Double Hamster on The Rocks

May 07, 2007

An entry about cockroaches

I slept in the tent last night, on my bed. Well, on three bed frames that I pulled together from two rooms. I set the tent up after switching on the light in one of the house bathrooms and catching several cockroaches re-enacting what I can only guess was a scene from Die Hard II. I killed two of them (one with the base of a steel cup as it tried to scurry up the wall) and then walked out of the bathroom and saw two long antenna poking out of the sink overflow mouth in the living room basin. Between this, the mosquitoes (not very many, but they carry filarisis), and the biting ants (flesh eating might be a better term... Hari told me about them. He had an infestation in his house and woke up with tracks of blood down his legs) I chose to sleep in the tent. I may do this for a while. I have considered purchasing some fake grass mats for the bed.

So it looks like I will get my grass bed. But the grass will be plastic. And there will be a tent in the middle.

Posted by jb at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2007

After a morning of moving and an afternoon of cleaning and setting up and running to the store, the author of this blog entry sits down at a table in an empty house in Kerala, India and thinks

Wow, this is going to be more difficult than I thought.

Posted by jb at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2007

Auto rickshaws give you that immediate, fatalistic feel for traffic

The house came through today, a three bedroom condo in Trivandrum, in Belhaven Gardens.

Took an auto rickshaw 30Km back to the hotel room near Technopark. When I first arrived in Trivandrum, I was looking forward to the Technopark. My hopes were crushed when I found out that it was devoted to technology and business process outsourcing. Nary a synthesizer in sight.

I'm flying back to Gurgaon the week after next, then back to Singapore for a week at the end of May.

Television still acts as a cultural ambassador. It probably has the widest reach of any medium. I think about this when I flip through the hotel channels. MTV has altered itself for India and now plays music videos. Other shows are dubbed in Hindi (a good narrative would have given me a "moment of awakening" when I saw Skeletor speak in Hindi on the dubbed version of He-Man yesterday but still nothing happened). The only totally undubbed and unaltered channel is the WWF channel. Strangely, WWF is popular in the little India section of Singapore as well. Crowds of people sit in plastic chairs outside the beer joints in little India, watching WWF, drinking beer, and conversatin'. Activists might like to believe that the current administration has made a strong impact on Amercia's image in the world but I'm beginning to suspect that Vince McMahon and John Cena have had a bigger impact.

Why do hotels offer free letterhead in the room desks? It's not as if I want to convince someone that I am an employee of the hotel. Maybe the hotel staff just sits there, waiting, so they can say "ah-ha!.. you used the letterhead...you work for us now."

Hari and I have been discussing transportation. I'd like an Enfield Bullet but a motorcycle requires a license which can make things confusing from a residency standpoint so I might need to step down to a scooter. In the best of all worlds, I'd get an auto rickshaw and give it a custom paint job. It would look badass and I would not get soaked during the monsoon season. it is weird that nobody buys an auto rick unless they are running a taxi service. sure, they have very little power but they are darn handy for errands.

I have not gone hiking or been to a museum/ art gallery in months. I miss both of these things.

I'll bet that there are vampires with a sweet tooth who chase diabetics around.

I've been thinking a lot about the baby crying contest in Japan, where Sumo wrestlers pick up babies and make faces and the baby that cries the loudest wins. Given the way memory shapes itself in infants, it could be that this event becomes the first fixed memory for some of these kids. What sort of first memory is that?

I wonder whether event amnesia is a common feature among kids who are developing an active memory. I might see something (like the sumo wrestler) that could become my first permanent memory but then some part of my brain elects to "lose" that first memory, waiting for something more pleasant.

It would be fun to make iron-on placemats that I could permanently affix to my table.

Posted by jb at 11:15 AM | Comments (3)

April 30, 2007

Notes written on newspaper during 4hr flight from Delhi to Bangalore

1. This plane needs pillow lined video screens for people who want to rest their head on the back of forward seat

2. I want to set up a fortune telling screen that looks like one of those large announcement/ clacker boards at a railroad station

3. I've been thinking about geese that get sucked into jet engines. I'll bet that there is a goose legend about a plane engine that opens a doorway to a secret fantastical world with goose-elves and stuff like that or maybe about a goose that gets magical powers after getting sucked through the jet engine

4. I wonder if surgeons have a secret sword and the stone mythos, possibly centered around a difficult extraction procedure. Dentists, I am sure have a molar and a jaw myth. Even today there is a dentist somewhere waving about a pair of silver pliers, saving the west from imminent tooth decay

5. The Janitor at Mecca, sweeping up around the al-Haram, at the end of the day after everyone has left. What is that job like?

6. Is it now possible to exchange large amounts of money by swapping phone sim cards?

7. I'm glad that trees can't use their leaves as sharpened throwing stars because then nature hikes would suck

8. It would be better if doctors has someone drag their fingernails against a chalkboard when they administer a shot since you would be so horrified by the sound that you would not notice the shot.

9. There are other sounds that I can't stand: fingertips pulled across balloons, the sound of thread being pulled through particular fabrics and, occasionally, the sound of dental floss moving through my teeth.

10. In Singapore, floss refers to finely shredded meat-- normally pork-- I shudder to think of dental floss in Singapore. It might be made of finely shredded teeth.

11. I'll bet that astronomers totally fake each other out by re-orienting the high powered microscope toward the moon and then getting an unsuspecting astronomer to get moon blindness by looking through the eyepiece.

12. I've never been jealous of birds for their ability to fly but I am envious of their ability to sleep while standing up

13. I had a dream last night, about unicorns walking into a mall. As each one passed the sliding glass doors at the front of the mall, it took off it's horn and placed it in an umbrella stand

14. Why did GI Joe never have a special operator called Rikki Tikki Tavi?

15. Everyone should get a special message printed on a T-Shirt in a big font. Then they should wear that t-shirt every day because you never know when you will end up in the background of a live news cast

16. Whoever came up with the oversized Styrofoam finger, that person was a genius.

17. Someday I will own my own airplane and I will play the video of "grave of the Fireflies" during inflight because, if you think you seats are uncomfortable...

18. If I had a small country without a defense budget, I might be tempted to develop Styrofoam tanks to increase the perceived size of my army. How terrifying would it be to drive a Styrofoam tank? I'll bet that you would not be afraid of anything after that.

19. I've noticed that there are always a few people who stand up for long periods of time on flights. Airplanes should have a standing section for these people.

20. Mini golf on an airplane would be badass. Real golf, not so realistic.

21. Also, we need hand rails for people who are willing to lift themselves over sleeping passengers in order to get in and out of their seat

22. I liked Pirates of the Caribbean but it is clear to me that this Disney chose an easy ride for a movie plot. They should try extracting a plot from a more opaque ride, like the teacup ride.

Posted by jb at 01:02 PM | Comments (1)

January 26, 2007

The Checkup

I went to a clinic in Singapore for a check up today. I did this because I messed up on my insurance form by stating that I had asthma (which I did when I was young) and then reading the fine print that said “have you had any of the following in the last two years” and then scratching out the asthma comment because I don’t have asthma, really, now.

I've not had a physical in 19 years. I’ve never had a physical like this. I spent the night fasting before I arrived. They pumped me dry of blood, shaved half of my chest, attached ECG electrodes and set me, starving, decaffeinated and delirious, up on a treadmill for an 18 minute stress test. I distinctly remember getting the impression that I could speak in Urdu by the end of it. The attendant even checked off a “Speaks Urdu” box on a form at the end of the test. I don’t remember whether that was before or after the attendant ripped the 12 electrode patches off of my chest and sent me downstairs for x-rays. There was also an eye test and an interview/ regular checkup in there somewhere. I walked in for the appointment at 9:15 in the morning and left at 12:30 in the afternoon. I did not even spend that much time sitting and reading back issues of Singapore Architecture (now even more diagrams of malls!).

After I got back, I went out to the middle eastern district with the rest of the office for lunch. We had terrible Lebanese food at a place that specializes in Shisha. I might go back for the Shisha (and the Halva) but I will forever avoid the falafel, which looked like and had the texture of well cured roadkill.

It has been raining all evening. And my chest itches.

Posted by jb at 06:43 AM | Comments (1)

January 16, 2007

Ramblin'

So the question came through, about six months earlier than expected, at a bar in a hotel in Delhi, where the partner in charge of the seven person company that I work for asked me what I thought about living in India and so, if the current round of projects works out, it looks very much like I'll be able to get out of Singapore and into Bombay. My goal: moving over there by late March, in order to really start visiting factories and mid income households and second tier cities and slums (maybe) and rural areas (absolutely) in order to figure out which products can be developed that will address latent needs in the Indian (and, in some cases, American) market. What do I think about living in India? The word unqualified comes to mind. Then I think that half of all shampoo and lipstick sales in India take place in rural channels (shampoo happened once Hindustan lever had the insight to sell single use sachets, which allowed people in rural villages to control the amount they purchased) and I realize that nobody really understands these markets. Let me add a proviso. There are tons of other people who have a better understanding than I do but over the last five years, lots of product development and design people have been forced to re-learn the way that they approach these markets and I'm pretty sure that nobody considers rural populations to be some sort of idealized (or denigrated) homogenous mass any more and I'm pretty sure that almost anyone who is not being a jackass will tell you that he/she does not understand these markets. Anyway, this is not a sure thing yet, but I will know soon, and I am interested to see whether this can happen.

Posted by jb at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2006

YouTube AMVs

So I've been a bit obsessed with music videos, stop motion animation, and animation music videos on YouTube.

On the stop motion animation side, there are a batch of movies from famous and not so famous animators available; most notably Jan Svankmajer: Czech surrealist filmaker. He's been a major influence on Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton among others.

Death of Stalinism in Bohemia

(I want to post some of his other stuff but this is not really the right forum)

Brothers Quay: Stephen and Timothy quay. According to wikipedia, their best known work is Street of Crocodiles.

