I'm a lasagna boy!

In which you can't get it back

If you are ever in need of audio files of various people hiccuping, look no further than Hiccup (sic) Lovers dot net, the project of one Eric Clapton. Video, too. This is it.

I spell the word hiccough.

On houses made of paper

Shigeru Ban's innovative [re-]use of everyday materials humbles me: he has an extraordinary imagination. The paper bridge he built with Japanese and French architecture students.

27 juillet (AFP) - Japanese architect Shigeru Ban -- iconic for his use of eco-friendly, lightweight materials -- on Friday lifted the veil on a paper bridge over the Gardon River in southern France.

Built half a mile from the Pont du Gard -- a section of ancient Roman bridge classed as a UN World Heritage site -- Shigeru's cardboard-tube structure is strong enough to carry 20 people at a time.

Reaching over the water to a sandy islet mid-river, it opens to the public for six weeks starting on Monday, before it is dismantled for the rainy season.

"It is a very interesting contrast, the Roman stone bridge and the paper bridge. Paper too can be permanent, can be strong and lasting. We need to get rid of these prejudices," Ban said.

"A bridge was one of my dreams," he said, as he thanked the two dozen French architecture students and three from Japan who built the bridge as a month-long project.

Weighing 7.5 tonnes, the bridge is made from 281 cardboard tubes, each 11.5 centimetres (four inches) across and 11.9 millimetres thick. The steps are recycled paper and plastic and the foundations wooden boxes packed with sand.

Balloons filled with 1.5 tonnes of water were used to test its resistance, said Ban's assistant Marc Ferrand.

Born in 1957 in Tokyo, Ban made a name by designing cardboard shelters for use by earthquake victims in Japan, Turkey and India and by refugees following the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

In which we memorize awkward phrases

Another good Step Five. The one I saw previously was amusing; this one is useful.

Phrases I use frequently include: "No." "Show me the log messages that indicate my code is at fault." "A lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." "Let's drink."

In which I drink like a Belgian

After splitting a six-pack of Hoegaarden on the stoop with Aram, Chris at Biron handed me a few more bottles: Witkap Pater Stimulo, Saison Dupont, and Scalbi (this last was 12%; I can't find it online, but it sure was tasty, and bread-like. I skipped dinner.)

Back to the stoop: Damon brought over a six-pack of Moose Drool brown ale, and then we followed up with Anchor Porter and Racer 5 IPA (too hoppy for my taste, so I mostly stuck with the Porter).

My foray into lagers continued with a (small!) bottle of Kingfisher along with a salty saag.

In which I write like a king

Although I don't like rollerballs, I dig the technology behind them. I also dig hacking on things. Put the two together, and voilà: awesome pen for not much cabbage. I especially like Step Five (of twelve).

In which I am having fun while learning

I am learning lots of new words (in between some hot craigslist action) while playing Chicktionary, which sounds like the sort of reference Bukowski wishes he had but is really an innocuous game — well, innocuous enough once you turn off the sound. And while playing Boggle online.

Words like raphes and ephas, which actually turned up on different boards, seem like filler, but Chicktionary is good fun. Good promotional fun.

Travels in the Scriptorium

Sophie Harrison's review of Paul Auster's most recent excursion into modernity touches on some of the salient points: the deliberate unfolding of a very physical plot (with some bumps; unless I misread, the protagonist, a cunningly-named Mr Blank, discovers a method of locomotion twice); the prominent reappearance of characters from Auster's previous books; and a willfully obscure approach to the oratio obliqua that frequently appears in his work. In this book, we have not the satisfaction of The Book of Illusions, not the implied, subtly beautiful closure of The New York Trilogy.

The mélange of characters suggests that Auster has uncovered a box of notes (index cards? A particular notebook? a few odd pages of typescript?) and slapped this book together. It is not quite satisfying, and too much comes through a sly tone in the narrator's voice, or in the sudden dialogue of the visiting characters. Travels ... feels both unfinished and uninspired.

