I'm a lasagna boy!

For king and country

I'm trying to figure out whether I have to show up at the Superior Court on Monday: I received a summons for Jury Duty in the City and County of San Francisco. The phone system tells me (after I key in 1,1,1,my juror badge #, and 1 to confirm) that "No-one is available to take your call. The next time Jury Clerks will be available is May 3rd at 8:00 AM".
And the web site doesn't offer an interface to this information.

Who da man?

ADDENDUM: According to Google, Tilney da man. What timing.

Station to station

This is the first time I am riding Caltrain from its southern terminal, San Jose Diridon, to the northern, San Francisco. This is also the last northbound train of the day.

Sentimental hygiene

On the shuttle back from work this evening, Peter was handing out BART cards like candy. I noticed that he had an unusual card:

turns out that this card was the first stock issued when the BART station opened. The unusually helpful and polite woman working the ticket counter at SFO looked around for more, but couldn't find them. Peter, always generous, gave me his.

Getting to the airport via public transit is too complicated. BART ends, but then the AirTrain begins. The AirTrain takes another several minutes, but then inconveniently drops one off in the middle of the parking structure; from there one must walk through zebra crossings and around structural pillars (how would someone in a wheelchair negotiate this?) to get to the terminal. From there, through a subterranean passage. And then, finally, into the airport: at least ten minutes *after* getting off BART. Similar systems in Zurich, Geneve, London, etc., etc., ad inf. all let off travellers in the terminal building itself.

Exit does not exist!

Once again, a television advertisement caught my ear just as I was starting to beeep-boop with the TiVo remote: the warped guitars, lyrics, and vocals of Modest Mouse praising a Nissan minivan of some sort, while soccer moms (literally!) cavorted gleefully. Sunny dispositions and a minivan do not jive with the pub-brawling, morphine-dampened-singing, battered-blue-van-touring of Modest Mouse.

Nissan are trying to promote a subversive image? This is weak doublespeak! Then again, Modest MouseSony are no longer "indie".

Mohadda mofasta

Riding a fixed-gear bicycle exhilarates me.

It's easy to get caught up in the fad of fixed-gear, but to this day I don't have an answer for when some bewildered derailleur cleaner asks, "Isn't that hard?"

A hand-made track frame.

Erste preis: ein schwein!

Building transit centers

Although developers are fuming about the approval of the Transbay Terminal Environmental Impact Report, construction goes full-bore near BART.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: the Governator seeks to "borrow" from transit funds to feed the state's sapped resources:

His budget proposal would transfer nearly another $2 billion in transportation funds to the state's general fund by suspending Prop. 42, which voters approved in 2002 and devotes sales taxes paid on gasoline to highway and transit improvements.
... In addition, the budget proposal also would end the Transportation Congestion Relief Program, the 181 projects that were guaranteed funding by Proposition 42 from the gas tax until 2008.
"It would be like a highway pileup,'' said Randy Rentschler, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area's transportation planning agency. "Some projects could be salvaged; a lot couldn't.''

In doing so, he borrows from the Gray Davis playbook: Davis took about $2 billion from the state's transportation funds as well.

Why is BART under-used?

Will the Transbay rejuvenate public transit throughout the Bay Area? In California?

H is for hapax legomenon.

When I was seven or eight, I read an odd book: I cannot recall the title, but remember that the cover illustration had a gaudy painting of a dark room with a brain in a jar, and a boy standing in studied amazement. The story told of the young boy and his relationship with the brain, which could answer anything; one of the curious bits of trivia it knew as that Jane Austen's posthumously-published Northanger Abbey makes the first printed reference to rounders as "base ball".

What is the technical term for the first occurrence of a word or phrase?

Karen Joy Fowler has written a book in the first-person plural, titled The Jane Austen Book Club.

Where my peeps at?

You can see where my friends (at least, people who have acknowledged me through Google's social-networking project) are.

These are the people that you meet Nr. 4

Although not literally my stoop, Coopers might as well be. The concrete-and-board benches outside welcome many of my neighbours: this morning Anna and I were sitting and enjoying some mutant macchiato when Jay rhymes-with-grimace and Sara(h) walked up.

On to the Kaltrain with the Kogswell!

Addendum:
in the evening, as I was pushing the pedals back hom'ards, received a call from Aram, who was "seven minutes away". Just after he pulled up on the Carleton, Mary and Arshad drove up onto the sidewalk, and we played a little music through Arshad's car and sat on the stoop. Next-door neighbour Logan learned a little about skateboarding, watching Aram ollie endlessly ("Can you tick-tack?" she asked.) And Amanda and David walked past with Pilot, who's not 22/7 or irrational in the least bit, and an exhausted jimg came home.

Lauding laudanum

Several years ago I read Althea Hayter's excellent Opium and the Romantic Imagination; today I picked up The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics.

No need to lose your wig!

For Aram's birthday, we went to see the Shotgun Players' production of Moliere's The Miser. When I told my father, he asked, "Did you go to Zachary's too?" And of course we had.