Wladyslaw Starewicz influenced the Brothers Quay
The Insects Christmas: A Russian Animation piece from 1913

A random movie: creature comforts

I will post something later on YouTube music videos but for now:
The Shins Pink Bullets:
This video was created by Adam Bizanski, an Israeli director. He did this as a personal project and then gave it to the Shins. After they saw his video, they decided that they would use it, which is kinda neat and in reverse.
[Update: Ach, YouTube removed this video. Here is the ifilm link]

There is a ton of stuff on the anime side. A search for AMV in YouTube (by no means the only channel for this stuff) yields 145,000 videos.

I became more interested in this after running across what still may be the best AMV I've seen. I don't know the anime but the song is Am I Awake (They Might be Giants):

The mix is changing but it seems that 90% of YouTube AMVs are still Naruto/ Bleach/ Dragonball remixes glued to Rock/Rap tracks and it's inspiring and all that but I like looking around for less obvious songs and clips. With that in mind, I started by searching for various songs and some trends emerged in the anime choices. It turns out that some anime just seems to attract people who post a wider variety of music

AMV: FLCL, Song: Jerk it out, which kinda fits since half of the anime seems to center around the forcible extraction of items directly from the protagonists head

AMV: FLCL, Song: Concerning the UFO Sighting near Highland, Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens. I like this because it works and its is not obvious.

AMV: FLCL, song: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

AMV: FLCL, Song Clint Eastwood by the Gorillaz

FLCL/ Ataris: I shouldn’t really link to this because it’s a bit too close to a standard AMV song (there are at least six Naruto/Ataris AMVs). Oh well:

AMV: Spirited Away Song: I still need to figure that out. It’s appealing though. Does sound Disney, per viewer comments.

Powerpuff Girls/ Belle and Sebastian: I can’t link to that.

Bugs Bunny/ Tribe Called Quest: I can link to that. This AMV is great [Update: the video has been removed due to terms of use violation. Almost all AMVs violate copyright so this happens a great deal. Sooo... I will replace it with the non-AMV Dangermouse Gray Album video, which shares the same spirit. The Gray Album was pulled offline a few years ago but the video is still around. This is a "must see" before it is yanked off YouTube]

So there is an Anime called Air, which makes it hard for me to find an AMV that uses La Femme D’Argent as the soundtrack

Which makes me think of Thievery Corporation (no AMV’s yet)

Alphaville, Forever Young, the quintessential 8th grade slow dance song of the mid 80's. The anime is Ginga Nagareboshi Gin: I don’t know anything about it but it looks just post speed racer. The video is not very good but I am posting it because the song is reasonably obscure.

There is an Aphex Twin AMV out there but it annoys me for some reason (it might just be too similar to thousands of other AMVs.) Instead, I am going to put up a different AMV. How is it linked? The director of the anime behind this AMV also directed the anime used in the Aphex Twin AMV. I'll post this because I like Boards of Canada and Cowboy Bebop. The video is a bit hard to watch, with endless scene transitions, but the song is great

It pains me that Apples In Stereo does not have a YouTube AMV yet

Aretha Franklin/ Fruits Basket (I know nothing about this anime but seems kinda annoying)

But no Astrud Gilberto yet..

Tori Amos has been linked to a few AMVs. Here's an appealing mix of Spirited Away and A Sorta FairyTale Kinda slow, yes, but sweet.

So this does not really fit (it is a different music video genre) but here is a second Tori Amos Song, Happy Workers, set to video clips and scene sequences from the video game Silent Hill. Much, much less sweet (Silent Hill is a bit of a gruesome game)

The same director has posted a fabulous AMV using an anime called The MAXX (adapted from what I assume was a comic series) and a song by Thom Yorke The animation reminds me alternately of noir comic books and R Crumb. Like the They Might Be Giants video above, this AMV stands alone as a real music video; this time in the vein of the FeelGood Inc video by the Gorillaz

Speaking of actual music videos with animation (instead of AMVs) Zero7 has a terribly appealing music video with a "Waking Life" feel. I like Sia's voice. If only I could find an AMV that used "Breathe Me" that did not use Naruto clips (for the record, I really like Naruto-- it is the storyboard equivalent of Harry Potter-- it is just used in far too many AMVs: 31,421 almost uniformly poor videos at last count. Part of the problem is that the Naruto Animation style and pacing does not lend itself to good music videos). There is a better version of the Breathe Me video on Sia's MySpace page.

And, because I'm browsing through the Tori Amos AMV list, here is a Tori Amos cover of the first half of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" set to an AMV

Also, in the semi related "Artists whose names begin with A" set, I've run across a Raffi sounding song called "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" apparently written by two ex members of ABBA. This video is entirely goofy and just a smidgen less addictive than the $&%^* BananaPhone song

And, lest you think that YouTube animated videos concern themselves only with modern/ popular music suited for the young'uns. Here is an animated video version of John Coltrane's Giant Steps by Michel Levy.

And... from the good people at Information Aesthetics, an animated video based on a moving FedEx Logistics map

Anyway, that does it for the A’s for right now. MTV is dead. Long live cheap online video. Digital, it seems, killed the video star.

Posted by jb at 09:43 PM | Comments (2)

October 15, 2006

East Coast Beach

I walked and then took a taxi to the East Coast beach today. It is the first time I’ve taken a taxi to get somewhere when I am rambling about. It felt like cheating.

A 200 meter concrete pier juts out from a point along the beach near the food court. If you walk to the end, you can see line after line of cargo ships, tankers and supertankers sitting in their lanes, rolling imperceptibly out to sea and back, not one person visible onboard. The trick to spending months at sea probably lies in keeping busy so I can understand why nobody was seen lounging at the rail. If you are lounging onboard in tight lanes with other ships bustling starboard and aft you are probably expendable.

And lots of people have become expendable. The crew size for a tanker today ranges from 22 to 27 people. Car carrier ships, bulk container ships and others use 20 to 23 people per ship depending on the age of the ship. The newer ships need fewer people. It is something to keep in mind the next time you see a massive cargo ship pulling into port. I’d have thought that the ship would require hundreds of people but instead you could fit the crew into an average public high school classroom with a few seats to spare.

Like every other public facility, the pier looks as if it has been washed daily. Thirty or maybe 40 fishermen stood along the railing and most of them were using old surf fishing rods. I found a barnacle encrusted rod poking out of a trash can along the pier. Some fisherman probably snagged it with his line and wrestled it up. He may have thought that it was a big fish but instead it was a fishing rod. Had he set down his own rod and used the sea damaged one, he would have caught a third rod. Repeating the process, he could have caught a fourth. At first this would see crazy, and he would catch and exchange a few rods just because it seemed so improbable. After his tenth rod, this activity would take on new meaning—as if he were pulling a great zipper out the ocean. Maybe a crowd would collect around him to watch and disperse. He would spend the night there alone, pulling rod after rod out of the iron water. At three am he would feel a great jerk on the line that would rip him from the pier, the pile of rods clattering off the cement behind him. There would be no sign of the fisherman or the rods in the morning. Hundreds of miles away, a mammoth saltwater trout would spit out his shoes and then add his rod to the undersea hundred mile dragline.

Posted by jb at 06:16 AM | Comments (1)

October 09, 2006

Improvements All Around

I'm not a fan of Nietzsche, and I dislike Family Circus, but I find Nietzsche Family Circus strangely appealing and scattershot.

Along these lines, I've also identified an entire species of spam that pulls filler text from project Gutenberg. I have no idea what to call it. Spam Classic is too long but Splassic sounds entirely wrong.

Also, before I forget, I was having lunch a few days back in a Chinese Bodega near the Sunshine complex off of Middle Road. There was a television on in the room and instead of playing sports or an Indian movie, it was broadcasting the Hawke/ Delpy Before (Sunrise/Sunset) scene from "Waking Life." The sound was off and this improved the movie somewhat.

2:29 PM

I Got Spam noticed the Project Gutenberg spam back in late August. I feel like a slacker because I noticed it only two weeks ago.

Also, another NFC:

Posted by jb at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

Opening the Wedding Store

I live in an apartment above a block of wedding stores. Another one has just opened today. There is a big banquet table set in the hallway at the btoom of my building. Some professional store opening ceremony providers are banging away spastically on drums just below the office window. It is impossible to work. All told, I'd rather be trapped back at college trying to sleep through the 30th rendition of "Life is a Highway" played in the gerden wedding reception area just outside the dorm.

Posted by jb at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

Thailand Stuff

Back from Thailand. Spent Friday night/ Saturday morning in Bangkok and then took the train up to Ayuthaya where I rented a scooter and spent Saturday visiting different historical sites.

I had a hard time finding anyone who would rent out a scooter/ motorcycle in Bangkok-- the guest house proprietor looked at me like I was nuts when I asked

Spent Saturday night in a guest house on the small river that runs around the old city and then went back to Bangkok this morning, in time to walk through just the smallest fraction of the Chatuchak Weekend Market and Lumpini park, where I watched several aerobics instructors-- each with their own stage and pounding music-- lead 100 to 200 people at a time in hand waving foot stompin' exercise. This seems to be a big thing in Thailand-- I saw a similar jazzercise crowd in Aruthaya.

The jazzercise crowd in Aruthaya bopped around in an enclosed parking lot in front of the main municipal building. Someone had built an ornate fence between the parking lot and the sidewalk (the sidewalks were all shoulder-width or less in Aruthaya and parts of Bangkok) and a big stage with a huge photo of the king pushed its way out into the street from the fence. At ten meters in height (my guess) it was not the largest photo that I saw.

Photos and portraits of the king and his wife were everywhere in Thailand. Just about every shop had a photo. At the same time, the photos did not lend themselves to a ‘cult of personality’ feeling. Maybe that was because I don’t read Thai.