Innocent Blood

The story in Innocent Blood is gripping and ultimately very sad. One of P D James's few non-formula mystery novels, it begins with a mystery that uncovers a murder already solved and suggests a murder yet to happen; although the actors are all laid out for the reader to see, the tension and thrill build throughout the story.

The sad ending is marred by one of James's typical mentions of sexual peccadillos, but this is overall one of her most impressive works. Although I always enjoy reading the Dalgliesh mysteries (less so the Cordelia Grey stories), they have stock characters and hackneyed concepts that always come down to class or ideological struggles; James's characters are all too often hidebound, predictable, and stiff in their expression. She describes rather than invokes them, which leads to a very prescriptive sort of book: she shoves much of the character detail down our throats, leaving little for interpretation (side note: this edition of Innocent Blood includes a Readers' Guide, with all of two questions. James really does not leave much to the imagination, which is an odd sort of rigidity for a mystery novelist).

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

In this relatively early (1926, a few years after the début of Hercule Poirot and his mustaches in The Mysterious Affair at Styles) novel, Agatha Christie subverts the still-young detective genre with a tour-de-force. She relies on none of the formulaic pieces of conversation that pollute her later books; few of the archetypes, although the bluff military type, Hector Blunt, makes an appearance, as does the secretly-down-on-her-luck young woman in the character of Flora Ackroyd; and none of the infuriating plucked-from-the-air contrivances that mar the later Poirot books. Almost all the clues are apparent, the single piece being a telegram that Poirot dispatches in a way that is invisible to the reader. Re-reading this novel, Agatha Christie's formidable reputation becomes real. I place this next to the A B C Murders and the weird Cards On The Table as her foremost mysteries.

In which we work around

This script is a work-around for Apple Bugs 5296510 and 5296576, which have not
yet been fixed by Apple. This problem only affects certain models of MacBook Pro.
This script downgrades the Apple AirPort drivers and firmware distributed with
Mac OS X 10.4.10 to the ones distributed in 10.4.9

Your model identifier is MacBookPro2,2

You are running Mac OS X, version 10.4.10, build 8R2218



Performing task: check

  You have 4 of 4 parts reverted to 10.4.9

  You have 4 of 4 parts present

  Currently loaded 802.11 and AirPort drivers:

        com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family (153.2)

        com.apple.driver.AirPortAtheros (223.47.4)

  Your WiFi stuff:

      Wireless Card Type: AirPort Extreme  (0x168C, 0x87)

      Wireless Card Locale: USA

      Wireless Card Firmware Version: 1.0.47

      Wireless Channel: 44

Samuel Smith Organic Lager

Many years ago, I frequented the basement of Oberlin's student union. Lots of good rock'n'roll (rock! rock! notably, the first time I saw Bricklayercake!), and $2 bottles of Sam. Smith. Those days are long gone, though, but I can still enjoy a good cool bottle of the beer: I have really been enjoying the Lager, which surprises me; I don't often enjoy lagers. The Sam. Smith Lager is excellent, and organically-produced.

Captain's Reserve Imperial IPA

A little light for an Imperial IPA, which suited the early afternoon; cool, not too hoppy but hoppy enough. I was torn between this and a Sly Fox IPA from a traditional beer engine, but opted for the tang of refrigeration.
A few days ago, I also returned to a few bottles from the Brooklyn Brewery (no links because their site is way too Flash-y): the Pennant Ale and the East India Pale Ale. The Pennant hit the spot: a little less hoppy and more malty, and a good balance of flavours. The Brooklyn IPA again struck me with the sour aftertaste of the hops, which probably would go down better with more cheese (I had none); the Captain recommends a Stilton; I will try it again sometime with a Cotswold.

