I'm a lasagna boy!

NYC beats down on cyclists

... are being held in NYC this summer: Cycle Messenger World Championship web site. Mmm fixie. The dates (originally 30 June through 4 July, yeee-haw) are now up in the air as the NYPD have not granted approval for that weekend.

I was amazed to see a sign in the window of the meeting place on Houston explaining that advertising Critical Mass was illegal: the Parks Department huffily claims that gatherings of more than 20 people require a permit. I was tickled to see the menu board at florent bearing the day's special omelet and a subversive advert for the previous night's Critical Mass.

Everything was fine at Coney Island

'though it's too early in the season for the Sideshow at Coney Island to be open on a slow weekday,
David Grubbs has a nice piece entitled "Coney Island, 2001" which will put you in the mood for Eak the Geek and others.
Anna and I went to see Ivak the Walrus and his consort at the Aquarium. When we arrived, we were just in time for the morning walrus feeding! I love these sessions, because the keepers so obviously know and love their charges, and spend much time explaining the social behaviour and natural science of the walrus to the attentive audience (someone always asks "Where are the tusks?" -- at the Aquarium, all of the walruses have developed tooth infections, and thus the tusks were removed to prevent further infections and decay). But to our surprise, only a scuba diver with a gasping air hose was in the enclosure, and he was lying prone and helpless-looking on one of the rocky outcroppings. We watched him do nothing for a while, and then wandered off to look at the beluga, ignominously hidden behind a massive construction site; the wetlands, undergoing reconstruction; the jellyfish, mobbed with school-children (note to self: never, ever visit a zoo during the school-day!); and the seahorses, many of whom were mysteriously absent from their tanks. Somewhat disappointed, we made our way back to Ivak's tank, and from the underwater viewing area saw him mock-fighting with one of the teenage females. We later took in the early-afternoon feeding, before going off to do some of our own. Yum.

Place-holder

The Big Takeover tells me what to do, a welcome guidebook to new records and CDs (if it were the New York Times, that would be "records and CD's").

Mole People

I finally read Jennifer Toth's emotional account of underground homelessness in New York City, Mole People. Toth was cutting her teeth as a journalist during the daring research and writing for this book, and sometimes the writing reflects lofty literary goals. At other times, the phrases become repetitive and the stories too brief to impart meaning or much empathy. She pursued a remarkable and difficult story, and the book is a stirring testament to that.
"Mole People" reminded me of Dark Days, the film so acclaimed at Sundance a few years ago. I hadn't the chance to see the film during its short run (at the late Castro?), but I really wanted to. Turns out that one can now obtain Dark Days on DVD

I loves Alien Loves Predator

High-larious. A photo-realistic comic comic strip which features Alien (of Alien) and Predator (ditto) as room-mates.

In which I found outstanding donuts

Sammy's Donuts has amazing, light and fluffy rasied donuts. A previously-impossible combination of Chinese food and donuts (ubiquitous in San Francisco's Nob Hill, especially this unnerving stretch of Hyde St.), Sammy's sells delicious donuts. 70¢ in a light and clean corner shop at 6th Avenue and 12th. The coffee actually accompanies the donut well if served black. I wish I'd eaten more than one (chocolate raised), but earlier in the day a flirtatious pushcart vendor had foisted several cake donuts on us.

been gone nearly half the decade

Earlier this week: I bumped into a colleague as we were both rushing to and fro in the busy hallways at work: he asked me, briefly, to stop at his desk. When I finally did, he couldn't remember why. And then he cocked his head and asked: "You always carry a camera, don't you?" and said that he wanted a photograph of himself to send to his mother. I obliged, and wondered when he had last seen her. "Oh, about 8 years ago." (According to his mother, who just looked at the photos, it was more than 10!)
In the always-connected circles he and I run in (bluetooth! tri-band! jabber! two-way pagers! macstumbler!), ten years of not seeing someone, not even a photograph, seems an impossibility. I was very very happy to take that photo.

A trip to Little Star

Well, the wings were not deep-fried, but dinner at Little Star was nonetheless outstanding. After all, we were there for the pie. After weeks of anticipation, I waded into both the Chicago-style deep-dish and the New York-style thin: each was yummuy, with really good crust. And the wings? Although baked, they were hot and spicy, just not dripping with Durkee's and butter. I think I'll stick to Burger Meister for their wings, quite probably the best in town.
The atmosphere at Little Star was overwhelmingly cool: a mix of retro-80s pop and current hipster tunes on their jukebox, four great beers (including Racer 5 on tap a nd obligatory PBR in $1 cans), and found-object art on the walls.