The coup was not really noticeable (at least for someone who does not read Thai since the papers went on about it). Thailand seems to be an effective mix between a democracy and a monarchy (the King does not have much formal power but a great deal of informal or symbolic power) and it looks like the military deposed the prime minister with the approval of the king. The more civic minded (maybe 5 out of every hundred people that I saw) wore bright yellow shirts with embroidered chest patches in support of the King. It's a given, though, since the King seems to be really popular. The Thai Baht didn't even swing that much (a few Baht against the dollar, nothing against the Singapore dollar) while I was there.

I suffered a fair amount of nausea on the trip. The swimming feeling, headaches. That sort of thing. I went to a pharmacy on Sunday and worked my way to finding a Dramamine substitute. The pharmacist was very helpful. Dramamine was not available so he recommended diphenhydramine (some Benadryl offshoot brand), which would put me to sleep. I told him that I wanted to focus on the nausea and he spent some time rummaging through the prescription drawers. Eventually he gave me some Sibelium and told me that it was good for nausea. I stopped by an internet café and looked it up. Apparently Sibelium is a prescription medication for migraines. I elected to deal with the nausea on the flight.

I’ve added Soontra—a modern looking juice stand-- to my list of two retail brands that could do very well in the States. The other is Bread Talk—a modern, small bread shop in Singapore with a slightly Japanese feel. Bread Talk could easily be the high end Dunkin Doughnuts of SE Asia. There are Dunkin Doughnuts here. I have no idea how they are faring. McDonalds, seems to do very well. Starbucks seems to do less well.

Posted by jb at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2006

Recycling

Over the summer of my last (I think) year of High School I had a semi job/volunteer position with the local recycling station near the post office in Kemblesville Township, Pennsylvania. On one of the long, brutally hot days, when patrons would make a run for it between the air conditioned interior of their cars, the trunk, and the recycling bin, I would stand in the parking lot, directing everyone and making sure that the number four plastics did not go in the number two container-- one of a series of big, turtle looking bins made from PVC with sliding windows in the front. Number one plastics, as I remember, were laundry detergent bottles, number two's I'm not sure about. I think number 3's were the Coke and Pepsi bottles. I could be wrong but each of these containers was filled with a distinct type of bottle, very pretty when you looked at it but awfully smelly, particularly in the heat.

At about one:30 in the afternoon in the middle of a normal broiling day, Joe Farber rode up on his bike. I was speaking with one of the recyclers at the time and when I turned around Joe was over near the turtle bins, opening each sliding deposit window, one after the other and looking in before shutting them. By the time I said “Hey…” he was in the number 3 bin, rolling around in the 2 and 3 liter Coke and Pepsi bottles. Given the heat inside the bins and the miasma of heavy syrupy odor that they exuded he stayed in the number 3 bin for a long time. Maybe five or six minutes. At least one recycler dashed form her car, carried stuff to the number 2 bin, paused, turned around, threw her recycling back in the trunk and drove off-- presumably in search of a different recycling station. The clatter on the outside was considerable. Even the glass dumpers stopped at the glass dumpster to see what was going on.

After five minutes or so, Joe climbed back out of the bin and stood in front of me. "You know JB, that was one of the most disgusting things I've ever done...I'm covered in backwash." He then got on his bike and rode off. It was like being visited by the Christmas reindeer of Kemblesville weirdness. We never mentioned this again. I think we both understood that it was a small event 'in itself.' that did not need to be discussed. I'm not sure what Joe thought about it. To this day, I'm not entirely sure what I've thought of it, except that I’ve always wanted to go and swim in the recycling container (and who wouldn’t) and while I have not gone for a swim myself, it's great to know someone who has.

(6:46)

In a completely unrelated incident, I managed to give myself a concussion on that same day a summer earlier, at a horse farm in a different township, when I bent down to get a drink from a regular, attached-to-the-barn garden hose only to look over, in slow motion, and watch the water spill on to an electric fence a foot away from my face. The electrical impulse was, of course, invisible, but my memory has permanently inscribed a faint white spark that glimmered as it traveled upstream to grab me in the molars

(6:54)

Posted by jb at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2006

Singapore National Library

Sometimes, the only way to appreciate cultural difference is to step into a border area between the public and the private, where the government brushes directly up against its constituents.

I'd been to the National library before but I'd always gone up to the top floors to look for the books instead of heading toward the basement. Dozens of kids were down there, teenagers, packed 2-3 per conference table. All quietly studying. Not a sound. Around them, the library built metal shelf after metal shelf of books, each shelf approximately 3/4 full; each book standing up completely straight and (here's the kicker) perfectly lined up at the spines.

I walked through the aisles and counted exactly two books that were tilted to one side. Otherwise they were each completely perpendicular...and shiny too. No frayed covers anywhere. It was the uniform depth that really got me, though. Apparently, the library has hired someone to walk back and forth along the shelves with a ruler in order to make sure that the books line up in perfect lines.

The visual effect is shocking. It did not help that the fire alarm went off when I took a book off of the shelf. I put it back and for a moment I was sitting in a discarded Kafka novel. It was 2020 and an alarm had gone off because someone without library membership had moved a book out of its perfect whitecappedtooth row. I checked the book for a RFID tag and put it back. A friendly animatronic voice came over the loudspeaker. This is the library system, a fire alarm has been pulled. Please remain calm. We are investigating.

Aiee!

Posted by jb at 05:55 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2006

Weekend in the city

This is a boring, piecemeal update.

I’ve spent the weekend in Singapore. I’m not sure what I’ve been thinking but I spent Saturday walking around the Chinese district, just beyond the point where Northbridge road crosses the bridge and becomes Southbridge road.

The apartment complexes near Neil’s road are Singapore’s lame attempt at having a “wrong side of the tracks.” Large billboard sized posters shout that “Low crime does not mean no crime” and that “Everyone should be aware of pickpockets” but if there is any crime here, I suspect that it comes from drunk Australians. I could probably walk through these high rise apartments at three in the morning with 500-dollar bills stapled to my shirt and I’d still be okay.

There is a tea chapter on Neil’s. This is an old school Chinese tea house/ club. I spent an hour there on Saturday, drinking a high grade Ooolong tea. I was seated in the Chinese section

( Inset: there was a Chinese section, a Korean section, and a Japanese section—each with different seating styles. The Chinese section was the most European, with marble topped tables and backed wooden chairs; the Korean section had small rooms with long benches and small tables. I have no idea what the Japanese section on the third floor looks like- probably spiked hello kitty benches from the Meji period.)

The waiter who sent me to the Chinese table near the street facing windows on the second floor came by and helped me choose the tea. At first he just asked me whether I had a preference for one province (Fujian, I think) over a different province (Guangdong, I think). This was a great question (the equivalent of asking a California tourist whether they prefer wines from the Napa valley over those of Sonoma or vice versa) because it forced me to tell him that I had no real knowledge of tea. A good move. I might otherwise have chosen the tea from Guangdong, which carries a heavy floral bouquet that can interfere with the non-aromatic taste of the tea (some day, I will use that factoid)

The waiter brought the tea over and walked through the tea drinking process. I’d known that tea drinkers typically pour tea from the first brewing vessel into a second cooling vessel before pouring it into a cup. I did not know, however, that Chinese tea drinkers (this may have been different in the Korean and Japanese rooms) pour the tea from the cooling vessel first into a fragrance cup (so they can smell the tea) and then into a color & clarity drinking cup (more stout than the willowy fragrance cup) in order to check the color just before drinking the tea.

Tea Equipment

There were several other steps, including a first infusion step where the tea is poured from the cooling vessel back over the outer surface of the brewing vessel since the first infusion is usually too bitter to drink. After the waiter left, I spent an hour noodling my way through a large pot and a small pack of dry tea leaves.

After I left the tea house, I wandered around some more and visited the Singapore Asian Civilizations Museum.

Now, I’m at work and listening to yet another thunderstorm roll over the Island.

Posted by jb at 03:19 AM | Comments (1)

August 29, 2006

Wandering around this morning

Six in the morning near the Fullerton Hotel on the bay. It is still dark out and there are a few people sitting at a restaurant under the bridge. One of them is watching a small tugboat crawling underneath the low overpass across the quay. Someone is standing up with a power hose, washing the underside of the bridge, standing on an A-frame ladder perched on the roof of the tugboat cabin. I get the idea that the bridges are washed once a week in Singapore.

I love Google Earth-- This is approximately where I walked this morning

Standing at an intersection near the capitol building. I’m waiting for the light to change and I notice movement along a stairway on the 16th floor of the Intercontinental hotel. Some business traveler is treading up the stairs, shoulders slumped, pulled forward by a laptop bag.

I’m surprised at how all encompassing vision can be. I imagine, for example, that I was in a world where my vision was limited and where I communicated by smell or hearing or touch or any sense but vision. The world would have only a few million people in it instead of the multiple millions that I see every year.

I’d like to extend the sense of hearing. If I could, I’d put listening posts all over the city. Small cellphones taped to walls near crowded areas. Anyone who wanted to could dial one of the numbers and “see” the area with their ears.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haircut in the QB House, underground near the train station. SD$10 and less than 10 minutes, guaranteed. The barbers manage this, it turns, out, by using nothing but clippers. It was the first stall where I’d seen an integrated television. Each customer was able to watch video clips while getting a haircut. This raises some issues though…what if the latest Episode of “Lost” came on the television and I wanted to watch.

I suppose that I could just buy six haircuts.

QB House Haircut Place-- Not my Photo

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’ve never been a fan of science fiction but the haircut place has made me think of cyborgs. Specifically, I was thinking of a cyborg with an integrated hand vacuum massager unit. After the haircut is finished, the vacuum could suck all of the hair off of your head while the massager unit goes to work on your scalp. Presto—the convergence of two common barbershop tools: the head massager and the cranial vacuum!

I’ll bet that those cyborgs could be dangerous assassins in their spare time, especially if they had integrated scissors and shaving tools. They could kill you in a heartbeat and ...just vacuum up the mess.