On a glass of ice

Some years ago, I had the thought to write a book on ice. In addition to a prècis of the chemical and physical properties of ice, I wanted to focus on the social aspects of the thing. Ice separated classes, divides the restaurants of different countries, and made possible the cocktail. Chemical ice makes possible the global distribution of once-local delicacies; ice as a physical force has shaped our neighbourhoods and our continents.

Ice has great importance to scientific and political issues: at the Earth's polar caps, it represents a bank of fresh water that might be used to share water with arid countries; in relatively unexplored areas of the world, the ice is a time capsule that contains undisturbed microörganisms from tens of thousands of years. For extraterrestrial explorers, ice holds the promise of past or future life; for terrestrial explorers, ice is a wonderland, full of adventure and excitement from the skating-rink at Rockefeller Center to glaciers in New Zealand.

I wanted to examine not these, but the social history of the stuff. In literature and in popular culture, ice has connotations beyond its physical properties. My outline and notes did not amount to much of a book, and I have long since filed the idea next to my Great American Novel (iteration one: the road trip, but not On The Road) and my examination of the language of sacrifice in the Greek dramatic corpus (I got to examples one and two, the second of which I wrote with the title, "The Religious and Poetic Imagery of Wine-Drinking in the Cyclops of Euripides"; the first is yet unfinished; I wandered into a critical examination of The Cyclops itself, and never recovered. I wonder why, to this day, very few critical studies of the sole surviving satyr play exist). I no longer have my notes; they were on a computer that was lost, reformatted, stolen; they were merely a handful of citations, from mid-nineteenth-century travellers' accounts of encountering ice in American hotels, from sea captains who dragged shiploads of the stuff from Canada to points south, and so on.
... The social aspects of ice are evasive, subtle, and would require more diligence to unearth than I have in me. I would be quite happy to travel to Florence and look for the bar where Camillo Negroni adulterated the Americano (Campari, Vermouth rosso, and soda) with gin, to see whether he had his served up, with a famously thin layer of ice atop, or on the rocks, in an elegant tumbler (after dozens of Negronis, I still cannot decide). I could walk the far reaches of Nunavut and see how the ice has shaped the land -- and how that, in turn shapes the people (for that matter, I could walk through San Francisco, or New York, and see ditto. But I have never visited Nunavut.) I could walk through Buenos Aires (which recently had its first snowstorm in almost a century) and talk to wharfers who unloaded ice from ships a few generations ago; I could find the communities in Russia and in Scandinavia and in Manchuria where people need to cope with moving about on ice almost every day of the week. Marco Polo reported on people who skated along the ice, with curved shoes.

A few years ago, Mariana Gosnell's book Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance appeared, and I figured the market for books on ice was probably saturated. I started reading this book, but it was both sufficiently different from the book I wanted to write and more meandering; I did not get very far.

All of this came to mind as I filled a glass with pieces of ice from the automatic icemaker in the refrigerator (there's another book: On refrigeration. This would be both a social and scientific book, but not as much about the physics or chemistry of refrigeration, but about the public-health aspects.). I enjoy drinking water from an iced glass: as the ice melts, the clear taste of the water refreshes me. This is one of my indulgences: the energy and expense of ice.

In which we shake and bake

Or wake and quake, to be precise:

"It was all pretty minor," said U.S. Geological Survey spokeswoman Leslie Gordon. "It didn't interrupt donut production."
Gordon said the quake was centered about two miles northeast of downtown Oakland on the Hayward fault. The actual epicenter was in the Oakland Hills near Joaquin Miller Park and the Mormon Temple, according to an online topographic mapping service that works with the USGS.

Aram and I rode past the Mormon Temple plenty the first year that he lived in Oakland: he on the Batavus (!!) and me on either the Ciöcc or the Dutchess. Nice rolling paths along that area, and Joaquin Miller is an awesome little park for exploration on a mountain bike.

In which we work from home

Wired Magazine published an article about working from home as an independent web hax0r, and how the informal collective Jelly has got something going on.

