dresese

Nightmare: Ghost stories

A few weeks ago, signs started appearing for "Nightmare: Ghost stories", which is evidently a haunted house attraction in Manhattan. I'm sure it's great.

But, first of all, "Nightmare: Ghost stories"? Isn't having a nightmare about ghost stories kind of like having a sex dream about watching pornography? It just seems a little detached.

Also, it has a ridiculous text message survey: "WHAT R U AFRAID OF: CLOWNS OR SERIAL KILLERS"? I suppose I can't complain about "R" or "U" in a message about text messaging. Perhaps that sort of thing gets us in the text-messaging mood. Maybe. But, really. Clowns versus serial killers? Serial killers, on average, kill many more people than clowns do. Couldn't they have made this a tougher choice? How about "Serial killers versus thugs holding bricks?" or, on the opposite end of the spectrum "Clowns versus mimes?"

Stupid conversation of the day

Girl taking up two seats on the subway, to me: Hey, does this train go to 43rd Street? We're trying to get to 43rd.
Me: You should get off at the 42nd Street, Times Square stop.
Two-seat girl, to her friend taking up three seats: You hear that? This guy says we should get off at 42nd street.
Three-seat girl: Naw, this is the wrong train. We're going to 43rd street.
Two-seat girl, to me: Yeah, we're going to 43rd street.
Me: I don't think you'll get closer than 42nd street. Just get off there and go up one street.
Two-seat girl, to three-seat girl: OK, I guess we'll try that.

St. Louis vacation

I recently got back from a week-long trip to St. Louis with my family.

Notable good food we had: Momo's, a Greek restaurant, and An American Place. The former, Momo's, had a variety of well-prepared Greek dishes, my favorite being a grape-leaf wrapped sea bass. The latter was very special. Using local ingredients from nearby farms, it was a great meal in which everything was prepared exceptionally well. I had braised lamb on cannelloni with lamb jus. The cannelloni was a great touch, easily the best I've ever had (then again, I only remember eating it at the Pasta House when I was young). The lamb was also very well prepared, and the lamb jus, which I've never had, worked surprisingly well. Noteworthy as well was a heirloom tomato appetizer, which managed to be both innovative and simple. Service was great in some respects, but it did have a few hiccups.

The St. Louis hoosier story of the trip comes from a waitress, not from any of the previously mentioned restaurants, who repeatedly referred to desserts topped with "homemade Cool Whip". At any rate, I thought it was a hoosier story, but who knows, she doesn't seem the only one to think of the concept.

I'll make another blog post on my food blog about my last eating adventure, Mama's Coal Pit, where I had snoot & rib tips.

There was more besides food, of course. My kids spent some quality time with their grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, and various other relatives. I was able to get together with my great high school friends. Greta and I both had some nice lazy afternoons. A good time was had by all.

Yankee's game

Last week I went to my first Yankee's game. They say there isn't a bad seat in the house in Yankee stadium. That might be true of the view, but you can't drink beer in the bleachers, which was where I was. I kept thinking of the Simpsons episode where Homer quits drinking beer, goes to a game, and suddenly realizes how boring the game is.

The game was in fact fairly boring for the first 6 innings, because the Blue Jays got a hit in the first inning, and then not much happened. Some good double plays, but that's it. Eventually the Yankee's came back in the 7th inning. It turned out well, and we got to see Roger Clemens pitch, which is something, although he didn't pitch particularly well this game. Derek Jeter seemed like the most effective player there, getting a solid 3 hits. In fact, we saw his average go from .330 to .333 in the course of the game, which was pretty neat.

Comments are back

Comments had been broken for far too long on this blog. This is something I normally fix, but I was enjoying the lack of spam posts so much that I just never did it. Well, we'll see how it goes now.

Really, it's time to move this blog to a different system. The spam protection just isn't there. To deal with this problem, I've started two new blogs on blogger a while ago: Bimodal Eating in NYC, a food blog, and Technical Dresese, a technical blog. Posting is sparse, and I've resigned myself to the fact that I don't feel like posting a lot these days. I'll try to get better, really I will. But this blog will live on for miscellaneous and personal things.

Subway litter

New York is dirty. Crap is just strewn everywhere. The subway is the same, with the addition of regular appearances by giant rats. I used to wonder where all that litter comes from. Recently, I've seen a few things.

A few weeks ago, I was standing in the subway platform for the Jamaica Center Station. There were many people waiting with me, some talking, others like me, impatiently and slowly peering for the first signs of a train. I heard a sickening splat, the kind of sound that everyone instantly recognizes as the sound of vomit hitting the floor. I looked to see what was happening, and the only thing I saw from that direction was a man standing right over the tracks, talking on his cellphone. As I watched, he continued talking, and leans over to casually throw up on the tracks. He resumes his conversation without a pause. This routine continues until my train comes.

A week after that, I'm waiting for my train to go to work, and I happen to glance over to a woman on the other side of the tracks. She was in her forties, in business atire. She nonchalantly threw her soda on the tracks. She was less than ten feet from a trash can.

Just today, I was riding on the train, and heard an odd groan. I looked up and see a giant of a man groan again. Then he starts muttering to himself. He is holding a cup. He then announces to no one in particular that he is going to crush the cup, which he proceeds to do with his foot. He leaves the flattened cup right there. Of course, no one wanted to tell this troubled giant to pick it up. But even if it was a short, weak, psychologically stable fellow, I doubt anyone would say anything. This is New York, and no one wants any trouble.