Maybe barbershop cybernetics is not the best research area for me. I’d likely et a visit from some futuristic barbershop robot, accompanied by a crazed woman and a 12 year old kid. “Don’t develop the integrated scissors unit” they’d say—and then they’d cut off my arm. This is another personal fear of mine.

Posted by jb at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

Po-Ket by Scooter

One out of every seven point five teenagers in Phuket, Thailand is brutally fast on a motor scooter. I managed to keep up with almost everybody at 80km/h but kids would blow by me on the highway with newer scooters that had better tuning. My own scooter was at least five years old; a cracked out Honda Wave with a thready sounding engine and weak, ghostly brakes. It started vibrating at 60 and couldn’t for the life of it get above 85, even on the long slow downhills that led out of the mountains off the west side of the country. When I let off the gas at 80, the engine would backfire.

The Bike

The scooter led me to divide the day trip to Phuket into three stages: the fun stage between the airport and Ban-Ra-Ngeng, the “my brakes don’t work so well” loop from Ban-Ra-Ngeng to the coast (Patong Beach, Karon Beach, Kata Beach) and back to Phuket town; and the “please just make it back” stage between Phuket town and the north side of the Island, with Nai Yang Beach, and Mai Khao.

Patong Beach

The entire trip covered roughly 100 miles/ 160 km. It took the entire day. At least half of time was spent in the rain, which made it more of an adventure than a vacation. The rain was not noticeable at 40 km/h but by 80 it became electric, crackling against exposed skin, cooling off—I imagine—the sunburn which I’d racked up in the morning.

The Map-- I traced out my approximate route using the polygon tool in Google Maps

I rented the scooter from an auto dealership within walking distance of the airport. It cost, for the day, 150 Baht or about $4. The rental fee established a price index in my head and so I was shocked, for example, to find that a Tequila Sunrise was also 150 baht on Patong beach.

Notes:

I found out that the brakes on the bike were not up to par as soon as I hit the rolling mountains outside Patong Beach. These were really steep (over 20% grade) hills with sharp turns in either direction and the terrain, more than the road signs dictated traffic speed. At the same time, I felt the need to keep up with the local kids who, while not exactly racing, were passing me at the start. I decided to open up the throttle a bit on one straight downhill only to hit a turn and watch the brakes weaken out just at the apex. I had that sinking feeling that you get right before kissing a lorry and I swung slowly, sickeningly from the far left lane out into oncoming traffic on the right. Pumping the right hand brake (does this work? I don’t know), I lurched the bike back to the left side as the first pickup truck crested the turn below me to meet the first minivan racing up on me from behind.

It is easy to take wrong turns on the coast. Just before Kata Noi, I missed a turn and ended up at the base of a long mixed cement track/ dirt trail that wound off into the hills. Pickup trucks stopped at the bottom and several men were waiting out the rain at a roadside shack. I decided to take the track, which turned into a dirt road, which turned into a muddy ravine filled road with sharp climbs and drops. I was forced into first gear to get up the hills and several of the downhills required that I walk the bike down, straddling the scooter while holding onto the brakes. At the end of the track there was one final descent into a sketchy jungle camp. Just a few pickups and a cement block compound. Phuket is a tourist island so this was probably a tourist spot of some sort but I decided not to hang around on the thin curve of beach. Instead, I turned the bike around and pushed it painfully in 1st gear back along the mountain bike path maybe 2km to the road. On the way out I passed another group of people trying to extend the ramp into the muck. They waved but more in the “look at the crazy guy” sense than in the “hey, I’m glad to see you” sense.

Kata Noi

The highway into Phuket town—the biggest urban area in Phuket— was under repair when I passed through. The Thai method of highway repair seems to involve scattering tons of loose asphalt over a dirt base. Cars and bikes then grind the loose asphalt into place. Since it was raining, much of the dirt underneath the asphalt has turned to mud. Cars and bikes slowed to a crawl as they were forced to navigate an off-road course. I’d already had some experience turning the scooter into a trials bike that morning and I put it to good use by careening by bike, cars, and gravel trucks at 40-50 km/h even as they were gingerly navigating water filled potholes. As in Boston, the real problem lay not with the slow drivers but the indecisive ones.

The waiter looked at me like I was weird when I ordered a Tequila sunrise at 9:30 in the morning. Maybe it was the coffee chaser.

There are Buddhist temples and shrines all over the place. I need to go back and get more photos but it was rainign and most were visible from the highway at points where I did not really want to stop for pictures.

There was one sculpture along the beach, though. In Katong.

Posted by jb at 01:59 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2006

Um...Tesco?

Paper towel rolls are shorter in Singapore. Door moldings are also tucked in rather than sitting out on the face of the frame. There are two passcard points and two keyed entries, all separate, between the sidewalk and my third floor office/apartment. The first passcard limits access through the front door and the second limits access to the elevator. Key locks one and two are set first at a small (five foot by five foot) garden entrance to the apartment and then at the doors to the apartment itself.

The apartment is right next to Bugis center, one of the main shopping areas in Singapore. I walk outside and right into a sidewalk length of small coffee, sandwich, and pastry shops. This line continues unbroken to the right at the end of my block, forming part of a foursquare circuit that rests shoulder to shoulder with Chinatown at the far end of the next street down. If I turn left and then right and walk across the street I can enter the Bugis center mall, three floors of small shops supported at the very bottom by a big Japanese grocery store.

I love grocery stores. I don’t buy much since I tend to eat at food stalls and hawker stands but I like looking at new products. Each product is a solution to some problem. Many are solutions to problems that had not occurred to me. I see it as a cultural conversation. Some new technology comes out or some cultural shift takes place, brining a slew of benefits and problems. Other supporting products are developed to answer new problems. Each product in the aisle says “Do you have this problem? Then how about this answer!”

Let me try to think of an example on the fly. Indian food seems to have become dominant in London, while coffee has replaced tea as the drink of choice and fewer people smoke. All of these dietary shifts conjoin to create digestive stress. Consciously or unconsciously, British consumers are responding to this digestive stress by seeking food that benefits the digestive bacteria in the gut. When I stopped in London, I left Heathrow and went directly to Hammersmith where I looked into a Tesco supermarket. Probiotic foods were everywhere. Emmi has several new yogurt drinks, BASF is producing a new probiotic gum, and dairy-based foods are dominating the shelves. There are even several clear probiotic drinks.

Probiotic foods are actually the second round in a conversation about digestion. The first round was based on medicine and focused on pills and tablets and mixes. Apparently consumers had already ingested too many pills. They wanted to get away from feeling that pills and vitamins were needed to smother the flames of an unhealthy diet.

This new round of the conversation said “How about we give you something focused on digestive health and strong bones while you stop worrying so much about milkfat and begin eating dairy again.” So far consumers seem to have said yes. Now food producers are providing probiotics in a hundred different forms, from small actimel bottles to big jugs of kefir, gums and gels. Someday, someone will make probiotic dairy creamer and everyone will be happy.

Posted by jb at 08:54 PM | Comments (6)

August 19, 2006

Powdered cereal and Papercraft

I’ve taken to recycling the milk from my cereal by dumping it into my coffee. The milk is sweet and the cereal adds a new tone I guess and I’m thinking that someone needs to buy cereal in batch and powder it. Cereal powder could be the American version of spiced Indian Tea. After all, who doesn’t like the taste of sugary cereal milk. Caffeinated, powdered cereal. Dump it in your milk, heat and serve. What could be better. Maybe powdered cereal with diphenhydramine for bed time.

We are now at the point where it should be possible to re-engineer comfort foods to deliver medical benefits. At least one company (CocoaVia) makes chocolate bars with plant sterols that are supposed to be good for controlling cholesterol. Other solutions could include pizza for ulcers, chicken parmesan for rabies, and mac & cheese for hepatitis. I like the concept. It could all be sold as part of the “Eat Comfort Food Or Die” campaign. I would also use the “Extra comfort” and “Just what Mom ordered” taglines.

One of the great benefits of micro-electromechanical machines (MEMS) is the potential to make devices that can be safely digested without causing undue distress. Researchers can now make ultra small capsules with integrated pressure sensors and rfid chips. I look forward to the day when the pressure sensor/ rfid combination respnds to pressure from our teeth (when eating) and sends a signal to a transdermal medication delivery unit. If we were practical, the delivery unit would dispense an appetite suppressant. We are not practical. I suspect that we will be given very small doses of oxycontin every time we eat ice cream. Maybe I am just thinking of this because of my back. It’s true, however, that networked food will move the eating experience from the palate to the plate to the patch.

One of the housemates gets catalogs from PaperSource . If I could, I’d buy stock in this company (it is not publicly traded). The company, which specializes in stationery, arts & crafts paper and imported paper may in a position to see the effects of the boom in papercraft. We’ve reached a time when papercraft may replace vinyl toys as the medium of choice for the expressive but purchase oriented consumers in the 20-40 age range.

This trend has been building for a while. The knitting crowd always mixed with the KidRobot crowd at the fringes. Now, in accordance with the law of hidden knowledge (two items being otherwise equal, consumers given the choice of purchasing either item will choose the item that allows them to act as a maven/connector) papercraft should beat out vinyl.

For my part, I’m not so interested in papercraft toys but I could be interested in papercraft jewelry. This could include rigid necklaces that allow the purchaser to insert paper or it could include necklaces, earrings and bracelets made entirely from paper. This will appeal to the Athropologie crowd, all of whom are moving away from the last outposts Abercrombie & Fitch land (Positioning: A&F is anthropolgie mixed with rich, college jocks plus a touch of BoBo-adapted organic farming culture) to become obsessed with higher end, more delicate items with cleaner lines.

Vinyl toys will attempt to make a comeback by incorporating other features, such as stamp surfaces that will appeal to the papercraft crowd but desire flows one way in this case.

