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February 28, 2006
Toothpick Holders and Shotgun Shells
From an article in the Wall Street Journal:
In West Chester, Pa., Judy Knauer, founder of the 700-member National Toothpick Holder Collectors' Society, gives away toothpick holders to young people. She tells them, "Here's your start." But few get hooked.
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Posted by jb at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2006
Taken Down by a Clown
This is mile 23 of the Marathon in the Summer 2004 Olympics in Athens. Vanderlei de Lima, the race leader, is being attacked by a clown. He finishes third, for the Bronze, winning over the crowd at the finish line by swooping around the track with outstretched arms, like an airplane.
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Posted by jb at 06:58 AM | Comments (3)
February 26, 2006
Partial Entry #36 Part Two
We walked the fifth mile, late at night, in the freezing air. The temperature had dropped dramatically. Twenty five degrees, then twenty, then sixteen, then ten. The air was so cold that the pressure hurt our eardrums. We wrestled with the bikes but this didn’t keep us warm.
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Posted by jb at 12:42 PM | Comments (1)
February 25, 2006
Partial Entry #36 Winter Scene
-Hey Dave
-Hey
-You called
-Yeah, what are doing two weeks from now?
-Nothing, I don’t know
-I want to ride from Washington DC to Havre De Grace on the C&O Canal trail
-It’s winter
-Yeah, I know, you should come down. We’ll ride.
-Dave...
-It will be fantastic. Look, you like winter camping, right. This is just a day ride, fifty or seventy five miles, then one night of camping and then a day ride back. It will be great. Nobody else will be out on the trails.
-Nobody goes on those trails anyway.
-Look, I’m getting married soon, right? I won’t be able to do something like forever. You should come down and go riding. You are up in Boston anyway. It’s warmer down here and besides, we haven’t hung out since I moved down here.
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Posted by jb at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2006
A Short Poem As A Placeholder
A short poem, as a placeholder. I'll switch it out if I get time to submit an entry tonight.
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Posted by jb at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2006
Prayer Rugs
When I met my parents last Saturday they gave me a belated Christmas gift: a large aerial photo (11 by 17 maybe) of a street scene in Cairo, probably taken from an upstairs balcony. The street itself occupies just over a third of the photograph and is bracketed by dense concrete buildings on both sides. Half of the street is covered with vendor stalls and baskets of fruit. The other half of the street is covered in prayer rugs. While a few people are strolling along the sidewalk on the right hand side of the street, there are over a hundred people on the left hand side, each kneeling on a prayer rug, bent forward, head pressed to the surface. The photograph is called Midday Prayers, Cairo 2000.
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Posted by jb at 06:42 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2006
Recovery
It’s been three days of sickness and I’m still coughing and snuffling and tired but I can see my way out now. I guess that the cold is viral, rather than bacterial. Small fragments of DNA or RNA were introduced into the cells lining my lungs. Once inside, the fragments folded themselves into the normal cell replication process, forcing the cell to make copies of the virus until it burst.
Posted by jb at 07:06 AM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2006
The Great American Nap Out
How much of the world has been asleep at any one time? Was there ever a point when 50% of the world or more was asleep? Maybe this happens the day after New Years. I like the idea of the entire world deciding that it’s time for a nap. I didn’t participate in Hands Across America or Hands Around the World but I’d be keen on World Nap 2006.
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Posted by jb at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2006
Focal Plane Cafe Brasil
I’ve arrived home and I’m reading James Lileks and he notes that today is President’s Day. I’d forgotten about this during the drive from Astoria to Boston.
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Posted by jb at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2006
Hot Sauce Blues
Flagellants, we know, whip themselves into a state of religious ecstasy. The ritual is still practiced once every seven years by members of the Guardia Sanframondi commune in Campania, Italy, and yearly, on the day of Ashurah by the Shia in the context of a rite called Zanjeer Matam. The Tamil also practice flagellation within the context of Hinduism but are better known for the Kavadi, a portable altar built above the penitent, supported by 108 lances (vel) driven into the skin on the back and chest. In this case, practitioners claim to feel little pain and instead walk a pilgrimage route in trance-like state, the burdens of the world made real above them, the weight of these burdens carried beneath the flesh.
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Posted by jb at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2006
Short Entry
I’m in New York this morning, staying in a small walkdown in Long Island City, midway along a street that runs directly into the Hudson River. I can see the fringes of the Manhattan skyline from the top of the front steps.
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Posted by jb at 08:49 AM | Comments (2)
February 17, 2006
St. Peter and the MLA
When does persona replace personality? If I’m sitting in a bar, for example, and I decide for purposes of backstory to be an ex-roadie for an overrated dirty rocker band who has recently escaped from a minimum security prison in Texas (after disguising myself as a laundry hamper using only six lunch trays and a set of plastic forks), should I give in to the temptation to pick a fight with the elderly woman at the pool table because that’s what a recently escaped roadie would do? What if I restrain myself only to find out later that the narrative aspects of my life reflected a particularly boring story and that St. Peter is actually a writer for the New York Review of Books?
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Posted by jb at 06:13 AM | Comments (2)
February 16, 2006
Station Wagon Blues
I flew on a 737-400 two nights ago, courtesy of US Airways. The plane, with its bakelite radio knobs and broken aisle light, was assembled in the 1980’s and shuddered perceptibly when it picked itself up off the runway. It’s that family station wagon of planes, the one with the fake wooden paneling on the sides. It’s the station wagon that each of the teenagers will learn to drive, the one that is retired and then brought out of retirement until the dashboard peels away and the brakes start failing and the lights dim and gutter—better suited for a tent and a scary book than a highway.