A junky way of getting around

In this fawning article, entitled "Four Bike Heroes", Larry Gallagher stumbles on a very good reason to bike or walk through San Francisco: In this stretch, one stands an extremely good chance of inadvertently witnessing someone either injecting something into or extruding something from his or her body. In a car, one is exposed merely to the constructed problems of congestion, freeways, and toll plazas (cf. the Examiner's current series on traffic).

You don't have to be weird to be weird

My faithful correspondents filled me in on the latest in old-fogey rock and/or roll:
The Fall are releasing a six-disc anthology of their Peel Sessions, and Carsickness' Chris Konigsberg has finally posted some mp3s.

Greg was good enough to give me a ride home through the rain, and kept up a constant stream of The Fall ("two CDs of their Rough Trade singles!") on the car stereo. We mused over which bands we'd like to see reunite ("Did you get tickets for Gang of Four yet?"). I actually do not care to see Gang of Four, unless you can transport me to a seedy club in Leeds, ca. 1979. Ditto Wire, Talking Heads (well, not Leeds, but CBGB or something), The Smiths. The Fall I don't mind seeing, because they're as current as they ever were.

The human (rat) race

The Examiner started its series on congestion in the Bay Area. The first article deals with the maze, the maze, the ever-beloved maze.

Last night Jay, Jimg and I chewed the fat on making congestion worse: slow down car traffic, increase congestion, and demonstrate the value of public transit. Jay pointed out Market St, Geary Blvd, and Van Ness feature no disincentive for drivers other than congestion.

As good as gold*

John De Lorean has died, just as the futuristic car he developed in the 80s sees a resurgence in popularity.
I first heard his name when my third-grade teacher, Dr Martin, announced that one of the fifth-graders (Jason Galbreath? John Galbraith?) had won a DeLorean and a year's subscription to Playboy by correctly answering a tricky math question (or it may have been a DeLorean filled with Playboy bunnies).

---
* stainless steel

Of doughnuts and the Red Cross

Ethnic Fried Food Around the World, their history and variety. Hurrah!

     American Red Cross personnel followed the invasion forces in Europe and the Pacific. Clubmobile Service operated in the European Theater of Operations. Its courageous members often carried coffee and doughnuts to soldiers for many miles over roads too rough for regular travel. Doughnuts became closely associated with the American Red Cross: the organization purchased enough flour between l939 and l946 to make 1.6 billion of them. Red Cross women served doughnuts at the rate of 400 per minute during the years l944-46.

Adios to the second dutchess

Someone stole the gold Flying Dutchman bike from my apartment last night. Goddammit. I'll give you money to get it back.

      My beloved bicycle was stolen from my apartment last night. It's a scratched-up gold Flying Dutchman frame with a worn Brooks Pro saddle, Phil Wood front and rear hubs, and a fixed-gear. It has a HEAVY sticker on the downtube and an red upper playground sticker on the seat-tube.

You can see it here:

stolen flying dutchman: http://flickr.com/photos/salim/4684590/

I am offering a generous cash reward, no questions asked, for its return.

Over the past few weeks, as I have divested myself of other and sundry bicycles (arrivederci, Ciöcc i Bianchi! bon voyage, Raleigh!) I decided to whittle the collection down to two: the custom-made courtney and the dutchess. They have awesome relaxed geometry, gorgeous details, and work well everywhere that I ride 'em. I've been loudly singing the praises of the Dutchess, an odd lilttle 80s steel frame that's has completely enchanted me. I rode its twin, the blue dutchess, for many tens of thousands of km., until the downtube snapped at the bottom bracket (wow!).
This recalls my enthusiasm for moby, the volvo I thought I would have for ten years. I bought that waggon, thinking it would serve me well, and then a tree went and fell all over it.

like a cop loves his donut

I'm so glad that Ivan Brunetti has a web site.

I anxiously awaited "Misery Loves Company" and "Biff Bang Pow!" editions when I was in college, and was cheered to see some of his work in a Cartoon Art Museum (or was it Yerba Buena?) retrospective in San Francisco a few years ago.