Back to bed, I think.
8:23 AM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Drove over the auto repair shop (Streetwise Auto Repair on Putnam Ave in Somerville) to get the car fixed. The car had managed to jam one wheel into a deep pothole at the end of a long curvy hill and this pretty much destroyed the tire and rim, something that I did not notice until about a week later when the can began to wobble as I drove it.

The repair shop was closed (this means a busy Monday morning) but it was nice to get back into the car and drive around. Fall hits early in Boston and while the leaves are not changing color, the sky is getting overcast and I noticed some gardens falling into disrepair.

It would be nice if the gardens could be slowly repurposed for Halloween. Leave some of the vegetables rotting on the stalk. Put in a last round of corn and then leave it so that it rustles and rattles. Run a power source and multimedia set into the garden so that it emits spooky noises when people walk too close. Start a social meme warning kids about the garden. Start sending vaguely threatening garden-themed text messages through an internet services while using a ghost proxy. Instill some real fear in the neighborhood. Topiary would help.

I always wonder that topiary themes are so classic. It appears that there are a finite number of acceptable forms. It also appears that there is very little kinetic topiary. That strikes me as a shame. Not that it should be impossible to make articulated frames that are motor powered for movement. It’s just that nobody does it.

I would like to see a topiary rube Goldberg machine. Even better, I’d like to see a garden-based rube Goldberg machine. It would be extremely complex but also very slow. I would include steps such as “When this water wears through this rock, it will channel itself into this here dormant field, driving earthworms up to the surface. As soon as a bird flies down to eat the worms it will land on this stick, which will pop open a window and start whatever seedlings have been placed in the bed this year.

It is possible view many of the strange events in our lives as the outcome of a decentralized Rube Goldberg machine, which operates behind the scenes, complicating and resolving endless mechanical and interpersonal relationships until something big and weird interupts breakfast.

(10:15 AM)

Posted by jb at 08:23 AM | Comments (7)

August 17, 2006

Storm Shadow

The concept of “one of those days” is universally recognized. If there were an Audubon guide to days, the entry for “one of those” would be prominent. It would be odd if this term covered the only universal human experience.

Woke up two days ago, went to the kitchen and promptly spent half an hour crawling back to my room. A sadist apparently got me in the lumbar vertebrae with a screwdriver. He just jammed it into one of the spinous processes and twisted. Now I know what my ceilings look like.

This is bad because I’m supposed to fly to Singapore on Monday. Prior to the flight I am supposed to put everything that I own into storage. It would be easier if I could reach down and pick something/ anything up off of the floor but I can’t. I can bend over and paw at it but the effect is like one of those “select your prize” glassbox crane machines that is never able to get the stuffed animal. I’m also running out of quarters.

The flight to Singapore involves a 12 hour layover in London, at Heathrow. The security measures have reportedly eased over the last week but I’ve received conflicting advice about leaving the airport and touring London before returning in the evening. It would be nice to see a museum or a gallery or run around acting like a chav until I’m taken down by the flying squad. On the other hand, it will take forever to get back through security with my collection of Franklin Mint Gi-Joe Commemorative Plates. I’m really only worried about the "Snake Eyes", "Storm Shadow" (both of whom are ninjas) and "Spirit Iron Knife" plates. Spirit Iron Knife is a bit of a Native American Miami Vice character: Miami Vice because of the clothes, Native American because of the headband and face paint. He also carries a compound bow. If I were him, I might feel a bit shafted. His friend Heavy Duty gets a plasma cannon. “Yeah, just wait up guys... I see that you have been unable to take down Cobra Commander’s monstrous killer robot with your plasma cannon… Thankfully I have this compound bow”

To this day, I’m not sure why GI Joe went through a ninja phase—I always saw the ninja figurines as the ones that you could place in a dark corner and ignore. That way, when one of your friends has your character surrounded and is on his way to deliver a mind numbing beat down you could remind him about the ninjas who were still lurking around the periphery of the room. “Where are they?” he'd say. You'd look around but you would have forgotten where you placed them. “They are…watching,” you'd say, “…watching… and waiting…” When he is asleep that night you would plan to sneak into his house and stab him in the head with Storm Shadow’s sword. You never would. His mom wouldn't allow you in after 10pm.

Maybe I’m biased. I see ninjas as the stenographers of the espionage world. Strangely, they look much more scary on commemorative plates.

Posted by jb at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2006

Watertown, MA

I don’t have any particular oral fixation but I will chew gum to stay awake or put off a meal. I do this more when I drive and road trips always result in gum wrappers strewn about the inside of my car. On the trip down to Wilmington, NC, for example, I picked up two packages of Dentyne “Ice” gum. I suppose the name fits because the gum is inundated with blue flecks. Originally I thought that the gum might contain diamonds or crystal meth (or, for that matter, 4-methyl-aminorex). In retrospect, I’m glad that the gum contains neither. I’ll bet that the folks at Dentyne are glad as well. Both additives would impact the bottom line.

This has not prevented the people at Cadbury (parent company) from making their gum packages as mysterious as possible. The sticks of gum are presented in the cardboard equivalent of an old cigarette holder and each gum elements (sticks? not really sticks, more like a short planks) come individually wrapped in small square of white cigarette paper that have been emblazoned with blue asteroids.

These asteroids disturb me. I don’t understand them. Was the gum intended for aliens? Are there creatures from foreign galaxies having appearances too terrible to describe chewing away at one hundred or two hundred sticks of gum at a time, realizing that they’d eliminate this planet save for the six tonnes of asteroid laden gum offered up each month by the visionaries at SETI? That would make for a depressing ending to the x-files.

Looking for technology today. I have this weird bi-monthly tech hunting assignment that always gets put off until the last minute at which point I end up submitting five or six new technologies that are always singular in their inability to convey either the new or the interesting.

Just now, for example, I found a company called Micro Target media that specializes in wraparound ad placement on the outside of porta potties. Soon the massed green walls, the open fields of porta potties will be gone, replaced by squat billboard ads for television shows, new movies, tools and other consumerist paraphernalia. Micro Target has gone beyond the call of duty here, integrating RFID and GPS technology to allow advertisers to watch minute by minute porta potty use. The idea here is that usage rate correlates to the number of impressions given by the ad.

For some reason, ad placement on porta potties makes me think of oversized refrigerator magnets. I’d like to make them. Single words, the size of license plates. People could put them on their cars in order to spell out messages for the reading pleasure of other drivers. We’d need to keep them clean but there should be a large market for this kinda thing. I went to the magnetic poetry website in order to place the suggestion and found out that it has a blog (http://magpo.blogs.com/davesblog/). The blog includes the line: “When it's 90 degrees and humid, you gotta air out the ferret...”. Now I’m not so sure about passing the concept on to these people.

That’s not entirely true. Their disclosure process prevents me from submitting this idea. I’m sure that they have already thought of refrigerator magnets for cars so this might just be repetitive. If they were bright, they’d get a list of every metallic surface used in consumer goods and then check off those that are amenable to refrigerator magnets. They would not get all of the concepts (the print your own magnet kits, the magnetic strips sized to provide backing for words crimped out via and old-style label maker, and the public surface magnets that could be used instead of spray paint/ market tags) but they could build an easy innovation process that would cover some of it.

Thinking along these lines, I’d like to see HP put it’s rice-grain sized chips in each magnet, forming a small mesh network on the fridge (you’d have to shield these of course). Each chip would contain the word written on the magnet and find it’s nearest proximal/distal neighbor. A fridge transceiver would take this information and relay it to an internet enabled device (such as a laptop). I could then show other people the refrigerator magnet poetry on my fridge. Social networks could be formed. It might revitalize the product.

An easer solution could already be obtained through camera phones. Submit a photo of your fridge to the magnet poetry site. One program aligns the magnetic squares. The next uses an OCR routine to approximate the fridge poem. This gets associated with a user account.

Now I’m kidding. I hate refrigerator magnets.

What else is going on in the world of technology? Apparently Ankit Fadia (hacker, India) has decided to apply some of his hacking and cracking skills to problems of consciousness. There may be something here. I could see a distracted state as the result of a denial of service attack. More importantly. I could see some human pattern recognition abilities employed to circumvent DNS attacks. Incoming packets, for example, could be scanned for “new” content and servers could focus on “newness” while batching “non-new” messages for later processing. On the user side, this means that consumers would occasionally be forced to add “new” content to a website query, possibly by going through a standard “make sure that you are human” process that involves typing a code word into a box and submitting this along with a request. On the other side, I could see a service that uses tokens to validate id and then allows validated users to obtain preferential treatment from websites that might otherwise be suffering from DNS attacks.

Lots of interesting things are happening in India. There is a fashion park under construction in Ludhiana. It involves the Knitwear Club, Shawl Club and Ludhiana Integrated Textile Park and seems to be intended as a one stop shop for designers. The park has apparently attracted a shortlist of 500 designers and 3,500 other groups who wish to do design work.

Why is this important?

Over the last few years anyone with even the slightest desire has been able to enter the worlds of publishing and video. Blogs abound. Photos can be bound into books and mailed with the click of a mouse. There are dozens of online sources for digital movies. At the same time, we have seen (rapid) growth in rapid manufacturing. There are at least five firms that will manufacture and sell t-shirts that I design. I’m sure an hour’s search could turn up a place that will manufacture bumper stickers signs, CD covers or other media to my specifications. A week’s work and I could find a firm in China to prototype and then machine manufacture something more substantial. This new ability is leading to a major cultural shift; from a consumer society to a designer society. This shift is important and is reflected in our changing attitudes towards work and schooling, both of which focus on creativity and conceptual flexibility (the high end stuff) rather than the day to day grind of equations and hard answers, most of which can be outsourced.

Here’s the thing. This is not just happening in the states. Technology is allowing the developing world to keep up with us. There will be no more than the merest gap in design proficiency. Design talent will not become an exportable good because everyone will be a designer. What will happen when the secondary roles of the finder and broker are also outsourced?