I couldn't sit in a cramped room with people that I was not collaborating with, and I have enjoyed no success with my own get-rich-quick^Wweb2.0 ideas (the Get-Into-Heaven cards, notably).

In which we understand the recursion

Two professors at University College London have published their solution to describing a perplexing shape in three dimensions. The Möbius Strip has long fascinated me, from the literature about it to the topological conundrum it presents.

The strip is made from what mathematicians call a 'developable' surface, which means it can be flattened without deforming its shape — unlike, say, a sphere.

When a developable surface is formed into a Möbius strip, it tries to return to a state of minimum stored elastic energy, like an elastic band springing back after being stretched.

But no one has been able to model what this final form will be. "The first papers looking at this problem were published in 1930," says Starostin. "It seems such a simple question — children can make these things — but ask the experts how to model this shape and we've had nothing."

In which we flout the arbitrary constraints

One, two, three, four, or five? Prescriptive behaviour, adherence to arbitrary policy such as this, smacks of a personality without discipline. If one has discipline, one certainly does not advertise it.

As Mildred asked Johnny, "What are you rebelling against?"

In which he has a different sort of revolution

&tThis guy checked out all 171 Starbucks in New York City, beginning by bicycle in Washington Heights and winding up, no doubt with frappucino-coloured stains on his gums and sugary pits in his teeth, 12 hours later traipsing in a car. I won't throw stones: a few weeks ago I did something similar (length, perhaps, not quantity) with doughnut shops and the Bay Area. He made a video, which I didn't. But I did ride a goddam fixed-gear. And I'm into these snacks now (they be a tasty simulacrum of the pieces of my each and every day). And I have long known that cycling is about embracing the philosophical question best put by Eddy Merckx: "Eat to ride. Ride to eat." The New York Times has also put into print its assurance that chubby people can rock the ride as well. (Walking home today, I walked next a woman talking loudly and into a 'phone. She said, quite interested, "Yes, I read the article. I didn't know that cycling can make you fat. Is biking the same as cycling? How does it make you fat?" I can tell her: it does make me fat. I like all the delicious places that cycling takes me.)

cathected

A back-formation from cathexis, it describes an emotional, perhaps libidinal, attachment to something, often a person but also a concept.

In which we fly under the radar

I am trying to add more information about the kernel panics I have been seeing several times each day on my MacBook Pro, but Apple's bug-tracking site spits out java.lang.NullPointerException repeatedly. Ha bloody ha.
An unfortunate coincidence, as my productivity with using the MBP and the particular wireless base-stations we have at work has come to a grinding halt. And a frustrating occurrence, because I really want Apple to sort this one out so that I can work untethered (from both power and network!) again. I'm a mobile sysadmin, dammit.

Horses for courses

Some years ago, I began enthusiastically collecting slips of paper with citations for various idioms, and stowed them alongside editions of Rawlinson, Partridge, and Fowler; I thought that I might, someday, produce a definitive work on pre-1970s English idiomatic phrases.
Every now and again I come across a phrase new to me, such as "horses for courses", which means "to each their own". Where it comes from, I know naught; I could guess that each horse might be best-suited to a certain course, and that some races are not as good for some horses as others. I like the explanation at The Hindu, in which a cricket analogy appears. Of course.

Ridgeway Strong Ale

I kicked the tap of Ridgeway's Strong Ale, a delicious and crystal-clear (in taste, not colour) English ale. In the company of a few creamy cheeses (mahon and Morbier, as well as Tasso, a delectable peppered "ham" made from pork shoulder) it really hit the spot. The Barleywine replaced the Strong Ale tap, but I decided to save that for a return trip.

Thomas Hooker Munich Lager

I had a glass (and a half, thanks to the generous barkeep) of Thomas Hooker Munich Lager. This was the first lager I had from the cask; normally I steer clear of lager, but the bartender at Spuyten Duyvil gently recommended it, and after a few sips I was sold. It was not as crisp and cold as the Erdinger Hefeweizen we had earlier in the afternoon at the Bohemian Beer Garden ("the last of hundreds of beer gardens") in Queens, but it was refreshing and really tasty.