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Posted by jb at 07:53 AM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2006
Cubicles in the Mist
Cubicles get shifted on Thursday. I’ve packed all of my gear into two large plastic crates that will be pulled six feet to the left when my new, half-sized cubicle is set up. I’ve managed to keep a window space in the corner of the office and I plan to take better advantage of this in the spring. Between mooning people in the office across the street and sneaking out to walk my Hot Wheels collection through the local carwash and frolic with the ducks along the Charles River, I will keep myself busy while waiting for summer.
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Posted by jb at 05:21 AM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2006
You Jerk
There are days when I wake up and think “I’m totally going to be a complete jerk today…I won’t even be able to help it.” It’s as if all of my jerk karma was stored up in a secret jerky investment fund and the annual dividend is delivered to my doorstep when my alarm clock rings.
Posted by jb at 07:14 AM | Comments (2)
February 13, 2006
Sled Piracy
So I’m tired this evening and when I’m tired I think about pirates. What was it like, for example, to spend days on end floating about twenty, thirty or forty miles off the Barbary coast, waiting for trading ships? Who was the least successful pirate of all time? Did he get a reputation? I’ll bet that the second unluckiest pirate used to stop by his ship and encourage him to keep trying. It’s wasn’t that he was being nice. He just didn’t want to be the most unlucky pirate.
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Posted by jb at 11:25 PM | Comments (2)
February 12, 2006
ScanTron Dreams
Boston was covered in snow when it woke this morning. Like an old man sitting up in a frat house, hung over and covered with marker, it lurched forward, blinked, and went back to sleep. Now, at 1 in the afternon, it's still snowing and Boston is still in bed. The flakes are bending left and right and churning in circles, telling me everything that I need to know about airflow patterns on my street. Moving in three dimensions, the snow looks like a picture stolen from one of my old differential geometry books. Ach, I need to get a video recorder.
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Posted by jb at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2006
The Love Lives of the Prokaryotes
If your morning has not started off well; if your coffee was cold or if your tea was flat or if your eggs ended up running all over your plate and colliding with your cereal because today you thought that you’d 'go without that whole bowl thing', just stop for a second and think to yourself “Boy, I’m lucky that I don’t spend all of my time obsessing over the lives of bacteria.”
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Posted by jb at 07:51 AM | Comments (5)
February 10, 2006
Taping myself to the Pamplona Bull
So I just learned this: in August, residents of Bunol, Spain will join in the world's largest food fight, throwing roughly 240,000 pounds of tomatoes at each other over the course of an afternoon.
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Posted by jb at 03:26 PM | Comments (3)
February 09, 2006
Short Quote
"What will be is not; and what would be;
what was, what might have been, they are not."
-Paul Valery
Also, from the Guinness Book of World Records:
"The largest haggis on record weighed 303.2 kg (668 lb 7 oz) and was made using 80 ox stomachs by the Troon Round Table, Burns Country Foods, and a team of chefs at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, on May 24, 1993."
Just in case you were wondering.
Posted by jb at 11:30 PM | Comments (1)
February 08, 2006
Impenetrable Article from the Pointless Archive
I was standing on a sidewalk eating a doughnut yesterday when I was approached by a mathematician.
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Posted by jb at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2006
Route 830 and the Nazca Lines
It’s six in the morning.
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Posted by jb at 07:13 AM | Comments (9)
February 06, 2006
Prepackaged Dove Massacre
When I was six, I started racing BMX at the Lums Pond racetrack in northern Delaware. I rode a Diamondback with (as I remember) a fat stem and bear trap pedals. The bear traps may have come later. I was racing at a time when kids regularly duct-taped the kickstand to the bike frame and when good racers could still be marked at the start because they could balance on the bike at the gate rather than keeping one foot down. I kept my foot planted on the ground until I was eight.
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Posted by jb at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2006
Fells Point
11:29 PM. I’m listening to an old Morcheeba album, which reminds me of Baltimore. Specifically, it reminds me of Fells point and of getting coffee with J after waking up in her bed, arm across her hips, soaked because of the 90 degree night and the busted air conditioning system.
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Posted by jb at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2006
Stool Pigeon
Did carrier pigeons ever drink? Did they ever stumble around, forgetting where home was, where the signposts were, which buildings were on the secret pigeon map? I’ll bet that at least one has. It was sent out from the front in Normandy and ended up six months later at a dive bar in New Jersey, stuttering, drunk, cursing at the pigeons along the rail, and waving a fragment of a map or a communiqué. Two years later it was cooked a eaten, roasted over an oil drum in a back alley. Sold out by the stool pigeons.
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Posted by jb at 10:53 PM | Comments (2)
February 03, 2006
Coasting
Flew back to PHL and returned today. The plane was driven by two crazed rodeo clowns who had only recently quit jobs as ride attendants on the Cyclone roller coaster that still haunts Coney island.
Posted by jb at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2006
Kinaret
Sometimes I dredge up old files on my computer. This is one of those files. I wrote it in October 2004. It concerns the image of Peter stumbling about on the surface of the Kinaret. I’ve done some editing but I’ve changed very little. I’m pulling it back up because (1) it reminds me of a time when my own religious practice amounted to more than convenient dinner table conversation and (2) I’m still pretty lazy and it makes for a quick and easy weblog entry
Posted by jb at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)