So this fashion park is interesting to me. I might become a reasonable hub. I can see kids sitting down with pieces of paper in small villages across India, drawing stuff that they see. The paper is then sent on to designers. The best designs are incorporated into the clothing that appears on out shelves. As our tools become better, design becomes democratized. I don’t want to sound too visionary grand-proclamation about this but it has always seemed as if many cultural conflicts have stemmed from two divisions: the divisions between those who invest and accept risk (this includes small business owners) and those who don’t and the division between those whose jobs have some essential creative component (this includes artisan labor) and those who don’t. Both of these are disappearing. I wonder what society will look like when they are gone.

Enough.

Posted by jb at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2006

Wilmington, NC

At Ryan’s wedding today in Wilmington, NC. Spent yesterday evening driving from Wrightsville Beach to Carolina beach and back. I’ve later been told that Carolina beach is the redneck beach. I guess that explains the confederate flag bodyboards.

Speaking to Owen and Jenny about wedding gifts. This is one of the first weddings where the majority of gifts have been given over the internet. It’s time to make “internet gift tsotchkes." I’m thinking of little plaques, possibly made out of stop signs or license plates or old mirrors or tin cans or denim or other found items. These plaques will have a small brass or steel note holder with a note regarding the internet gift. They will also feature of big, blue circle with the letter "I" stamped on the interior. Now everyone will have something to place on the table at the wedding.

Noted in local bars: a revised version of the “your weight or fortune” scale. Now you pay 50 cents and then blow into a hole through a disposable black straw. The machine gives you your blood alcohol content and the likelihood of arrest should you be pulled over. A few years back, a friend told me about a party held by local police officers. They were seeing how high they could score on the breathalyzers.

Back at the Kampgrounds of America. It provides a weird mix of old world and new world camping. Old world: I can hear cicadas and smell campfire smoke at the picnic table by my tent. New world: I have a wireless internet connection in my tent.

I managed to leave my suit (by accident) back at my house in Massachusetts so I’ve had my first wedding dressed entirely in clothing (suit, shirt, tie, t-shirt, everything) purchased at Target. And it looked reasonably sharp, darnit. The effect impressed me enough to wax on about the purchase to anyone who would give me an ear.

The wedding was in Saint Mark’s church, off Everett (Evansville?) road on the way to Wrightville beach. A wonder of modern catholic architecture, which is to say it looked weird, futurist and terrible. H.L. Mencken complained about modern church architecture at the turn of the 20th century, wondering why the wooden clapboard church had been replaced by towering brick monstrosities. Evidently this trend has continued. Soon modern churches will look like modern synagogues, which are often awkward and angular: executed by some new school architect who has yet to realize that the Bauhaus died for a reason. I suppose there is a lesson in this. It’s too easy to be in love with the aesthetics of religion (this may be true for me). A more interesting problem is the loss of aesthetics in a normally aesthetically pleasing world. Maybe churches are designed to make us consider this, and the problem of aesthetic loss is pale, easier to tackle shadow of the problem of suffering. It’s as if Job had been sent to New Jersey instead of suffering the death of his wife.

Saw Dan (Ryan’s brother) and Stacey together today. It’s still, along with Jen and Steve’s marriage, one of the most encouraging marriages that I have ever seen. It seems to marked by goodwill, originally outside the marriage (before they knew each other), then within and then outside again, which is not something covered in marriage sermons. It would be kinda funny if the great passions (from great love to martyrdom) that are supposed to define our lives were in the end shown to be less important than goodwill (and maybe plain honesty). Ach, I feel like I’m bordering on one of those aphoristic Benjamin Franklin books. Anyway, Dan and Stacey, when together, often make the people around them slightly better, which is the main indicator of any sort of really great relationship.

Microsoft seems to be thinking in the right direction with Zune, the new music platform intended to compete with the ipod. From the WSJ: "We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together." Napster made the concept of online music acceptable but Apple built it’s market by making it easy to download music without worrying about bitrate or bad labels or sudden static. The next frontier is probably music discovery. How do you find new stuff that you will like. www.pandora.com has done a decent job but Microsoft may be able to do better. I expect Apple to respond with new licensing regimens, including a licensing platform that will allow users to remix and repost music via garageband. This fits with the discover/manage/ create cycle that seems to characterize so much media. If Apple knew what it was doing, I’d be creating music videos on a macbook pro a year from now.

According to the WSJ, Michelle Bernstein, head chef at Michi in Miami has created a new soup comprised of “Cold corn with lobster garnish” Is the soup martini the next frontier? I can see a shot or vodka potato soup warming me on a late Winter night. I’d sell it under the “no more empty calories” tagline. I’d design a bar to look like a kitchen in one of the old Soviet Republics. Patrons would enter in the dead of winter and drink snifters of warm tomato vodka soup. In the summer, they’d drink shots of gazpacho and tequila. What should I call this? The patrons could be soupaholics. The soup could be soupahol or souperclear (for soup plus everclear). I hate that word. It Is nowhere near as good as rockstitutes (rockstar prostitutes).

Enough.

Posted by jb at 07:40 PM | Comments (4)

July 20, 2006

Reading the WSJ

Airport Ideas in Charlotte, NC in the morning

The camelback drink insert concept came up in discussion. Pre-filled camelback bags just need to be good enough to keep from breaking open under the stress of biking or hiking or running. That and a valve at the bottom. It does not need to be made of the high test polyethylene used in normal camelback pouches.

According to the Wall Street Journal, XOXO is reviving a classic supermodel-driven advertising scheme. The WSJ notes that stars are used to brand clothing today, not supermodels. Supermodels may be a better idea, though, because they require at least a bit of inside knowledge that would give the bearer slightly of the fashion insider mystique that many teens/ 20 something seek. It might be even better to use lesser-known models.

There is a kids toy store in the airport. As always, there is at least one construction kit that includes sixteen billion reconfigurable pieces. The trouble with these platforms in that kids (often with the help of their parents) build exactly one platform and then abandon the toy. When is Lego going to respond to this travesty by releasing Lego stop animation kits, with or without a simple video camera? Let teenagers (right, probably not kids) go and make movie shorts. Design the camera and support equipment specifically to support stop animation, including 3 frame or 10 frame shots, guidelines for smooth movement, and choreography sheets. This might be too complex to be a good idea, but I’d like to see these toys used more than once and I’d like to see kids escape excessive attachment to the first round finished toy models that they build. Otherwise, they may as well be assembling Ikea furniture. Ikea should look into this.

Why do the second tier advertisers allow so many spelling and grammar mistakes in expensive national newspaper ads? If you’ve just spent $50K to get a quarter page ad in the WSJ, you could spend $1K to have someone proof the darn ad. I’m thinking here of the Diamond Essence (manufactured diamonds) ad on page A13, which occupies ¼ of the second op-ed page. This is prime real estate. Your WSJ op-ed reader is well off and will be in the habit of reading the page instead of scanning headlines. Despite the obvious placement expense the ad reads like a "Grow Muscle" insert in the back of an old Mad magazine. It’s repetitive: "revolutionary scientific breakthrough"... "the diamonds are transparently clear." There are obvious statements: "the diamonds will scratch glass!" Of course they will. There are statements that seem decidely off topic: "Temperatures used to form the diamonds run above 5000 degrees F, twice the temperature needed to melt steel." Why steel? I’d wonder about other industrial diamonds. There are, further, missing words and misplaced commas “Why so many famous and wealthy people, including royalty, movie stars, celebrities and TV personalities, wear them instead of mined diamonds” Who wrote this? It’s an embarrassment. You can advertise performance and low prices without making the consumer think that he’s buying something that “fell off the truck.” Get it together grammarians!

I’ve also read that the United States Congress is planning to get rid of the penny. The 3% copper content dives the per unit manufacturing cost above the monetary value of the penny itself. Our legislators have considered abandoning the nickel for similar reasons. I’m fond of both of these currencies. There is nothing, after all, like being hit in the head with a bag of nickels and, as my grandma used to say, a sock filled with pennies is a great substitute for a shillelagh. Even if we can’t keep the weight and the metal content, we should preserve the currency; if only to keep the spare change a flowing to charitable organizations, (the WSJ notes that spare change actually does add up and con contribute to the bottom line at many donation driven services). I suggest that we replace the pennies with AOL subscription CDs.

If AOL had been smart, they would have reduced the software payload in each CD and then enabled a recordable surface. That way, the fraction of consumers suddenly short of recordable CDs could reach in a pinch for that AOL subscription CD, open the package, at least glance at the content, and use the CD with its advertising laden surface to record some music. The CD would then be traded back and forth and would stand out in stacks of music CDs instead of being thrown immediately into the trash.

Just a thought, though.

I've been watching people walk around the airport and thinking about the role of skin in controlling information flow. If you ever look at a face peel during reconstructive surgery you’ll see layers and layers of muscle, all swarming over each other between the forehead and the chin. The skin reduces the visual impact of this muscle and allows us to communicate in a reduced set of expressions. If our brains were better at processing visual information, the role and nature of our skin might change. I can imagine a second set of cheekbones or muscles under the eyes that would add a whole new dimension of social context to communication. A smile is one thing but a smile where the muscles under your eyes curve as well is entirely different.

Article in the 20 July WSJ on web pages for the blind. Many of the major websites are making navigation easier for blind people. Google, is creating a search service that will retrieve pages in order of utility for the blind. This is great. I might start to use this service in order to find pages where information is available without distracting frames buttons and boxes.

That's it.

Posted by jb at 12:00 PM | Comments (2)

June 06, 2006

Ach, another abbreviated weekly update

Spent two days hobbling around after the Mt. Washington hike, legs creaking more than the stairs

Saw R, my housemate, play his last show at Ryles in Cambridge Thursday night. St Germain, MMW, Freddie Hubbard, that sort of thing, played with five other people. HD went with me to the show and LK, met us there after getting in a semi-car accident (the details are still not clear to me) en route. The set included one of R’s own pieces which he had worked out at the house a few weeks before.