Full of beans in sun-shine like this.

Aram and I hung out at the café this morning and discussed our respective vices: coffee, wine, and fixies. Of the hundred or so bicycles that rolled past the interesection of Waller and Steiner, more than a quarter were fixies, old road-bike conversions and track frames alike. Nuts. The only cyclists who came to a complete stop were two girls riding matching yellow hybrid frames.

I'm quite excited that Caltrain has proposed to cut the number of stations it serves, and accompany this with a radical shift in the local/limited train design. From the preliminary proposal, they are responding to the ridership patterns shown and to requests from passengers ("more express trains"). Furthermore, they are taking the sensible approach of reducing service where it is least cost-effective and where it will affect the fewest riders (how many trains still stop at Paul Ave., anyway?). One note of caution: they are quietly considering elimination of weekend service in order to bring the agency out of its increasing deficit.
The community meeting will be next Thursday, 23 March, at City Hall; the public hearings will follow a week later.
Caltrain is one of the few local transit agencies to responsibly deal with its ridership: it provides great facilities for cyclists on- and off- the train, offers rapid connections during peak hours, and tries really hard to keep facilities clean and functional (no, I'm not talking about the chain sandwich shop that opened in the 4th and King Station a few weeks ago).

chicane

Through Driving in the Burgh, I discovered chicane: A series of tight turns, in opposite directions, in an otherwise straight stretch of road.

The Real Underground

The Transport for London web site has a very well done map (Flash required) showing the geographic and schematic perspectives of the tube system.

Can you use it with your friends? I say yes.

20q is an online neural net that simulates the "Twenty Questions" game. It guessed with suspicious accuracy what I was thinking of.

      You were thinking of a tabby cat.
Is it considered valuable? You said Yes, I say Doubtful.
Is it brown? You said Partly, I say No.
Is it a specific type? You said No, I say Yes.
...
Uncommon Knowledge about a tabby cat
Does it roll? I say Probably.
Does it get wet? I say No.
Is it gray? I say Yes.
Would you find it on a farm? I say Yes.
Is it spotted? I say No.
Can you use it with your friends? I say Yes.
Is it a geological product? I say Doubtful.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.
Is it made of metal? I say No.

Scott and Haight

Pasted at the northwest corner of Scott and Haight was this poster:

If they don't burn this whole place down

Arrived home twice within twelve hours to see otherwise sensible young men urinating, one across the street on Mario's house, and th' other on my side gate. When I approached him, he shrugged and moved out of my way. I had the mild satisfaction of chasing him, fly open, into the street while he yelled, mildly, "But there's nowhere to pee around here!"
Anna said that I should have asked him where he lived, so that I could go pee on his house.
The ever-present public urination, defecation, and eating all make up one of the facets of this city, which, eight years after I moved here, continues to enchant me. On consecutive weekend days in March, I rode my bicycle around for pleasure and for errands; I sat outside with friends in the park; ate a wonderful meal within view of the bridge, the western hills, and the docs of Oakland; and I read in the sunlight with the windows open.

you're going to miss me when I'm gone

Fiona wrote about the animal most likely to eat you when you're dead. I can hear Roky Erickson hollerin'.

Inappropriate use of quotation marks, Pt. II

Long have I admired MUNI's use of quotation marks on their advisory stickers. I finally snapped one th' other day:

Slint Sold Out

Last night, at the long-awaited Slint show at the Great American Music Hall, Joseph asked about seminal shows I've been to. I think that the Gastr del Sol/Unrest/Stereolab show at Metro, apparently the same show that prompted Number One Cup to get together as a band; the 9 AM Shellac show also at Great American, perhaps because their stage presence was so phenomenal; and the BBQ Killers/flat duo jets/Animal Time show that happened at some warehouse in the Strip District after the American Legion closed down (was shut down?). They are all important because they exposed me to different music in a different setting. I've seen lots of great shows. Last night was one of them: Slint, tight as a drum.

Greg has a great write-up from Wednesday. He'll probably post Friday as well.

The constant expansion of a single moment:

This article in the New York Times discusses Gregory Rabassa and Clarice Lispector, providing my first biographical glimpse into Lispector's writing. An incontrovertible liar who wrote in Portuguese! I first read her "Água viva" during a world-literature course at Pennsylvania State Univ., taught by one of her other translators and champions, Earl Fitz.