On line

I got the new Nintendo Wii gaming console yesterday. And without a reservation! But it took me four hours on line to get it. Yes, I had to stand for a whole four hours.

New Yorkers would read the following paragraph and it would make perfect sense. I suspect everyone else is confused by it. If I was online, why did I have to stand up? How could it take me four hours?

Well, it turns out that New Yorkers say "on line" instead of "in line". I don't know why. But trust me, I had ample opportunity to witness the behavior yesterday, and that's what they say. From old coots to little toddlers, they all say "on line".

So, to re-tell my tale, I spent four hours in line at the Nintendo World store in Manhattan to get a console. That seems pretty extreme. I'm not a hardcore gamer. But I did want to get it so I could have something new and interesting to do for Thanksgiving and the Holidays. The console itself is cheaper than the competition, and more innovative, so I'm looking forward to playing it!

Scary

In honor of Halloween, I'd just like to say that the "LearningLeaders" posters on the subway freak me out. To those that haven't seen it, they feature little kids with white hair and a big bushy white mustache. Albert Einstein is cute. Kids are cute. But kids who look like Einstein are extremely disturbing.

You can see some examples at their website.

Recent books

I've been doing a great deal of reading over the past few years. Every work day I have about an hour and a half total time on the subway with nothing to do except read. So, I've read a great deal. Some recent highlights are:

• The New York Trilogy - by Paul Auster. I've been reading a lot of Paul Auster lately. It is some wonderful, strange, and beautiful stuff. This book is the strangest one of his I've read, and probably the most engaging (and sometimes infuriating) of his work. (Well, I've only read about 4 or so of his books so far, so I perhaps cannot make such a sweeping claim).
• A Man in Full - by Tom Wolfe. Also Bonfire of the Vanities. There were read, not out of a burning desire I had to read Tom Wolfe, but because they were available in the building library and were books I had actually heard of before. I found them both to be a quick and easy read. But is it any good? The writing style seemed a bit lacking, almost as if it were written by a teen girl with lots of exclamation points she wanted to share with the world, and a constant chatter of interior monologues. But despite the annoying style, I felt both novels had something to say, and told a story that said it in an interesting way. So, pretty good.
• Kafka on the Shore - by Haruki Murakami. Not, as you may think, a sequel to Einstein on the Beach. Instead, it is a novel about a teens search for... well, a lot of things. Very strange, sort of creepy, then peaceful, then also romantic, and then back to creepy again. I had no idea what the hell was going on with parts of this book. It's sort of a twilight zone episode crossed with a coming of age story. Even with the bizarre plot, or even because of it, it did turn out to be a pretty enjoyable book.
• Full Metal Jacket Diary - by Matthew Modine. I found this little gem in the library in our basement. It was a great read about the process of acting in a Stanley Kubrick movie. Not only did it have great tidbits about things like how F. Lee Ermey got the job as the Marine instructor, but had some excellent quotes by Kubrick on making movies. I don't think they'll have this at a library, and it probably doesn't have enough content to make it worth $20, so just find it in your local bookstore and thumb through it. I'd tell you to come on over to my building's laundry room, but this book has disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived.

Crazy town

Sometimes it seems that everyone in this town is fucking crazy. I went out on a brief errand a few days ago, just down one avenue to a store. As I crossed the street, I heard a man screaming into a public phone "FIFTEENTH AND EIGHT AVENUE!". I've never heard a location shouted in such anger before. As I returned from the store, an older woman, walking towards me, suddenly threw a bunch of bird seed below a car nearby. Startled, the next person I saw was a woman coming towards me muttering to herself. As I avoided her, I realized that everyone I had seen on the street in my errand had been crazy. Then I did a little self-check to make sure I wasn't acting crazy as well. Nope. It was just them. Where do they come from? How do they survive here? What do they do all day? I don't know, but they are here and I'm guessing that if they disappear, then a person even crazier must replace them.

Hooray for late night debugging!

As I write this, it is now 12:41 AM. At midnight, I got back home. I was out with Adam seeing Scorcese's new movie, The Departed. Which was, by the way, awesome. But that's not the point of this post.

Upon getting home at midnight, I would ordinarily just go to sleep. But, somehow, I felt like I wanted to debug a problem at work that I was working on earlier today. As much as I realized that it was a pretty sad thing to do, I quietly opened up my laptop on my bed, and lied down on the bed (Greta was still in the living room). I started working on the problem. That's when I saw something slowly drift downwards in front of me. I peered over the laptop to see a rather large spider right in the middle of my pillow. A bit frightened, I glanced up a the ceiling to see where he had come from, but I was unable to see anything interesting. I squashed the spider with a book in short order.

The scary part isn't the spider. We have spiders here occasionally. The scary part is that this spider gently drifted down right into where my head would have been if I was sleeping. And I like to sleep face-up, and I'm sure when I sleep I must snore with my mouth wide open. Would I have woken up clawing my face? Would I have woken up with a spider in my throat? Or perhaps I would not even have been the wiser, and a spider would just scuttle about my face merrily before returning home.

After a lengthy and disturbing discussion with some ex-coworkers earlier this week about bedbugs, I'm feeling a little vulnerable right now to the whole nocturnal creepy crawling things.

