion it needs to succeed.

stridulate

v.intr. To produce a shrill grating, chirping, or hissing sound by rubbing body parts together, as certain insects do; v.tr. To produce by rubbing body parts together. From Latin stridulus, from stridere, to make harsh sounds; onomatopoeic.

A cricket or tarantula may stridulate, the former to report the temperature, the latter to ward off predators.

Gillo Pontecorvo

Gillo Pontecorvo died.

Mr. Pontecorvo will be remembered best for “The Battle of Algiers,” a stark portrayal, shot in black and white, of the bloody uprisings that led to Algeria’s independence from France in 1962. Admired and honored when it first appeared, it received renewed acclaim when it was rereleased in the United States in 2004. A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, called the film “astonishing cinema vérité” and “a political thriller of unmatched realism and a combat picture remorseless in its clarity.”

The movie was based on a book by Saadi Yacef, who had been the leader of the insurgent cell in the Algiers Casbah that the French crushed in 1957. He survived capture and, after Algerian independence, approached Mr. Pontecorvo to make the film.

“Had it been up to Yacef, the result would have been pure propaganda,” the author Michael Ignatieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2004. “Pontecorvo held out for a deeper vision, and the result is a masterpiece, at once a justification for acts of terror and an unsparing account of terror’s cost, including to the cause it serves.”

The film depicts a cycle of escalating violence and torture as revolutionaries of the National Liberation Front attack fellow Arabs and the French police, who then retaliate, only to provoke more attacks.

Mr. Yacef also produced the film and had a starring role as the leader of the revolutionaries. Indeed, the cast of the film, shot on location in the Casbah, consisted almost entirely of nonprofessional actors, adding to its grim documentary quality.

“The Battle of Algiers” won the Golden Lion for best film at the 1966 Venice International Film Festival. (Mr. Pontecorvo directed the festival for four years, starting in 1992.) But its legend grew as it was used as a kind of training film by both urban guerrillas and the authorities trying to suppress them. The Black Panthers studied the film in the 1960’s, and in 2003, months after the war against Iraqi insurgents began, the Pentagon screened the film for military and civilian war planners.

From little things big things grow

Muhammad Yunus, a proponent of microfinancing as a means to economic self-realisation, received the Nobel Peace Prize for his development of Grameen Bank, "banking for the poor". He is a powerful and passionate speaker, a humble man, and has great and patient vision. I am a little surprised that he did not win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics -- although I am not certain that the theory of microcredit is a great advance in economics, it certainly marks a departure from the mind-boggling statistics that dominates the field.

Let's Learn Maori

A recent edition of Bruce Biggs's (apparently well-known and classic) text on learning the Maori language has some revealing sentences. To describe the conditional tense, the book proposes: "Whenever the Queen comes to New Zealand, the Maori people suffer a disaster."

And to illustrate the concept of ownership: "Please restrain your octopus. The fishermen are coming soon."

Te Taurawhiri i te Reo Māori, the official New Zealand site on the Maori language, has an interesting Flash-based interface.

In which we have fun with power management

I have (just only!) discovered the pmset command for the PowerBook / MacBook Pro (ugh. that name!).

sudo pmset -b lidwake 0

instructs the power manager to wake the machine only after a keypress, even if the lid opens.

pmset -b specifies the paramets for battery power management only, and pmset -c for AC only. pmset -a sets both, but may overwrite the battery settings in some cases.

I had to reboot recently because of permissions corruption somewhere in my profile: after the upgrade to 10.4.8, the computer no longer demanded a password when waking from sleep or screensaver mode (the preference remained selected, though). The uptime was 28 days, which I don't think I ever had with a PowerBook.

The Basque History of the World

Against my intuition, I ordered a copy of Mark Kurlansky's Basque History of the World and started reading it. Kurlansky's research, experience, and writing all shine in this history: he interleaves the contentious political and nationalist struggles of the Basque with well-researched, concisely-written pieces about Basque culture -- the typical beret, the recently-formalized yet still-isolated language -- and in doing so, underscores the unique cultural and political contributions of the Basque people.

I was very happy to find that Google Earth has excellent satellite imagery and map coverage of Basque country, and the online version includes the beautiful subway stations!

ENIAC

Scott McCartney's ultimately disappointing book ENIAC, "The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer", meanders through the lengthy ENIAC, a computer designed to facilitate the production of trajectory books for the United States Army.
McCartney briefly describes the history of computers, including Babbage's Difference Engine, before he delves into the convoluted intellectual and business history of the computer itself. He staunchly defends the two maverick engineers, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert, who led the ENIAC team at the University of Pennsylvania, and casts their efforts in a happily sentimental light. I was more interested in the technical aspects of ENIAC: of the concept of stored programs; of magnetic tape for storing data; the use of which Eckert pioneered; and of the parallel-processing units. These receive some attention, but light detail, in McCartney's book.
The book also ends very unhappily, as did the lives of the two protagonists. Neither succeeded in business, and together they filed and lost the patent on the first computer. Each lost a wife under tragic circumstances -- indeed, Mauchly's wife died during a midnight bathe off New Jersey, and this mysterious incident led to the U S Army denying Mauchly the security clearance necessary for his computer company to obtain vital government contracts. But the story I wanted to read was not in this book: this was much more of a human-interest story than anything else.