Drove home Friday night, arrived at 2 in the morning. Dad had picked up a 1995 Ryan long wheel base under seat steering recumbent and we were supposed to take it out on first a 60 and then a 20 mile ride on Saturday. Overslept and woke at 8:30. Got breakfast while dad rode his own recumbent (a trike, really) through rain and wind in rural Pennsylvania.

Spent Saturday sitting in the kitchen and talking with family members. My sister was home and recovering from several years of employment at a horse farm in North Carolina.

Memorial service on Sunday. Met Joe’s wife, 3 month old and 3 year old. Saw his parents for the first time in years. A quiet Unitarian service at a Quaker meeting house near Villanova. Services were conducted by the same pastor that married Joe and his wife, Carol.

Drove back to Boston. Attempted to watch a movie—The BreakUp—with AL. Too terrible to watch. We walked out after 20 min. The whole point was to see a bad movie but there are limits. The handlebars came off of the recumbent on the way over to the theater. This was interesting. It was the first time I'd crashed out (screeching tires and all, it is hard to fall gracefully when you get dropped out of your handlbars) on the bridge that leads to Charles/ MGH.

Plan to look for washers in order to keep handlebars on this week.

Posted by jb at 07:12 AM | Comments (3)

May 30, 2006

Random notes from the last two weeks

Notes from last two weeks

Watched a Yankees/ Red Sox game and had BBQ at BW’s house in Waltham last week and listened to some hair raising horror stories from the last three months [Example: Which is worse, (1) having a doctors tell you parents—incorrectly—that you have a 3% chance of survival and being forced to make plans around this until a new team of doctors determines that your cancer medication is causing your pulmonary problems or (2) sitting through a diagnostic procedure that requires doctors to irrigate one lobe of your lung for several hours, giving you the feeling of nonstop drowning?] Went to court in Waltham Thursday morning and succeeded in getting a civil charge dropped in re: an inspection sticker for my car and went to arts night last night at the Neighborhood House Charter school. More on that later maybe, but here is a piece of art from one of the kids. I kinda like it:

Went up to Mt. Washington this weekend, intending to do some backpacking. I decided to carry tent plus bag, stove and 3 liters of water and extra clothes in an old external frame pack which came complete with a metal edge which dug its way into my scapula when I was hiking. As I understand, it was included by EMS in an effort to keep hikers from sleeping while the pack is on.

Sunday was warm (83-85 degrees at the base) and melted snow was rolling off the mountain. Several trails were closed, including the Tuckerman ravine approach to the Alpine level so I dragged the pack up the Boott Spur trail instead. I hate that trail. Each time I struggle up it, I swear that I will never take that trail again. It’s that wrong exit on the freeway that forces you to spend six hours caught up between stoplights and video stores. The walk up to the Lakes of the Clouds cost me my first liter of water and any desire to hike down to the forest below the alpine ridge in order to camp that night. Instead, I spent most of the day hiking out from the Lakes (ponds really) of the Clouds and around the ridgelines near the summit of Mt Washington (I’ve been to the top- it’s a parking lot with a miniature South of the Border type center in the middle. The ridgelines below the peak are great but I’m not too tempted to go back up to the top). It was not a grueling hike but it was enough to keep me hobbling around the house yesterday.

Posted by jb at 07:05 AM | Comments (1)

April 09, 2006

Mistakes Were Made

"Good afternoon America. Good afternoon shareholders. Mark Platner here. We will be reviewing our quarterly results shortly but I wanted to first take a minute and speak frankly on some of the difficulties that have confronted us and about some of the changes we will be making in order to better serve our community, our nation, and those who have chosen to stand by us throughout the last three quarters

First, I’d like to say that this transition period has not been easy for any of us. We’ve all spent long nights on this end, reviewing past decisions, trying to determine where things went wrong. Several of us left the company. One committed Seppuku. The cleaning staff in our Clearwater, FL office is still in therapy. We are paying for the therapy, by the way. We may be in tough financial times but we still care about our employees.

Today we are focused on disclosure. We are glad to get things out in the open and see this as the first part in our own ten-step plan toward corporate accountability. With that in mind, I’ll walk through some of the problems that we have faced and provide some insight to changes in our approach

The biggest and most obvious stumbling block hit us early when we merged Corporate Office Rentals and a new Theme Parks division we’d acquired from a Disney Affiliate. In retrospect, we should have installed our more traditional managers in the Theme Parks division rather than thinking ‘out of the box’ by replacing the Rental Management team with a set of Rodeo Clowns. In retrospect, we were deceived by their inspirational speeches. We are happy to announce, however, that we have settled out of court to control our losses stemming from the early decision to combine coffee stations and mechanical bulls as a “wake up and get going” tool.

Unfortunately, we did not learn the larger lesson here, and followed with other unfortunate staffing changes. An example: while we continue to believe in the enormous potential held by all individuals, we now admit that our decision to hire state-certified sociopaths to staff our “Bright and Perky” line of family restaurants was short-sighted. Many of these restaurants, by the way, are still standing and most of our waitstaff no longer require clozapine to function.

We can also state that our decision to replace a third of our workforce with Roomba’s was unfortunate. While we firmly believe that robots are the way of the future, we feel that these robots may not be Roombas with built in calculators. As part of our ongoing settlement process, we would also like to extend a formal apology to the many patients who visited our regional hospitals during this Roombas phase and in particular, the one hundred and sixty eight patients who ended up getting a less than gentle vacuum massage rather than undergoing standard, accepted open heart surgery procedures.

As you know, our difficulties extended beyond staffing decisions. For those of you wondering about the oversized Monopoly cards sent out in the place of the last quarterly shareholders report, I ask for your patience. You may have gotten our letter on the subject. We now have standard reports prepared for everyone except shareholders with more than two hotels on Ventnor Avenue. We have also removed the slot machine graphic from our homepage share price display. On that note, you may be pleased to know that we remain listed in the NYSE despite the regrettable but well publicized incident with the giraffe.

That said, we are making efforts to improve the situation and communicate these improvements to the outside world. You may recognize, for example, changes in our advertising style. Many viewers were offended by our last ad campaign. They did not, for example, find the commercial where the plane filled with kittens blows up near an orphanage “funny” or “cute” in the way that we’d intended. We regret this. From now on we will use only mimes. Maybe an orphanage full. Just a joke there.

Thanks for listening to my introduction. We will start the formal review now. We suspect that you will find more reassuring information within the body of this report. Pay particular attention to our management analysis. We’ve spent some time trying to clarify parts. You’ll find some liner notes to the interpretive dance sequence under your seats."

Posted by jb at 07:54 AM | Comments (1)

March 24, 2006

Alllight?

You have $100 right? You don’t? I’m sure you can get it. Why? Because I’ve just been given a lead on the guns & ammo equivalent of a Pantera reunion tour. No really, check this out: Boomershot 2006 . 200 people are driving to Idaho in late April for the express purpose of taking rifle shots at over 800 targets containing nearly 1000 lbs of high explosives. After all, the only thing better than shooting at something is shooting at something and watching it blow up. Apparently, it takes place out in a field. Shots are taken from 350+ yards for most of the day but there is some late in the day cleanup at closer ranges if some of the explosives have failed to detonate. The organizers maintain a strict ceasefire when cars are passing by. The only thing that could be more fun would be a combination explosive detonation and pumpkin chucking event. Or a Pantera reunion. It’s no too late. I hear Anthrax is getting back together.

Posted by jb at 01:07 PM | Comments (2)

March 02, 2006

The Endless Molasses Tar Pit

Time for year-round tonic tonight. Apple cider vinegar and hot water with a touch of molasses. Normally, I’m supposed to use blackstrap molasses, which requires a few extra rounds of boiling and crushing sugar cane in order to extract the denser, bitter sugars, but I’m using normal, sugary first round molasses because it’s all that I have on hand. Not that I’d boil sugar cane in the kitchen anyway. I’ve never boiled sugar cane—all of my molasses has come from a glass jar.

Continue reading "The Endless Molasses Tar Pit"

Posted by jb at 09:32 PM | Comments (1)

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.

Continue reading "Taken Down by a Clown"

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.

Continue reading "Partial Entry #36 Part Two"

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.

Continue reading "Partial Entry #36 Winter Scene"

Posted by jb at 10:08 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.

Continue reading "Prayer Rugs"

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.

Continue reading "Recovery"

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.

Continue reading "The Great American Nap Out"

Posted by jb at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

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?

Continue reading "St. Peter and the MLA"

Posted by jb at 06:13 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.

Continue reading "Sled Piracy"

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.

Continue reading "ScanTron Dreams"

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.”

Continue reading "The Love Lives of the Prokaryotes"

Posted by jb at 07:51 AM | Comments (5)

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 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.

Continue reading "Prepackaged Dove Massacre"

Posted by jb at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2006

Botox Wonderland

Gala tonight. The Anthony Spinazzola wine and food event to benefit something or other. I avoided the tuxedo in favor of the black tie. Ryan's play is tomorrow night. Indian food maybe, then the play probably, and billiards If everything works out, not that I know how to play them.

Continue reading "Botox Wonderland"

Posted by jb at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2006

SoapFight

Someday, let’s say ten or fifteen years from now, I’m going to end up sitting in a small foldable chair at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Working around the room, the group leader will ask each person attending about his or her problems. When he gets to me I’ll talk about my addiction to alcohol-based hand cleanser. Fifteen people will hurl me from the doorway of the clinic onto the hood of a cab who will charge me half rate for the six block trip to the hospital provided that I can make it there without actually climbing into the car.

Continue reading "SoapFight"

Posted by jb at 12:45 PM | Comments (4)

January 24, 2006

Spring?

