I'm a lasagna boy!

One thing leads to another

This

is what I look like after using all of these.

Where ye be shopping, matey?

Worth1000's photoshop contest "If Pirates Ruled".

hax0r pub|1c trnzt

The New York Daily News reports that pretty girls don't ride the subway:

A scrolling marquee sign in the West 4th St. station was even less helpful than usual, after it got pwn3d by some hax0rs. Sez one rider: "I'm pretty, and I take the subway every day." Word. And you're probably also rich.

UPDATE: This meme turned up everywhere: engadget, Gothamist, usw.

A change of clothes

Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, and others all receive credit for this 'un, but today I was singing it on the way back home: "I need to slip me out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." And so I did, parking the ol' bike in the Mission and downing a cold glass of Hendrick's.

He drinks a whiskey drink

Something to keep your eyes on, especially if: you have kids, you like kids, you are a kid, you cherish freedom, you enjoy having all your limbs, you enjoy not killing other people, or you value not being shot at by other people.
Note that sentence contains clauses conjoined with an option. And the 'e' in whisk(e)y is for Canada, eh, you dodgers.

Oblique Strategies

At Moe's in Berkeley, I found a Loeb of Longus' Daphnis and Chloë. This story was the reason I wanted to study Greek in college. I have another Greek edition around here somewhere, but so far my favourite edition is Christopher Gill's translation, in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels.
The Loeb editions have a well-deserved reputation as a compromise: the handy pocket-sized cloth-bound book with the miserable translations.

And while they prayed, they laboured too and cast about to find a way by which they might come to see one another. Poor Chloe was void of all counsel and had not device nor plot. For the old woman her reputed mother was by her continually, and taught her to card the fine wool and twirl the spindle, or else was still a clocking for her, and ever and anon casting in words and twattling to her about marriage.

Pachamama Landscaping Van

Urban post-mortems

Exercises in Forensic Archaeology, but really they're just really nice pictures by Julia Solis.

Read my lips. More new taxes

Advice delivered from the stoop to the newly-elected President:

One lesson yet unlearned involved the nation's growing debt. Through the eighties the United States had been unwilling to take action to reduce its rising debt. If the U.S. Government had placed a tax of one trillion dollars on wealth of Americans before the crash and designated half of that trillion dollars to reduce the national debt, Americans would have been outraged. Yet the markets, in their brutal, inexorable fashion, had taken exactly that action and confiscated half a trillion dollars in national wealth. And the debt still remained.

An embarassment

The Department of Transportation's Transitweb project awarded four agencies special recognition for their web sites. Unsurprisingly, three are in California:
www.bigbluebus.com, www.sfmuni.com, and www.vta.org. If these are the best, we're in trouble. Hell, we're in trouble anyways. Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus site stands out for its functional map.

The West Virgina agency cited by Volpe, Mountain Line, doesn't even adhere to web standards. The information is poorly-organised, inaccessible to people with disabilities, and out of date.

Hey! You! You can't leave that on the train!

Who was the idiot on Caltrain #271 today, carrying a complete electric range with accessories?

Less is less

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that, for want of a shoe,the horse will be killed.

... the nation's 14th-largest transit system is proposing to become one of the nation's most expensive transit systems with a $2.50 base fare. ... the authority proposes to eliminate service on weekends and holidays, and drop weekday service after 9 p.m. unless Gov. Ed Rendell and the state legislature provide tax money to fill a $30 million budget deficit. The fare increases are to go into effect about Feb. 1. Service cuts, which include eliminating 70 of 230 weekday bus-trolley routes, would begin in early March. These changes, combined with cuts in Access program transit service for aged and ill riders, could mean $54 million in revenue and savings, thereby keeping the authority solvent for a while longer.

The Pittsburgh area, which has a remarkable system of dedicated busways, has faced trouble over its transit spending the past several years; investment in infrastructure and reliable service is the way to increase reliance on public transit. However, when transit cuts fall too easily to the budgetary axe, people learn not to use public transit.

Similary, San Francisco faces similar cutbacks in MUNI (and other) service, as well as higher transit rates.