I'm a lasagna boy!

In which these are a few of my favourite things

Queen, air-guitar, MIDI, and come together to form a truly horrible piece of Flash animation. And while I was enumerating the web widgets that make me chuckle, how, how could I omit the Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, The Prime Number Shitting Bear?

Almost French

I am adding a widget that shows my current "reading list", thanks to the cheesily-designed website Chain Reading. And I am reading Sarah Turnbull's "Almost French", the satisfying story of an Aussie who implusively moves to Paris for "love and a new life." Everything works out, but slowly, and the travails of French bureaucracy that she related did not make as much of an impression as did the way she ironed out the massive cultural differences with her boyfriend-fiance-husband (there, I spoiled it for you), his friends and family, and builders, neighbours, et al. She also observed some riots, but that's quotidian around Paris now, in'it?

de(s)cant

Transfixed by a rapid succession of bottles, glasses (O! beautiful stemware! How come I drink from a humble tumbler at home?), and, finally, a decanter passing over the counter at Hotel Biron, Aram wondered about the origin of that name. Is it related to canto, to sing? I suggested that the Latin root cant- came into english with the prefix de to form descant, and I was correct:

descant: Middle English, from Anglo-Norman descaunt, from Medieval
Latin discantus, a refrain : Latin dis-, dis- + Latin cantus, song,
from past participle of canere, to sing. See kan-

as for decant(er), the original question, I should have known (and
Meiling would doubtless have remembered) that it comes from the greek
noun kanthos, meaning 'eyelid'. The greek poets drew a visual simile
between a wnie-jug's lip and the tear-duct-y bit of one's eye.

Ah, for the sound of popping corks.

In which I told you so

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** Saturday, November 12th **
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BEAT MUNI CHALLENGE!
10:30am, Glen Park BART Station

In this bike ride, we will experiment with the age-old question: is cycling really faster than Muni? As everyone knows, beating Muni is often a cinch, but can you match the fabled 24 line? If you can beat this line, you can beat any line. The person who passes the most busses gets a free lunch. Meet at Glen Park BART and we'll ride together to the start of the 24 line. Wear a helmet. Contact brandonbaunach@dbarchitect.com for more info.

A terrible, terrible map of the 24 route is on the 511.org site.

Do you remember that stifling summer when MUNI automation meant that Mayor Willie Brown walked the stretch of Market between City Hall and the Embarcadero faster than any of the LRVs?

In which we have a photofilesystem

tuxmann has released 1.0 of flickrfs, a FUSE-based representation of flickr, the (social) photo-storage service.

In which we turn old-fashioned

As my ipod has turned into a brick, I am amusing myself by thinking about album names like Ix-Nay on the Hombre (although, for some reason, I thought it was a grifters record) and Sheik Yerbouti. Ad-propos of FZ, the cover of Ship Arriving Too Late to Save A Drowning Witch also cracks me so consistently up. To wit:

I put a copy of this image, sans title, on the window of a cube I occupied a few years ago. I walked past a few days ago and it was still there, the current inhabitants either blithely unaware or laughing quietly.

In which we stop Catherine the Great from cheating

Amazon's Mechanical Turk intrigues and fascinates me. Cooler (not only because one can make money) than the ESP game built by academic researchers, the Turk challenges the human to write, decipher images, select and compare, and all sorts of menial tasks that cannot quite be automated by a machine -- or perhaps already have, but require human approval to refine their decisions. Already the top results for "Mechanical Turk" are polluted with blogs referring to Amazon's API -- but the fascinating, real story can be found in Tom Standage's book and, of course, in the Wikipedia.

In which the youth are getting restless.

There's not enough rioting in this country. After Rodney King, L.A. burned: but why have we not seen large-scale riots (well, in San Francisco last week a handful of protestors were arrested) because of the Bush regime's continuing violation of international law, domestic due process, and civil rights. We have not see violent outrage at the state's theft of money from the public schools, nor at the undermining of unions. But France gets it: the youth are getting restless, burning cars and staying out all night.

Some of them wear no pants.