On the other hand, I'm feeling pretty special. I not only avoiding some unpleasantness, I solved the bug pretty quickly. And, now that I think about it, I caught my train back to Queens tonight immediately, which is unusual for 11:15 pm on a Sunday night. Luck is, evidently, with me tonight.

More posts

Posts to this blog are getting fewer and farther between. Once a week is already bad enough, but once every two weeks is getting almost to the point of giving up.

Sometimes I think the problem is that my life is not that interesting. But if I think about it, that's not the problem. I probably think of something nearly every day that is blog-worthy. The problem is more of time. If I write a blog entry, I write it at home, at the computer. I only get about an hour or two of time at night when I would be on the computer. And if I'm in front of the computer, I am usually doing work.

Yesterday, a solution occurred to me. I have roughly 1.5 hours I am on the subway every day. Previously, I've been spending this time reading books. And it's been great: I've read a lot of great books in the past few years. But if I wrote on the subway instead of reading, I could and would write a great deal. Later, at home, I would simply need to transcribe all my writings.

So this is what I'm doing now. I am writing this on the subway. Standing up. While trying to keep my balance against the stops, starts, and unexpected decelerations. I'm writing, but as you may imagine, writing while standing up, while balancing, on a subway does not lead to great handwriting. And if you have seen my handwriting before, you may find it difficult to imagine what my bad handwriting looks like. I write, but whether I can read it later on is a mystery right now. If you are reading this, I suppose I must have made some sense of it.

Colbert

In the proud tradition of this blog, I will now tell you a somewhat interesting and not-very-recent story.

Last month I got to see a taping of The Colbert Report, thanks to my coworker Tudor. I think the last time I ever got to see a taping of a show is when I was a kid on a trip and got to see The Merv Griffin Show. At the time, I didn't know who Merv Griffin was, and I still don't.

Anyway, the show took just about as long to film as it lasted on TV. For some reason, they time it that way, with the commercial breaks and everything. I don't know why they don't break for arbitrary time or not break at all. Editing the tape to be the right length should not be that difficult.

Before the show Colbert mentioned it was his 111th show, and asked the audience what hobbits would call that number. Someone gave the correct answer "Eleventy-first". I had forgotten that Colbert was a huge Tolkein fan.

The show was great, an unusually good show. Afterwards we headed over to the Russian Vodka Room and had some wonderful horseradish-infused Vodka. It's much better than it sounds.

A Scanner Darkly

I went to see the new Linklater movie today, A Scanner Darkly. It was really well done, and very faithful to the book. I really liked the visuals, and the movie was surprisingly funny. Then again, the book was as well, but the movie has proportionally more of that great paranoid-druggie humor. The acting was a bit cartoony, which sort of makes sense given the look of the film, but may strike some as overacting. At any rate, Robert Downey Jr. was great, one of the best things about the movie.

Cherry Blossoms

They've all gone away now, but I've been enjoying all the special flowery trees in New York. There's a particular one with white leaves that is the first to bloom in the spring. Then the famous cherry blossom trees. There are many other types as well, with purple flowers, large white flowers, and all sorts of things. My neighborhood is especially beautiful in this time. And then all the flowers drop, and it's like you are walking to work on a bed of roses.

Landlord Stories

My mom visited me last weekend. Unfortunately, she stayed by the 7 line which was under construction all weekend, so she had to take taxis around. One of the cab drivers told her that he knew my building well, and that it was just bought by a Pakistani. That is very interesting news, and a bit unbelievable to me, since I hadn't heard anything about it. So Greta asked one of the doormen, and he clarified. Evidently, no, the building was not bought by a Pakistani. But it isn't a complete mistake. The reality is, as usual, even stranger than rumor. According to the doorman, the owner's brother got in trouble for selling missiles to Pakistan.

So, my landlord is the brother of an international illegal arms dealer.

No wonder people who live in this building thought our previous landlord, Leona Helmsley was comparatively great.

Rap

A few days ago I got to see a talk by Touré, who reports on rap for Rolling Stone magazine. He read from his latest book, and answered questions. I could tell why he was such a good reporter. Besides having a natural way with words, he had an easy-going, yet involved manner. He just sort of exudes a hip sort of friendliness.

It got me thinking, though. My knowledge of rap is quite limited. It's been a major chunk of the cultural pie for a long time now. Ever since I saw people beat-boxing in junior high school, and walking down the halls spurting Beastie Boys rhymes, it's always been there for me. But aside from a few Easy E tapes that Brian V would constantly play in his car, I never seriously listened to it.

Touré's had great things to say about a number of artists, from names that are very familiar (Queen's own "50 cent", at least the early work), to one's I hadn't heard of, like "Ghostface Killah". He is pretty down on the whole South-driven rap scene right now, where the hooks come first and the words later. And, he continued, some of the songs are hardly even songs - they open with a chorus, or a double chorus, or even a triple chorus! The verse is completely forgettable, and not really personal or political in any way.

At any rate, I really should get some rap albums. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

Nunnery

Another find from the downstairs library: a book called "The Encyclopedia of Misinformation". It's a great book detailing all sorts of wrong thing people believe in. I was a bit suspicious of this book, because often books of this sort are full of misinformation themselves. However, from the misinformation it lists that I already knew was misinformation, it seemed correct and well researched.