Fuller's 1845

I had a bottle-conditioned Fuller's 1845, a really delicious and tasty ale.
A few weeks ago, Damon and I had a bottle of the Vintage Ale, another bottle-conditioned brew. The 1845 I found more refreshing than the heavier, sweeter Vintage.

In which we downgrade from a Brigadier

About two dozen of these from the MacBook Pro to Apple over the past three days, ever since Travis pointed out a known issue with a specific wireless access point, 802.11, and the MBP running 10.4.10. I swear this had never happened before he demonstrated the kernel panic on his own machine.

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0035E29B): mbuf address out of range 0xa9
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 
0x251d3ac8 : 0x128d08 (0x3cc0a4 0x251d3aec 0x131de5 0x0) 
0x251d3b08 : 0x35e29b (0x3ecf78 0xa9 0x51c7400c 0x1) 
0x251d3b58 : 0x34d18b (0x251d3b8c 0x618 0x0 0x0) 
0x251d3b98 : 0x6d33b3 (0x0 0x618 0x0 0x251d3bcc) 
0x251d3be8 : 0x98867e (0x0 0x618 0x0 0x519f1038) 
0x251d3c28 : 0x98e5ed (0x237e8000 0x618 0x251d3c78 0x35e98c) 
0x251d3ce8 : 0x9914fc (0x237e8000 0x36ed3a00 0x51a12000 0x6) 
0x251d3e98 : 0x98a785 (0x237e8000 0x38e8b80 0x40000000 0x38e4900) 
0x251d3f08 : 0x39b3c3 (0x237e8000 0x38e8b80 0x1 0x38e4900) 
0x251d3f58 : 0x39a595 (0x38e8b80 0x135eb4 0x0 0x38e4900) 
0x251d3f88 : 0x39a2cb (0x38e9c40 0x0 0xaeffab 0x0) 
0x251d3fc8 : 0x19ad2c (0x38e9c40 0x0 0x19e0b5 0x420a140) Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0x0
      Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
         com.apple.iokit.AppleYukon(1.0.11b2)@0x984000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.5.1)@0x6cc000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.2)@0x584000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily(1.2.0)@0x63b000
         com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.5.1)@0x6cc000

Kernel version:

Darwin Kernel Version 8.10.1: Wed May 23 16:33:00 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.22.5~1/RELEASE_I386

In which we compromise security

The iPhone is buggering my passwords for web applications. I typically use -- and many sites prudently require! -- a password seed that is a mixture of letters and numbers, so as to throw off the brute-force, dictionary, and script k1dd3 attacks. However, the iPhone's split keyboard (one view for alpha, a second for numeric and symbols) means additional taps in order to enter passwords that have combinations of alpha and numeric characters. Worse, logging in to a site where my username or password contains these interleaved becomes slow and tortuous. It's re-learning typing, but less efficiently. I changed a few passwords for apps that I expect to use more from the 'phone than the 'puter, but in doing so felt a pit in my stomach that I was easing up too much on the security of the passwords in favour of the convenience of the keyboard. I wonder if a subsequent update will include an escrow service (like Keychain?), or an option for an extended keyboard.