March 11, 2005

An Enigmatic Author Who Can Be Addictive
By JULIE SALAMON

When Gregory Rabassa talks about Clarice Lispector, it is evident that his infatuation with her isn't purely literary. "Those blue eyes, right out of Thomas Mann, 'The Magic Mountain,' " he sighed, during a recent interview. "She was so beautiful."

Mr. Rabassa is a renowned translator, of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado and Mario Vargas Llosa - and of Lispector, who became, in the mid-20th century, one of Brazil's most influential writers, described as the Kafka of Latin American fiction. Her works have been translated into film and dance and she is famous in literary circles. But she is almost unknown outside of them, particularly in the United States, where all her books combined sell a few thousand copies a year, mainly in Latin American studies courses on college campuses.

After her death from cancer in 1977, at 56 (more or less), she acquired the mystique of a character she might have created: a beautiful woman who was intense, philosophical, idiosyncratic, tragic - and murky on mundane facts like her exact date of birth. Like her writing, which is blunt and pungent yet also intellectual and abstract, she is hard to pin down.

Mr. Rabassa will be discussing the enigmatic Lispector and her work this Sunday at the Center for Jewish History, along with Earl Fitz, a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University.

In his memoir, "If This Be Treason," due out next month from New Directions, Mr. Rabassa, who was born in Yonkers in 1922, describes his first encounter with Lispector, 40 years ago, at a conference on Brazilian literature in Texas. "I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf," he recalls.

Lispector was rarefied in other ways. She was born in Ukraine to Jewish parents, but immigrated as a baby to Brazil. Her mother died when she was 9. Though she and her two older sisters were raised as Jews, she identified herself as a Brazilian, and called Portuguese the language of her soul. For years she was a diplomat's wife, traveling the world until the marriage ended and she returned to Brazil with the couple's two sons. She wrote an intimate newspaper column, yet regarded herself as a recluse. She was beautiful, yes, then badly scarred by a fire started when she went to bed smoking a cigarette.

By the time she died she had written nine novels, eight collections of short stories, four works for children and a Portuguese translation of Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray." Lispector grappled with contradictions as she searched for nothing less than the essential meaning of human existence. For her, however, basic facts were no less elusive.

"She was an incorrigible liar," said Professor Fitz, a former student of Mr. Rabassa, who says he has been obsessed with the writer and her work since he read her novel "The Apple in the Dark" in the spring of 1971. He has devoted much of his academic career to Lispector, having written two books about her, and is now working on a third in which she figures prominently.

"She wanted to be thought of as a writer though she pretended she wasn't a professional," he said. "She told different people different things about what town she lived in and when she was born. She wore a lot of masks, and when she would take one off you'd think she was revealing something, but all she was revealing was another mask."

This inability - or refusal - to settle on a single identity is reflected in Lispector's work, which churns with life but offers few resolutions. Her characters are mostly middle-class women contending with unhappy marriages, frustrated love affairs, strong-willed children, stifled ambition, sexual ambiguity. "Her characters lack a certain kind of cohesiveness and even when they have cohesiveness it doesn't lead to happiness," Professor Fitz said.

She could also be very funny, most pointedly in her "crônicas," newspaper columns (literally "chronicles") that she published in the Saturday edition of a national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil, from August 1967 until December 1973. (A fine sampling is available in English in "Selected Crônicas," published by New Directions and translated by Giovanni Pontiero.) This genre is a Brazilian specialty, a newspaper column that allows poets and writers wide latitude. They can write a kind of diary one week, an essay the next, a story or simply a random thought. Think of them as literary blogs, but on newsprint.

Lispector began writing crônicas to make money, but also thrived in this idiosyncratic form, which gave rise to profound reflection as well as amusing riffs on social convention and family relations. "When mothers of Russian descent start to kiss their children, instead of being content with one kiss they want to give them 40," she wrote. "I tried to explain this to one of my sons but he told me I was just looking for an excuse to justify all those kisses."

These newspaper columns frequently offered their readers a more potent brew, as jolting as Brazilian coffee. Lispector's imagery could be intense, mystical and often violent, seeming sometimes like the brilliant ravings of a madwoman. One of her shortest crônicas, at least as reprinted in the book, was called "A Challenge for the Psychoanalysts." The entire story went like this: "I dreamed that a fish was taking its clothes off and remained naked."