Except for one entry, on the phrase "Get thee to a nunnery" in Shakespeare. The book claims that nunnery in Shakespeare's time meant a house of prostitution, and that people mistakingly believe that it really means a convent. That sounded highly dubious to me. I mean, obviously a nunnery is a convent, it seems very straightforward. So I just googled around on this, and found out that I'm not the only one who thinks so. According to that link, while nunnery sometimes meant a house of prostitution, it usually means a convent. Shakespeare scholars agree that convent is the meaning that Shakespeare was after.

I'm surprised that the Encyclopedia of Misinformation got this wrong. It had an excellent article about how the whole Shakespeare authorship discussion is bullshit, and how there is overwhelming evidence that Shakespeare wrote the works that today bear his name.

So now you know, dear readers. The only debunkings you can trust are the one endorsed by this blog.

Disturbing book

I'm always on the lookout for some interesting books from our building's communal bookshelf. I've mentioned this before. Last weekend, I saw an interesting little book on writing tips. I snagged it. Let's face it, I could use some writing tips.

About halfway through it, I discovered the previous owner had left a receipt from Rite-Aid. It was for a lice comb.

I'm not even sure what a lice comb is, but now I'm quite disturbed. Perhaps you can look forward to a beautifully written post about my new case of head lice.

Stanislaw Lem dies

My favorite author, Stanislaw Lem, passed away today in Krakow. He was not only the best-selling science fiction author worldwide, but, even better, he deserved to be. He wasn't ever very popular in the states. I only knew of him when my college roommate showed me some of his books. Later, I picked them up and was completely blown away.

For anyone wanting his best works, I recommend:

• Fiasco, a truly important book about humanity's first meeting with an alien civilization. As you can tell from the title, it doesn't go so well. Lem had such an obviously more correct view of the whole contact scenario than even geniuses such as Arthur C. Clarke had. This one starts off very slow, so bear with it.

• Memoirs Found In a Bathtub, currently my favorite book. It has black humor in spades, great symbolism, and it is just mind bending in a way that I really appreciate.

• The Futurological Congress, probably Lem's funniest book. At the same time, one of his scariest. It also has one of my favorite passages of Lem's, on the nature of evil.

There is more. I didn't even mention his most famous novel, Solaris, which is like Fiasco; a great critique on contact, both between the human race and alien intelligence, and between people. It is a very profound book, but I'm a little disappointed in the translation. It is translated from a French abridged translation, and I think Lem's message suffers from that. There's not only many more wonderful books of his I could mention, but he also published many more that have not yet been translated to English. I can only hope that these keep appearing.

Now that Lem is dead, I feel that science fiction is no longer worth reading. The only person alive that could produce books as good as Lem is Robert Silverberg. But Silverberg hasn't written much of interest in a while, and even at his best, only a few are nearly as good as Lem's works.

Lem's books are under-recognized in the U.S. I urge anyone who reads this to pick up a copy of his books and read them. He wasn't just a good writer, he was a writer who really saw things as they truly are, and truly understood science fiction. It was rare when he started, and it's even more rare today. I'll miss you, Lem.

A subway quiz

Here's a little test of your subway instincts. Imagine you are on a platform, and a train pulls up. The car on your right is jammed full of people. The car on your left has some seats available. Which one do you choose?

If you chose the the car with seats available, then you are a person filled with common sense, but unfortunately limited experiences with the subway. The correct answer is the car that is jammed full of people.

The rationale behind this is simple. There is undoubtedly a homeless man sleeping in the subway car that is stinking up the whole car, and no one will sit near him. Choose the crowded subway car with no objectionable odors.

This may sound callous. After all, the homeless many is in need of help, obviously. And the fact that he smells bad is not an inherent defect, but merely due to the fact that he is homeless. Callous or not, though, to a sleeping homeless man, what car I choose to ride in does not matter. But avoiding a stinky subway ride matters quite a bit to me.

Mountain View trip

I just got back from a week-long trip to Mountain View. I managed to see my good friends Erik and Vladimir (plus wife Maria) who I worked with at Intellicorp, Shibani, Emmett, Michel, Arthur & Kevin, who I worked with at Intraspect, Patty, Jon & their family, whose lab I worked in at U of I, and Samantha, who I worked with at Intellicorp and Intraspect.

For food, I had at least one of the Bay Area's best hits. With Michel, I had Zachary's absolutely authentic Chicago-style pies.

I had some decent food with everyone else, but nothing mind-blowing. Probably the other really nice thing I had was a mini-pizza with really nice tasting heirloom tomatoes at Charlie's. I'd ask where they got heirloom tomatoes at this time of year, but at least two people told me the high-end supermarkets import them from Chile now and sell them year-round.

However, two disappointments: I did not get to eat at Shalimar, which is pretty much my favorite place to eat in the world. And I didn't get to drink a good pearl milk tea. I'll have to leave that for when I go back.

Oh yeah, and the weather sucked. It was relatively cold and rainy, and at one point while I waited for Caltrain one day, very cold and very rainy. I swear I almost got frostbite. Meanwhile, in New York, the weather was incredible, with highs of more than 60 degrees.