Dogfish Head World Wide Stout

The hoopla surrounding Dogfish Head's various hella-hoppy beers has not moved me: I don't care for hops with the feverish passion these brewers do, and I find that the heady alcohol content of the beers, although well-balanced, make them difficult to drink as casually as I tend to. Today I tried a bottle of their limited-edition World-Wide Stout, "brewed with a ridiculous amount of barley" and 18% ABV. This bottle had a delicious, smooth taste, and nowt of the thin or sharp tastes that sully many craft stouts. It tasted good chilled, although at first it was almost too cold, having sat on ice for a while.
I have tasted their 60-, 90-, and 120-minute IPAs over the past few months, and have been happy but unimpressed. The "minutes" refer to the time that the beer spends in the boiler, I think. I admire the determinedly off-kilter approach that Dogfish take to brewing -- they come up with some delicious beers, and never sacrifice taste in their quest for "extreme"ly alcoholic beers, but their position on hops makes the grassy taste too prominent for my palate. Of the four beers I have tried so far, I enjoyed the World-Wide Stout the most.

In which we party like it's 10.4.1

MacFixIt has a few words on the OSX time-bomb.

updateGoogle pointed me to a freely-available version of this alert. One reader pointed out that you could use the value of defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion ProductUserVisibleVersion , but I don't know a programmatic way to get at that value.

Mac OS X 10.4.10 is the first iterative release of Mac OS X to have 5 digits in its version string (1, 0, 4, 1, 0). It is also the first iterative release of Mac OS X to use the ".10" extension. This is causing some significant issues.

The initial three [sic] digits for "10.4.10" are the same as "10.4.1," an earlier release of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Since the "MAC_OS_X_VERSION_ACTUAL" string (used by Cocoa applications to determine the current OS version) can carry a maximum of four digits, Mac OS X 10.4.10 and and 10.4.1 are both labeled "1041."

This means that some applications recognize Mac OS X 10.4.10's version string as Mac OS X 10.4.1 and refuse to properly run, erroneously thinking that the system version is too old. For instance, the application UNO requires Mac OS X 10.4.4. When running under Mac OS X 10.4.10, it recognizes the Mac OS X version number as 10.4.1 and refuses to operate.

Essentially, the built-in Cocoa method for forbidding an app to run on too low a system breaks against Mac OS X 10.4.10.

We're still searching for a viable method for tricking applications into thinking that the system version is 10.4.9, which would largely obviate this problem.

In which we observe

The New York Times has a nice (but incomplete: who designed this bridge? Who built it?) article on the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, a beautiful cable-stayed bridge near Acadia National Park.

In which we ride the red bike

Bicing, the popular Barcelonabike- sharing scheme, might come to New York. And so
our newspaper of record:

Barbara Held lives in Barcelona but is from Buffalo, Minn. She lived in New York before moving to Spain 15 years ago. Ms. Held stopped by the SoHo art gallery to visit friends. She did not need to test the program because she participates in the one in Barcelona. She had her bike card in her purse. It was the size of a credit card. An image of a red bicycle with the word Bicing, the name of Barcelona’s program, is on the front of the card. Barcelona started its program in March with 1,500 bicycles and 100 stations.

“The city didn’t think it would take off,” Ms. Held said. “But the program is so popular. People ride the red bikes all the time.”

I have doubts; as the story notes, vandalism and theft are rampant, and the sense of community is not strong enough to maintain a program of sharing such as this. I have recently seen a similar program enacted at a large company (not a university, but similiar in concept and spirit), which runs a massive corporate "campus" in Silicon Valley spread across a mile long and hundreds of yards across. The company deployed dozens of cruiser-style bicycles, unfettered, in order to promote easy movement amongst buildings. The repairs, theft, and rebalancing are all tricky: nightly sweeps are necessary to identify broken equipment (as people have no ownership of the bicycles, they casually discard them when broken, or perhaps even treat them as disposable); to retrieve discarded, misplaced, and far-afield equipment (users have taken the bicycles to the nearby towns, to far-away towns, and even to their own houses); and to ensure that a reasonable mix of equipment is available at the beginning of the next day. These are important and difficult obstacles that New York will need to overcome in order to have such a program become effective. Tying it to the MTA, as Paris and San Francisco are proposing, and requiring an annual membership plus a nominal usage fee, might make this more feasible.

Old Speckled Hen

I first drank Old Speckled Hen in the States, before finding it on cask — the traditional English hand-pump for serving "real" ale — . I enjoy it from the bottle as well, because its mild, slightly soapy flavour comes out nicely from a shelved bottle.
I put this bottle in the 'fridge for a few minutes and then had it, but without the appropriate pint glass: the frothy head looked a little funny on the short tumbler I used. The beer has a reddish-brown color. I don't think it is a traditional old ale, because it did not have a bottle date nor a high ABV (5.2%, about half of an old ale). Tasty stuff.

In which we have built a competitive system

Tushar Chandra, Robert Griesemer, and Joshua Redstone published a paper on a commercial implementation of Leslie Lamport's Paxos [a href="http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf" title="Offsite: Paxos Made Simple (PDF)">PDF] consensus algorithm; they describe their efforts at building and deploying their system in Paxos Made Live. (The paper appeared in PODC '07: 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, and is published at the link above through Google.) Synchronization, consensus, and contention-resolution are fundamental and beautiful problems in a distributed system, and I enjoyed reading this paper (Disclaimer: I was a peer reviewer for the paper in draft).

In which we have a winner

The Perry Bible Fellowship is my new favourite comic. It joins Sam Hurt's Eyebeam, the "minimalist computer art" and ;nonsequiturs" of Pokey the Penguin, the math, sarcasm, and romance (all equally important!) of xkcd (who today name-checks one of my favourite internet memes).

stook

A word pruned from contemporary dictionaries, stook was in use at the time of Webster's 1913 Dictionary. It means "A small collection of sheaves set up in the field; a shock; in England, twelve sheaves." It comes via the Scottish, from the Middle English, and ultimately through a Low German word.

hiatal

A medical term to describe a certain hernia, hiatal appeared in this morning's New York Times Crossword, and it took my cheating^Wlooking at Rex Parker's explanation to figure it out; I had been trying to shoe-horn hiatus into the solution. The hernia in question occurs when the stomach protrudes into the chest cavity.

In which we pull it off

Seven years later, seven years of a drone from my only closet, seven years.

In which the hum is coming from her

The American composer Joseph Bertolozzi is composing a "Bridge Suite" with sounds sampled from the Mid-Hudson Bridge, described in this article from The New York Times:

The purpose of the test was to check not the bridge’s soundness but its sound. The rather bizarre scene on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge near Poughkeepsie was part of Mr. [Joseph] Bertolozzi’s audacious plan to transform the span into an orchestra, compose a piece for it, then actually perform the work live with a small army of percussionists. It is a musical undertaking on a vast scale and one that has brought oddly harmonious marriages among the worlds of art and government, music and engineering.

Mr. Bertolozzi, 48, has been meticulously harvesting a multitude of sounds from the structure: not just the cables, which on playback create woo-wooing effects or sounds like a bass guitar, but the spindles below guardrails, the rails themselves, the interior and flanges of innumerable I-beams, connecting metal plates and the grates between walkways.

He sent mounds of steel pellets down the interior of a 315-foot steel tower to create a rain-stick effect. He collected clanks from the “Hudson River Estuary” sign, with its blue sturgeon emblem. An organist as well as a composer, Mr. Bertolozzi even hopes to turn large upright conduits for power lines into rough organ pipes.

“I only play big instruments,” he said.

In which we complete a revolution

Fifty-eight thousand and some revolutions, in fact, on the 81-gear-inch Kogswell. Aram rode his Kokopelli Ti bike, with the beautiful Suntour track hubs, RyanPC was decked out in wool and a stylish ten-speed (times three!) Lemond, Socolow had his Bianchi AXIS and an old Timbuk2 bag, James his Lemond and a whole bagfull of gumption, and Greg his dirt-dropped Trek (but no sunblock).

I got the only flat of the ride, and I changed the tube (I had energetically pulled out the valve stem) on the wind-swept western approach to the Dumbarton Bridge.