Perhaps it is a fitting paradox for this paradoxical writer to be presented by the Center for Jewish History, given her apparent ambivalence toward the religion of her family. The Lispectors landed not in southern Brazil, where most Jews settled, but in the northeast, the poorest region of the country, moving to Rio de Janeiro only when Clarice was 12. Her parents spoke Yiddish and she attended Hebrew school, but the many spiritual references in her work tend to be Christian or nondenominational. She lived with her diplomat-husband in Europe just after World War II, yet she avoided references to the Holocaust.

"She didn't deny her Jewishness, but she didn't push it," said Moacyr Scliar, the Brazilian-Jewish novelist whose work has dealt explicitly with the Jewish Diaspora. "The reason why this happened is still a subject of discussion here in Brazil."

Speaking by telephone from his home in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Mr. Scliar speculated on possible reasons for the absence of Jewish characters and themes from Lispector's work. "At that time there was not anti-Semitism in Brazil but some rejection of foreign people, not only in relationship to Jews but also Italians, Germans and Russians," he said. "Also, she was married to a diplomat. It was not very good for this husband of Clarice's to be married to a Jewish woman who was not Brazilian."

Yet Mr. Scliar recalled a conversation he had had with Lispector just before she went to a television station for an interview. "I was much younger than she, but she knew my work and asked about my literature, my Jewishness," he said. "I told her I like to write about Jewish subjects and that I didn't feel humiliated or inferior because of this. She said, 'I wish I could write about those subjects.' But she didn't explain what she meant by that."

In her final book, a novella called "The Hour of the Star," Lispector named her main character Macabéa, which many scholars believe refers to the Maccabees, the fierce Jewish warriors celebrated for defeating the Hellenizing Syrians. Lispector's Macabéa is hardly heroic by Bible-story standards. She is a poor young woman from the backwoods of Brazil, who comes to the slums of Rio with big dreams but can't avoid the kind of grim fate Lispector writes for so many of her characters.

Yet for Lispector, who died the year the novel was published, Macabéa's struggles are part of a lyrical, existential dance between imagination and reality. After Macabéa's story is finished, Lispector offers a quick, meditative postscript on life and death: "And now - now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?

"Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes."

In her introduction to a 1989 translation of "Soulstorm," a collection of Lispector's short stories, Grace Paley ruminated on possible connections between Lispector's Ukrainian-Jewish origins and her writing. She concluded: "I thought at one point in my reading that there was some longing for Europe, the Old World, but decided I was wrong. It was simply longing."

For Lispector, that longing was bound to language as vitally as plasma to blood. Sunday's program at the Center for Jewish History will include the screening of a television interview with Lispector from February 1977, which she asked not to be broadcast until after her death. She told the interviewer, "When I am not writing, I am dead." Yet as she herself observed so many times, the meaning of death is ephemeral. Lispector died shortly after that interview, but almost 30 years later her work remains in season.

"The Cultural Politics of Dislocation: Clarice Lispector and Ways of Being Jewish in Brazil" will take place on Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, Manhattan. Admission: $15; $10 for students, 65+ and members of Yivo, Americas Society and Congregation Beth Simchat Torah. Box office: (917) 606-8200.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Lies, damn lies, and

gullible.info, an aptly-named blog that contains enough trivia to choke ten thousand pub quizzes.

Meine schwesterchen hat ein blog

My sister has a blog.

      I also realized that, because it's so expensive here, I also have not had broccoli in almost four months. It’s one of my favorite vegetables; I can eat a head for dinner. I heard someone asking about it at the vegetable stand today, which is what reminded me that I haven't eaten broccoli in a long time; its name in Arabic translates as ‘foreign cauliflower’.

On the foolishness of double-turn lanes

From Transportation for a Livable City's current action items:

Tell the City to remove dangerous and unneeded double turn
lanes.

      WHAT'S AT STAKE: Double turn lanes are notoriously dangerous for pedestrians, bicyclists, and other motorists. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) says that double turn lanes pose significant "liabilities" to pedestrians and bicyclists." The State of Oregon's 'Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan' and the City of Portland's (OR) 'Bikeway Design and Engineering Guidelines' state that double turn lanes should be allowed "only if absolutely necessary" to prevent gridlock, should be "closely scrutinized", and should be "avoided whenever possible."