Feels like spring today, even with the snow on the ground. I’m in a terribly good mood. Great, really. Bipolar good. Good like I’m going to crash out and end up in a padded cell with the world’s least popular upper body fashion accessory pinning my arms to my sides. That’s what spring does to me. I also want to dress up in a Barney the dinosaur suit and mug people on rollerblades. Spring does that to me as well.

Continue reading "Spring?"

Posted by jb at 03:04 PM | Comments (2)

January 23, 2006

Scenarios

I spend too much time thinking about specific scenarios, as if someone screened them on loop in my head. I thought I’d write some of them down:

Continue reading "Scenarios"

Posted by jb at 06:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2006

Python Ankles

I feel slow this morning, horribly stupid and hazy. I’ve been this way all week. If you hold a chicken down and force it to look in one direction, you can hypnotize it by drawing a line in the ground in front of its beak. You could hypnotize me by pointing and you wouldn’t need to hold me down.

Continue reading "Python Ankles"

Posted by jb at 11:44 AM | Comments (2)

January 21, 2006

Winterpills

So I drove to union square last night, to see the Winterpills play at a hipster bar that would not be out of place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, East Coast, United States. Raquel met me in Davis square and we drove over. We arrived at 10:30 and left at 11:30. Short evening but I’m not up for much else on a Friday night. Saw Flora briefly. She sings backup vocals for the Winterpills now. You can still find her solo album—released years ago—on iTunes. I’m listening to it now. On the album she sings lots of the songs that she wrote in college. I’m biased toward her songs so I can’t really assess them, the same way that you can look at an old photo of a friend or family member and think that it would stand with the best of Cartier-Bresson or Mary Ellen Mark and then you realize that it’s only because the content of the photograph has immediate access to the personal that the great photographers attempted to reach in an audience of strangers. We went to college together and it had been over a year since I’d seen her.

Continue reading "Winterpills"

Posted by jb at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2006

Chairs

So I worked from home this morning. I was waiting for a Danish-looking chair that arrived in the mail. The chair is now set up and it looks a bit like a playground bounce-horse, one of those cast iron figurines out near the swingsets with a huge spring at the base. I bought it because it was cheap and it was supposed to be better for you but in the world of chairs, better always means uncomfortable.

Continue reading "Chairs"

Posted by jb at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2006

Jello Werewolf

When I was in college I knew a student who would sit in the math faculty lounge and grab at the space around her head whenever she encountered a tricky equation. She told me that she was pulling numbers out of the air. It seemed like a very habitual gesture on her part or (at least) I’d seen her do it on several different occasions. She spent half of her time doing math and half of her time sailing Lasers and J22’s with the Olympic-class sailing team at our college. I’ve totally forgotten her name.

Continue reading "Jello Werewolf"

Posted by jb at 03:42 PM | Comments (2)

January 15, 2006

Snowed Again

So it snowed again last night. Just a dusting but it means that that the winter heat surge is over. Time to tuck in till April. I plan to wrap myself in blankets and hide under the desk until the grass pokes up beside the trash can on the sidewalk below the window. My brother is even farther north with no car so he ends up waiting at bus stops in Montreal and then playing games like “guess how many fingers I have left” when the bus finally comes. Gets dark up in Montreal earlier as well. 2 pm and lights out. Sun comes up at 1:30. Pedestrians signal to each other with flashlights. Batteries costs at least six hundred dollars apiece. De-Icer salt is the new currency. Rich socialites are getting killed for their LL Bean boots. Mayhem.

My brother puts up with this because he is training to become a nurse. He is planning to participate in Medicine Sans Frontiers after graduating from McGill. His girlfriend is planning to do this as well. They keep mentioning Somalia. Every time they do, my mother gets a new gray hair. She’s been reduced to buying extensions and dying them. That’s how much gray hair she has right now.

What happens when you use fake hair when assembling a voodoo doll? Let’s say that party A practices Santeria and obtains the article of clothing and the nail clippings from party B but through some vicious mistake ends up working with fake hair (an extension, a wig, what have you) instead of real hair. I’ll bet a nylon factory catches fire somewhere. Are hair businesses worried about this danger? Do they have insurance riders?

It’s true that some countries will not allow the import of gag voodoo dolls. I wonder how the barbershops are run there. I’ll bet that the better ones give you your hair back in a bag after you’ve had a haircut. I could use that. I’d tape the hair to one of those robot dogs in order to make it look more real. I’d fire it up on Tuesday evenings, let it run around the room, and think about what my life would be like were I born canine instead of human.

I’ll bet Martin Buber never considered dogs when writing “I and Thou.” Dogs, unlike humans, are pack animals. Their sense of “I” is distributed. It’s more like “Us and Thou” which, among humans, applies only to the relationship between groups of first year college students and the retail staff at Target. It’s true. You can always find college students at Target in the fall, roving in packs, pulling towels and wastepaper baskets off the shelves, trying to find something to match the Ikea desk set that they just bought.

Once I spent the better part of a month lurking around a Home Depot. I hid at the top of the particle board stack and crept out at night out to scavenge for food in the garden center. I was hoping to get found by a producer who would then make a play about me. The Phantom of the Home Depot. It would be like the Phantom of the Opera but with the sound of power tools instead of singing.

Musicals are awful. I can barely tolerate them. I want Cats to get combined with Stomp. I’d pay to see forty people with brooms beating the tar out of Macavity the Mystery Cat* and the rest of them. It would be just like professional wrestling or maybe an ultimate fighting championship. We could get a steel cage, or maybe the battlement set from Les Miserables. That would rock.

Speaking of stage acts. I’ve decided that getting mugged by the Blue Man Group would be one of the worst things ever.

*That, apparently, is one of the Cats. I picked this tidbit up from a Cats fansite.

Posted by jb at 02:41 PM | Comments (1)

January 14, 2006

Metal Detector

Quiet morning. Woke up at nine. Working on investment review of a spectroscopy company while listening to Portishead and Art Pepper on the stereo, not together. It’s better than being on the beach. Way better. Nobody walking around in a speedo with a metal detector looking for lost earrings and Sacagawea dollars. That’s what comes to mind when I think of the beach. Someday I will invest the time and money in printing up several hundred “You are Not A Winner- Better Luck Next Time” coins. I will hide them under the sand in Ocean City, NJ and wait for the gnashing of dentures. Then I will go to Atlantic City to play cards. I’ll bet there is a $500 minimum “Go Fish” table in at least one casino in the continental United States. If not, someone should make one. Come to think of it, McDonald's should get involved in the casino business. Slide, ball dive, and slots for the kids. Dealers in red stockings with wigs. They could include a free Happy Meal in the place of a drink. I’d want the scratch-off bib.

Posted by jb at 01:32 PM | Comments (1)

January 13, 2006

Perfection

Parsha This week: Vayechi. [I need to read it but I've gotten distracted because commentary is always easier to read than verse.] It’s the last book in Genesis, which in its body moves from Adam and the fall through Noah, Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph.

Yanki Tueber, a Chasidic columnist, offers a light commentary on Genesis when he compares the six major figures above to six forms of perfection. Adam begins perfect only to seek imperfection, Noah exemplifies a sort of rules-based perfection (given detailed instructions, he built the ark), Abraham is perfected through the love of G-d, Isaac is perfected in selflessness, Jacob in harmony, and Joseph in action.

This, of course, points to something more interesting and tragic. Using the broadest of brushes (no really… it's that broad), we can see Genesis as a transformative book that begins when perfected (but static) man is driven out of paradise. For the rest of the book, the better fraction of man—exemplified through the patriarchs*—seeks G-d in the midst of social and moral upheaval, first by following all G-d’s laws (Noah), then by seeking G-d out of love (Abraham) so intense that it leads to loss of self (Isaac). All too late, however: man is cast from the garden and is forced to define its role in creation, first through harmony and the synthesis of social structure (Jacob) and finally through participatory action in the larger outside world (Joseph).

What a perfect—if overly generalized—sense of a kid thrown out of the home, forced to make his way in the big city:

I’m sorry, I’ll follow the rules, I love you, look, I’m not even self-important any more, okay, I can do this, okay, here I am.

There are two lessons in this:

First: perfection, which was a static (or at least unconscious) thing in the Garden of Eden, has become dynamic post-fall. Perfection is no longer limited to a single form and so our ideas of perfect behavior or perfect people fall short as they converge on the concept of perfection that favors Adam and Noah-like stasis.

Second: just as the Patriarchs reflected a spark within the wash of their own culture, so there is a tiny spark in each of us that moves from perfection to perfection, seeking to return to the home, seeking G-d first as the child who will follow the rules but offers nothing, then through gnosis, and finally as an entity standing separate and self-aware, ready to build something new, to participate in creation, to offer a gift back to G-d even as Paradise itself recedes in the face of the world.

*Okay, I’m using this term a bit loosely.

Posted by jb at 04:38 PM | Comments (1)

January 11, 2006

Sculpture

Drove Ryan over to the auto repair shop this morning. He sends his cars to a shop run by the father of a student in one of his science classes. It's a small shop behind the Lowes Theaters in Fresh Pond. Outside the bay doors you can see one of apparently dozens of massive sculptures, all of which are cut from large (this particular sculpture was at least 16ft long by four feet wide) steel sheets; all of which feature designs that would not be out of place in the Watertown Mosque. Mechanic and artist, I’m not sure which activity comes first but he is a very good mechanic. Ryan told me that he holds gallery shows in the car repair shop. I’m going to try and attend one.

Traffic was hideous on the return from the shop. 30 minutes for two miles of driving. I'd like to see more people commute to work on horseback, if only to see the office go quiet when Bonnie from accounting steps through the double doors, posture slung low at the hips, boots grinding into the wood floor in front of the reception desk.

Back in the office today, a copy of the McKinsey Quarterly report on China to my left. I’ve been given an opportunity to get back into China studies (well, somewhat back, I’m illiterate in Chinese and this presents a very solid bar to expertise) which is something that I have not thought about since college.

Posted by jb at 02:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack