I'm a lasagna boy!

Anar visits Roman ruins in Northern Jordan

Anar visited Roman ruins in Jordan!

The lime in the cocoanut

Sprout went to the doctor today.

I sing to understand you

Doesn't it just figure that a lot of cities would declare a Guided By Voices Day? Goddammit. Pound-for-pound, this band has put out more crap than The Fall.

BART to pigeons: Come on feel the noise

BART spends $150,000 annually to combat the noise of rock doves, better known to city dwellers as a rat with wings. The current approach, apparent at the 16th Street Station and others, is to blast them with the sounds of predators. The name of their spokesman, Linton Johnson, caught my eye. Why not play some dub instead?
I wonder how much BART spends on ridding the 16th Street Station of dirty needles and used crack vials.

And miles (per gallon) to go before we sleep

According an open letter to Bill Ford from the Rainforest Action Network, published as a full-page advert. in today's New York Times,

Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, the EPA has ranked Ford last in overall fuel efficiency for 20 out of the last 30 years, and Ford’s fleet today gets fewer miles per gallon on average than the Model-T did 80 years ago.

Caltrain II: Electric Boogaloo

After yesterday's experience riding the Baby Bullet, I decided to see how much I could shave off the wait time. I rolled out of work at 16.34 and arrived home at 18.01, for a one-way door-to-door time of 87 minutes. That's pretty swell. Turns out that my arriving at the Mountain View station at all early was moot, as the new stock wasn't in service for this express run; the older carriages, which accomdate 32 bicycles, were. And I was all set to bellyache about how I prefer the old to the new!

Should we, the public, spend $185,000 per (new) passenger to electrify Caltrain? Encourage the Dumbarton Rail plan? Extend BART to San Jose? Which will happen fastest?
Portland took a quick-and-dirty route to laying short-term rail: this encourages people to use transit, but means that the lines may not survive for a generation.

I need a kamera

On the window of a hair salon, at the corner of Scott and Haight streets in San Francisco.

3 Rivers, 2 Wheels

Although they have one of the most irritating web sites ever, Bike Pgh! offers tools, a lending library, and advocacy for the City of Three Rivers. See if you can get the link about bike racks to work. I was pleasantly surprised to read that the city has a bike plan.

Was it worth it?

After weeks of hearing Greg sing the praises of public transit, I finally rode Caltrain's Baby Bullet express service today; it's the first time my bike and I have actually ridden this service.

My door-to-door time was one hour and thirty minutes, including fifteen minutes' waiting time at the Mountain View platform, where a Stanford psychology student tried to engage me in some sort of study. If I take the limited in the evening, the door-to-door time is about fifteen minutes longer, or, barring wait time, as much as half-an-hour longer!

Caltrain has a progressive policy towards bicycles on board: no additional fare and ample space for bicycles and gear. However, with the Baby Bullet, Caltrain has really let down cyclists. The rolling stock is significantly less bicycle-friendly: we have to move bicycles through the seating area to place them in cages which are significantly less roomy than the racks on the older carriages; the capacity has diminished, so that only 16, rather than 32 or 64 bicycles, fit -- as a result, cyclists line up 20 minutes early to board the Bullet, thereby negating much of the speed gain.

The faster travel time of the Bullet is due to its less-frequent stops; it runs at a top speed of about 70 mph, just as the regular locals and limiteds do, but stops only four times between Mountain View and San Francisco (irritatingly, at both 22nd and 4th streets).

(Past) Progressive writing

I picked up a copy of J P Dunleavy's Fairy Tale of New York, a rollicking book written mostly with participles. I really liked his Wrong Information Is Being Given Out At Princeton, with its antihero Stephen O'Kelly'O, and the succinct, vindictive Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms.
The narrative portions of the book remind me of William S. Burroughs in their lucidity, and in the way both authors eschew complete sentences.

Dr Dolittle

Despite the high praise accorded to Hugh Lofting's Dr Dolittle, I found it an excrescence, especially compared to its contemporaries. The level of sophistication does not approach Lews Carroll or Kenneth Grahame, as Hugh Walpole suggests in his Harper Trophy edition.