More Philip K. Dick

Besides the previously mentioned Philip K. Dick book, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, I've recently also read Confessions of a Crap Artist and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Confessions of a Crap Artist actually is just straight fiction, no sci-fi at all. I liked it quite a bit; it was often funny, occasionally depressing, and the writing was straight-forward and insightful. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, however, I wasn't very fond of. I have a feeling it was written with Dick was taking entirely too many drugs. It has a disjointed and neurotic feel to it, and the novel moved much too fast. It's the kind of novel where you read it and you feel like you might be coming down with a fever.

Google

I've recently received a job offer from Google, and today I just found out that I will be starting next Tuesday in their New York office! The job offer didn't just happen, I interviewed with them on December 1st, and had applied well before then. At any rate, I'm excited! Never again will I have to launch into an unsuccessful explanation of what my company does. I'll just have to say "It's Google!" and everyone will know.

Don't expect any blogging about anything job-related, of course. Not a huge change, I never did do any job-related blogging. But Google does have professional-quality espresso machines, so perhaps expect me to return to my old blogging theme of the quest for the perfect froth.

Buñuel, Linklater, Dick

Yesterday I just finished watching The Phantom of Liberty, a movie made in 1974 by Luis Buñuel. I was quite impressed, and surprised to see a combination of a few styles of film that I like a great deal. One style if the basic slightly surreal style of Buñuel, and the other is the telling of many stories, loosely joined, in sequence. In other words, think of a very funny, wickedly deranged version of Slacker. One sequence in particular (the one with the gunman on top of the building) made me think that Linklater intentionally paid homage to this film. This movie is a must for anyone that enjoys clever foreign movies.

Speaking of Linklater, I recently read Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said which was mentioned at the end of my favorite Linklater film, Waking Life. It was a great book, one of the best of Dick's I've read. And after reading the essay referenced by the movie, though, I've decided he's quite delusional about his alleged coincidences about this book (although I have never read the Book of Acts). For example, he says:

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy—this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

This coincidence doesn't strike me as very coincidental. In the book, a girl Kathy forges identify papers, and has a husband named Jack who is either dead or exiled. She is also a police informant. I fail to see the connection between her and a friend of Dick named Kathy who has a boyfriend named Jack, and a relationship with a police inspector. The fact that she is a drug dealer is not coincidental, especially if you consider that Philip K Dick did a huge amount of drugs. Probably half the people he knew were drug dealers. The relationship with the police inspector did not necessary mean she is an informant. The only real similarity is the names, both of which are common.

At any rate, it's a bit silly to dwell on something so obviously crazy, and Philip K. Dick was one undoubtedly mental. But I wouldn't like him so much if he wasn't.

The Transit Strike

Along with every other NYC blogger, I feel compelled to post on the transit strike that happened today. I didn't particularly need to go into Manhattan today, but I was interested to see what kind of havoc would be unleashed in Forest Hills.

Forest Hills has a ton of commuters that travel to Manhattan every day, so today when there was no subway, almost everyone seemed to default to taking the Long Island Railroad. The LIRR was totally prepared, and had set up a booth to sell & check tickets. This is necessary because the ordinary system of selling tickets via machine and walking around and checking them on the train doesn't work so well when people are packed like sardines. I anticipated a big line. However, it was much much longer than I had anticipated. It went down to the corner, which wasn't so surprising...

...and way down the block, as far as the eye can see...

...and after 5 or so blocks, around the corner, then around the corner again.

Everyone was amazed at how long this line is, but they still lined up anyway. What else could you do?

In the street people were stopping to ask cars driving by if they were going into Manhattan, and if so, can they have a ride. Shuttle buses were lined up on the side of the road. And I saw many school buses, which may or may not have been doing extra duties.

Hopefully the strike will be over tomorrow. I feel sorry for these people, waiting outside for hours in the cold, just to go to work, knowing that they will have to do the same thing again in reverse, in just a few hours.

A Jay Update

By popular request, here's a small update on my friend Jay. First of all, let me repost his famous mustache picture (from this post):

Warning! Do not be fooled, as I was. This is not a handlebar mustache. It is merely a mustache that looks like a handlebar.

After this picture was taken, Jay went to Ohio State University to become a Physics professor. A short while later, I got an update from him saying that he has started dating a wonderful architecture grad student there. Just a few days ago, he tells me he got married to her in a small ceremony in Hawaii.

So there you have it, the update on Jay. But, status of the famous mustache? Currently unknown.

Stopping comment spam

About once every three days, I get a slew of comment spam. I've dealt with this in previous posts, and I've gotten MT-Blacklist to deal with the problem. My blacklist filter is huge, but still not complete enough to filter every spam. The filters that come from the master blacklist (no longer in existence) are very specific, and I find myself amazed that simple spam-related words such as "casino" and "porn" are not filtered out. So I ban these words outright. However, that means that no one can post a comment with those words in it. That sucks (although, for those words, no big loss). Plus, it's a stupid solution because spammers can easily work around it, substituting an endless variety of look-alike words like "casin0".

There is a solution, upgrading to Movable Type 3. However, since I have multiple authors, such an upgrade would cost around $40.

A coworker suggested I move my blog to LiveJournal, and let them take care of the spam problem. However, to use my current domain name, and to customize the look and feel to get my LiveJournal site close to my current design costs $20/year. Not bad, perhaps a better deal than Movable Type. However, I then have no control at all. If the spam problem (or other problem) still exists, I'm screwed. Also, I don't want to be part of the LiveJournal community, I'd rather be a part of the independent blogger community.