The Westing Game

One of my very favourite books, a delightful puzzle by Ellen Raskin, is The Westing Game. A few years ago, while poring through the stacks at a second-hand bookshop in Fairfax or thereabouts, I found an autographed first edition of the book, and picked it up to re-read it.
It's a complex, thrilling book, which picks up the pace and then pauses to let juicy details emerge, and then speeds up again. The writing is rich but never too complex, and has all the non-politically-correct sorts of details that could never appear in a so-called children's book today.
The Wikipedia entry on Ellen Raskin has some great pointers to other internet resources; the entry for the book itself has most of the plot detail, but is useful after-the-fact. The University of Wisconsin has a few manuscript pages online.

Cod

When I first read Mark Kurlansky's Cod, a "biography of the fish that changed the world", I did not enjoy the book. His writing jarred me. Despite the great idea, of framing historical events such as the discovery of America and the American Revolution, in the context of our relations with cod, his run-on sentences and peculiar transitions wore on my nerves.
I am enjoying the book more on this second reading, but still find Kurlansky's writing amateurish, inelegant. He has an excellent theme, and innovatively organises the book not strictly around a historical timeline, but also around cultural phases concerning the cod. He examines the discovery of North America from the fisherman's perspective, and how trade routes through the Bay of Biscay, the Irish Box, the North Sea, and ultimately to the Newfoundland and Maine seaboard. Kurlansky intersperses recipes, anecdotes, and songs about the fish: ugly though it may be, its flaky white flesh has inspired much in the way of food and even some Catalonian creation myth.

When I was but a wee lad, I saw autumn come in to Pittsburgh as the leaves in the parks nearby turned colour, as the wind picked up and blew the falling leaves in bright swirls, and as the Italian grocers in the Strip District unloaded wooden boxes of what looked like ... wood. Turns out that the stiff, pine-coloured contents of the crates were bacalao, the peculiar dried, salted cod known and loved throughout the Mediterranean. After several days of soaking in a tub, the fish would be ready for cooking. Or one could leave it dry and chip bits of it into a dish for flavour. Or one could use it to settle an argument, and hit an opponent upside the head.

More about containers

The new Freitag boutique in Zürich (cool photos here) is constructed of containers. Freitag makes messenger-stylee bags from old truck tarpaulins; their designs do not captivate me as much as the Barcelona stylee, such as Demano and Vaho (Vaho means "the breath of air that frosts a mirror", or something like that -- a concept I do not think English represents with a single word), but are distinct and bright.

Shipping containers can find reuse in lots of innovative ways. And shipping containers are eerily beautiful, as in Edward Burtynsky's large-format photographs of containers and other elements of the commercial infrastructure.

Three Men in a Boat

I finally read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, often described as a classic. The book gracefully unrolls the story of a boating-trip down the Thames, with its attendant comic misadventure. The first sentence sets the dry tone for the book: "There were four of us ...", because the boat holds the three men -- and Montmorency the dog. A grade-school friend gave me his copy of this many, many years ago -- maybe twenty! -- but it still sits on the shelf. I picked up a paperback reprint while travelling, and found that the book's narrative neatly suits the reading of a few pages while on a train or while waiting for a flight.
P G Wodehouse pays homage to Jerome in Psmith in the City, setting an exciting political meeting to the scandalous retelling of an incident from Three Men in a Boat.

In which we take a guided walk

ask.com now offers pedestrian directions as part of their mobile widget, and another (Flash-based) site offers excellent walking direcions through most of London.

Having walking directions available may prove a phenomenal application for mobile devices, and probably also a windfall for advertising. I would probably appreciate an expert-informed recommendation for a good café when walking around an unfamiliar city, and possibly also an advertising incentive. Having the directions, and making them rock-solid, is a great start towards even better local, targeted advertising.

diegetic

The adjective diegetic refers to the source of music in a film: "if [the music] is part of the narrative sphere of the film ... if a character in the film is playing a piano, or turns on a CD, the resulting sound is 'diegetic.' If, on the other hand, music plays in the background but cannot be heard by the film's characters, it is termed non-diegetic or, more accurately, extra-diegetic." I learned the terms "source" and "cue" music some years ago in a film-theory something-or-other, but I prefer this term, which comes from the classical Greek philosophical contrast with mimesis: the contrast of exposition with demonstration.