Despite there known dangers, there are approximately 80 double turn lanes
throughout the City, and while many of these are no longer serve any
significant traffic control purpose, they continue to endanger pedestrians
and bicyclists. Thankfully, DPT has undertaken an initiative to remove
these dangerous and unneeded double turn lanes throughout the City, and
several of these have already been approved for removal
(http://livablecity.org/pipermail/news_livablecity.org/2004q4/000050.html).

Unfortunately, a city committee called ISCOTT recently refused to approve
the removal of a double turn lane at 6th & Harrison, despite the fact that
DPT's analysis showed no significant impact on auto traffic
(http://livablecity.org/pipermail/news_livablecity.org/2005q1/000055.html).
This Thursday, ISCOTT will consider DPT's proposal to remove 4 more double
turn lanes and this Committee needs to hear that you believe pedestrian and
bicyclist safety should always be a higher priority than potential concerns
about adding a few seconds of travel delay for drivers.

TAKE ACTION:
- E-MAIL DPT c/o Ricardo Olea (mailto:ricardo.olea@sfgov.org) and ISCOTT c/o
Conrado Magat (mailto:Conrado.Magat@sfgov.org) and let them know you support
DPT's efforts to remove dangerous and unneeded double turn lanes. Sample
language is below:

"I am writing in support of DPT's proposal to remove double turn lanes at
the following locations:

* Beale and Mission Streets (Agenda Item #2)
* California and Kearny Streets (Agenda Item #3)
* Bush and Kearny Streets (Agenda Item #4)
* Battery and Clay Streets (Agenda Item #5)

I believe that ensuring the safety of San Francisco's pedestrians and
bicyclists should always be a higher priority than concern about adding a
few seconds of travel delay for drivers. Double turn lanes are known by
transportation professionals to be dangerous and should only be used when
they are absolutely necessary to prevent significant auto traffic congestion
from occurring on a regular and ongoing basis.

To allow double turn lanes to remain in place simply to reduce delay for
motorists by a few seconds is both inhumane and negligent, is a violation of
the City’s Transit-First Policy, and would seem to expose the city to
substantial liability. I encourage you to step up this effort to improve
pedestrian and bicyclist safety by bringing forward all the unneeded double
turn lanes throughout the City for removal."

- ATTEND the ISCOTT hearing in person this Thursday, 3/10, 25 Van Ness Ave.,
Suite 345, 3rd Floor Conference Room.

Deer me!

After almost three months of not cycling in to the office, I finally got off my duff and into the saddle this morning. Spectacular! I even saw deer frolicking in the meadow. How bucolic.

Six hits of sunshine

the LA Weekly has an article on the Orange County Museum of Art's display of "Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture," which is more than paintings on skateboard decks.

Suitable for Arabs and old gentlemen

I started on Andrew Lang's edition of The Arabian Nights Entertainments, which provides a child-safe retelling of the classic shenanigans: "In this book the stories are shortened here and there, and omissions are made of pieces only suitable for Arabs and old gentlemen." The ribald pieces omitted, the anthology still makes riveting reading, and Ford's pen-and-ink elegantly illustrates the adventues of Sinbad. However, I'd like a more thorough, and unexpurgated edition.
Some of the breathless reporting seems drawn straight from Herodotus, Homer, or Marco Polo: "In one place I saw a tortoise which was twenty cubits long and as many broad, also a fish that was like a cow and had skin so thick that it was used to make shields."

Like a giraffe needs a pie

Everybody gets some of the good stuff in the adorable animated video for Mr Scruff's funky "Sweetsmoke" tune. Yum!

Maybe in the next world

Well, Bubba is dead.

The tide is high

Mavericks took place today: Greg and I took a jaunt down there in the beautiful, sunny, warm morning to stand on the bluff and watch 30-foot waves break over rocks (and the odd surfboard). Greg's hungover humour ("that's a hellacopter!") notwithstanding, the morning was completely awesome.

I was at the jetty about a year ago, but didn't see these sort of waves.

Congregate, devastate

June of '44, a band that knocked my socks off when I first saw them (either Mpls or Chicago, '94), have an excellent "In The Fishtank" EP, to which my ears have been stuck all day. The bass is delectable, and the song structure makes word problems out of math rock (duh).