These solutions are not a terrible amount of money, but I'd like to see if I can make some quick fixes that can solve the problem for only a small loss of free time.

So, I have two potential solutions, one of which I already implemented. First, close off comments on most posts, which I did this morning. There is no easy way to do this through the Movable Type UI, so I had to just modify the database directly. Not too hard.

If that still doesn't stop the spam, I can do something quite simple like put a hidden field in the comment submission page, and look for that in the script where comments are posted to. That would thwart any tool that just does POST's to comment scripts. Alternatively, I could require that users enter some simple field manually to post. In that way, even if the spammers try to mimick a real posting, they will fail. It is easy enough to work around, but my site is not important enough for spammers to bother creating special code to deal with.

If all this fails, I'll have to cough up some cash and upgrade MT or move to LiveJournal.

The funny part is that these spams are useless! Movable Type changed the way comment url's linked, so that URL's in comments cannot effect Google page-ranking. But, spamming is so low-cost that even if 99% of the spam does nothing, it still is worthwhile.

Recent books

I haven't done a post in a while about what I've been reading, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading anything. Due to my 30 minute subway ride, I have plenty of time each day to read. Here's a few highlights:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond. Everyone has read this book. Now I have too. I really enjoyed it, it blew my mind.


• Collapse - also by Jared Diamond. Great book. The historical sections were fascinating. The section on Rwanda was a revelation and a must-read for anyone interested in that genocide. Other chapters were also great, especially the one on feudal Japan and modern-day Australia. And in the last chapter, he brilliantly refutes the most popular anti-environmentalist arguments.


• Portnoy's Complaint - by Philip Roth. Hilarious!


• Sailor Song - by Ken Kesey. Recommended by my friend Greg when I went to St. Louis. Very well written, funny, and interesting. But the ending was very confusing, and thinking back about it, I'm not sure I even understand what the plot was about. Fun, though.


• American Pastoral - by Philip Roth. Great novel, although a bit of a downer. The contrast with Portnoy's Complaint is interesting. In that early Roth novel, the message is "My parents are amusingly neurotic, and I'm even worse!" In American Pastoral, written just a few years ago by a Roth who is getting a bit old, is a lot more serious, and more like "My child is fucking crazy, and not in an amusing way either."

Logan's Run

This week I watched Logan's Run, which was showing on TCM. I saw this before when I was much younger, and I seem to remember that it was a good sci-fi film. Hence, I was happy to watch it again. However, I was quickly disappointed.

The first thing wrong: the special effects, which are completely ridiculous. From the obvious scale-model city, to a gunfight where the gun seems to only emit sparks, the effects were awful. Not that there's that much wrong with that. A good story could have made up for it.

Ah, the story. A world where everyone over 30 is killed. They evidently have a chance to get "renewed", if they take part in a ceremony where they wear robes, revolve in a circle, and eventually float into the air. Then they are shot. All this takes place in full view of everyone. No one ever renews, but no one has ever realized that. Amazing. Could you imagine, for instance, if today no football team had ever scored a touchdown? And that no one ever noticed?

Finally, the stupid sci-fi ending of all, where someone tells a computer something the computer doesn't expect, and it causes the computer to self-destruct. It doesn't just crash, it explodes. In fact, it causes parts of the city to collapse, even. And then, the people of the city, whose entire civilization has collapsed, decide what they are really in the mood for is going to surface and hugging an old man.

What's worse, it looks like they are remaking it. However, perhaps this time it will be less stupid. Also, I wouldn't mind reading the novel it was based on, I hear the movie is almost completely different from it.

Subway search

Last week the police has started to do random bag checks in random subway stations. I hadn't seen it until Monday, where the police were at the Forest Hills station, searching all bags. I asked if I could take a picture of them, but they said no.

They were fairly thorough, though, at least more thorough than the bag check I go through at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library. I have a backpack with 5 compartments, 3 of which are big enough to hold something dangerous. The library checks one. The police at the subway on Monday checked two. Not bad, but not perfect either. I didn't point it out to them, though. I was anxious to go on to the oven-like subway platform and swelter while waiting for my train.

Children in the Land of the Dead

I went to see Romero's Land of the Dead today. I decided to go about 2 minutes after it started showing, so I ran to the theater. Luckily for me, I got there just as they were starting the Serenity trailer, which looked wonderful. It actually looked like it was a movie-length version of the last episode.

At any rate, some bozo brought their year-old child, and did not leave throughout the movie, no matter how many people told them to take the damn baby out. The baby didn't cry at all, a fairly impressive feat for a baby watching a zombie film. Instead, it sort of cooed all the time. It sort of went like this:

Guy in movie: OK, I'll just wait for you guys here. I'll be fine! [Zombie pops up and eats the guys face, with flesh and blood splattered everywhere]

Baby: Coo! Gurgle!

Audience member: Take the fucking baby out!

Owner of baby, if there was one: [Silence]

Not only that, but I had another experience that I previously had in watching Eyes Wide Shut. About fifteen minutes into the movie, a mother and 4 of her kids, ranging from 12 to 4 years old, tramped in. For both of these movies, I just don't understand the mentality that a person uses to choose movies. Does she not know this was a zombie movie? I didn't see her later, she probably figured left soon, which was just what the person in Eyes Wide Shut did. Maybe it's the same woman, who specializes in taking her kids to wildly inappropriate movies. She followed me from San Francisco! Now that's scary.

At any rate, it was a good movie. As usual for Romero zombie films, it has some great satire. Kind of depressing though. A lot of people died. I think I'm getting too mellow, that thing would never have upset me before. But at the end I felt pretty good, because with O'Connor resigning, and the administration as usual dragging their heels on climate change in the G8 conference, I was feeling pretty down today. But now I realize that no matter how bad things are, at least we don't have to deal with zombies.

Philip Glass

I've been living in New York a year now, and I've never seen anyone famous. I did see minor celebrities, perhaps, like the Charles Durning, and a women who, I was informed, was in Sex in the City, a show I've never watched.

But today I hit the jackpot, at least for myself. I'm 90% sure I saw Philip Glass, my favorite composer! He was eating a sandwich at a new place called "Your Taste" at 6th Ave and 23rd St. I never want to bother anyone so I just moved on, but it was quite a thrill. Looking back on it, I'm not sure if it should have been so thrilling. I mean, I saw him once in San Francisco at at a live rendition of Koyaanisqatsi, which was incredible. But here it was unexpected, and close up. At any rate, I'm still thrilled.

Ray Lane

I usually don't talk about work on this blog, but ex-Oracle CEO and current partner at KPCB, Ray Lane just gave Visible Path a plug in an interview with Business Week.

Crafts in St. Louis

According to a post in the The Commonspace Blog, my friend Greg Svendsen is selling ceramics now, at The Shop (in St. Louis). I have a bowl he made for me, and it's a great looking rustic sort of thing, perfect for slices of a nice Italian bread. Next time I'm in St. Louis I'll definitely go and stop by The Shop, which is evidently at Spring and Wyoming.

Also, my mother is selling some jewelry she designed herself at, last I heard, Plaza Frontenac. She's sold quite a few pieces already, and I'm looking to help her set up some small e-commerce site for it.

Good luck and good sales to both of them!

Double Subway Craziness

Today I went down to take a subway to Elmhurst to go eat some Malaysian food. When I arrived, all the trains were running local, and two trains were waiting and accepting passengers. I went to the one on the express track, when it informed me that the other train would be leaving first. So I quickly move across the platform to the other train, only to be confronted with a loud sermon by one of those annoying subway preachers.

As an aside, the demographics of those preachers are quite curious. All of them are older Jamaican women. I've never seen a male preacher, a white preacher, or in fact even a non-Jamaican preacher. However, within that demographic range, some of them sit mostly quietly, sometimes letting out a few loud sentences of "praise". Some stand and preach, and one in particular is just batshit crazy, screaming "Praise Jesus!" while running up and down the subway car with her arms flailing wildly. I've encountered her about three or four times so far.

This one was one of the normal ones, which means that she was completely obnoxious without actually being scary. So as I jump in the subway car, notice a loudly talking Jamaican woman, hear a few words and decide it's not worth it. I jump back out again while I hear the announcement that the doors are about to close. I run over to the next car and get in, much relieved.

A few minutes later, someone announces their presence, asking for money. At least I assume that is what they are asking for, this guy's voice is so slurred I can't make out any words. So I do what I normally do in these situations, which is continue to read my book. The man stops by me, asks me for money (I think that's what he said), and when I said no, he gets mad at me and says something. I would have been a little concerned or freaked out, but I couldn't understand a word he said to me. I just looked at him and resumed reading my book. He traveled to the end of the subway car, and went through the door between the cars, and entered the same car that the subway preacher was in.

Now this is an interesting situation. I've never seen two people do their shticks at the same time in the same car. What would happen? Would this guy just pass on through, not interrupting the Jesus-woman? Or would they do some sort of crazy-person verbal battle, with her warning him of the dangers of hell, and him giving her an incomprehensible tongue-lashing? It was almost interesting enough that I wish I could see what was going on. But it wasn't to be, and now I'll never know what happens when a subway beggar meets a subway preacher.

Mitzvah tanks

I was surprised to hear loud, strange music coming from the street-level outside our office at around noon. When I went to see what it was, I saw a long procession of "Mitzvah tanks" that was blasting music. And I do mean long, it took about half an hour for the little parade to finish. No one seemed to know what it was for, or what the hell Mitzvah tanks were. It turns out the parade was to celebrate the deceased Lubavitch Rebbe's birthday. My coworker DB found this history and description of the Mitzvah Tanks. Thanks DB! I have actually seen these in Forest Hills a few times, mostly during holidays. Once they tried to give me something for Succoth, but I was reluctant to take it.

Spamalot

Yesterday Adam and I went to see Monty Python's Spamalot on Broadway. About 15 years ago I was a huge Monty Python fan, and saw just about everything they did. I think I overdid it. Just like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I was seeing every other weekend for a while, then as soon as I stopped going I completely forgot about it. Well, those worlds just collided in Spamalot, which stars Tim Curry. And David Hyde-Pierce, and Hank Azaria, all of whom were excellent. The rest of the cast as well, especially the actress who played the Lady of the Lake.

I was happy to see that Spamalot didn't just recycle old Python gags, although it did that too. It does have some great new material, most of which are musical numbers. Tim Curry was laid-back and enjoyable, and David Hyde-Pierce is always very funny. Hank Azaria played a variety of roles, and seemed natural and funny in all of them.

Adam and I got standing room tickets (I had to go early yesterday to get them), and they cost $21.50 a piece. For the entertainment I got, it was a great deal.

Windows Schadenfreude

I'm feeling better today, and wanted to get at least one backlogged posts off my chest. So, this one is about Windows Schadenfreude, which is the feeling I get when I see some sort of innocuous non-computer device displaying Windows error messages, causing me to greatly enjoy the sheer stupidity of it all. Here's one I found on 7th Avenue, where a ClearChannel ad displayer above a subway is advising pedestrians that they may want to run "CHKDSK /F".

Isn't Windows Schadenfreude a great feeling?

Five colds

Just as I was getting over the last cold (which lingered in my chest for a week or more), I get a brand new cold. This one is even worse. Expect more posts when I recover, sorry for the silence.

Four colds

I'm in the last stages of a cold today. Ordinarily, nothing worth even noting. But it so happens this is my fourth cold of the winter. Four! Usually I get one, or maybe, maybe two colds for the winter. Now, I move to New York, I get four.

Is it because of New York? I do come seem to rub shoulders with an insane number of people every day, mostly on the subway. Or perhaps it is just because my kids are toddlers now, and getting out and playing with other children? Whatever the cause, I calculate I've been sick about a fifth of the time this winter. And it's not just me. Almost everyone at work has been out sick with at least two serious colds or flus. So, I think it's just New York.

Maybe I should eat more kimchi.

Aguirre

I recent saw the movie Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Besides Klaus' brief appearance as a hunchback in For a Few Dollars More, I haven't really seen any real Klaus Kinsi films. Aguirre seems the most famous of his films, so I started with that.

This is the kind of film I wish there was more of. It is both personal and historical. The class of civilizations when the Spanish invaded Central and South America has always been interesting to me, and this is the first film I've seen about that period. The movie, made in 1972, only looks dated when showing that 1970's era low-budget blood that is so familiar to fans of zombie films from that era. The rest, though, looks surprisingly modern. Excellent cinematography. The plot is very simple, but manages to show a surprising amount of facets to the journey: the terrain, the food, the cannibals, the primitive raft construction, the black slave, the native slaves, the noblemen, the women, the religious killings of natives who could have to help them, and finally the increasinly maniacal Don Lope de Aguirre.

I've started watching the commentary as well, which is fascinating. Evidently it was based on a real letter. Werner Herzog wrote the film in 2 days, and a drunk guy vomiting on his typewriter made him lose a few scenes (which he later could not remember). The making of the film also seems interesting, since it was filmed on location, with actors trudging through real swamps, etc.

Next up in my Kinski-fest is Fitzcarraldo and My Best Feind.

A Scanner Darkly Trailer

Check out the new trailer for Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. It looks incredible!

Dumpling House

In my continuing quest for great dumplings, I ate at Dumpling House in Chinatown yesterday. It is renowned for being very good, and very cheap. Five dumplings cost $1. To my surprise, it also had sesame bread, which I used to eat at the Halal Chinese places in the Bay Area. I had my camera with me and took a few pictures, but I was so hungry I didn't even remember to take pictures until I had devoured a significant portion of my food. I also neglected to take a picture of the restaurant. Bad blogger, bad!

They had two kinds of sesame bread, the plain (the uneaten one on top), and a meat and vegetable filled one (filled after baking). I saw how they made it, which is basically by frying it on a huge griddle. It was quite tasty, just as good as the ones in California.

The vegetable boiled dumplings, 8 for $2.00:

Finally, the fried pork & chive dumplings. They were wonderfully crispy, and succulent on the inside. Great stuff. There are five initially, two were already eaten.

Although it is cheap and good, which seems like a magic combination, it is a small restaurant with seats for 4 or 5 people. Plus, the service is horrible, you almost have to grab someone to take your order. People regularly will come up to the counter where you order, and order ahead of you, even though you've been waiting a while. A friend of mine tells me it's just like in China, you just have to push your way in and shout your order. It kind of reminds me of how you order at Shalimar in San Francisco.

Vacation blog

My friend (and fellow ex-Intraspecter) Mike, and his girlfriend Beth are going on a 4 month trip to South America. He's starting a blog about it. The idea of these temporary blogs, to follow one personal or public issue that has a limited shelf-life is an interesting one, and I think we'll see more of it.

Vanity Fair

I evidently didn't take a long break from reading fiction, because I just recently finished reading Vanity Fair. I figured since I just read Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, I should read Thackeray's most well-known work. I'm glad I did. The book was often funny, very insightful, and occasionally romantic. Due to reading Barry Lyndon, I had no idea how it would proceed, since that book was so negative. Vanity Fair shares the same cynicism, but also has some more light-heartedness and a major characters who aren't complete jerks. I'm trying to get my wife to read it now, I think she would enjoy it.

The strange thing about the book is that one of the main characters is named Becky Sharp, and I'm pretty sure I knew someone by that name in my class in high school. Or maybe I'm just imagining things.

Also of note is that part of a passage from Vanity Fair gets used in Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon:

Here, before long, Becky received not only "the best" foreigners (as the phrase is in our noble and admirable society slang), but some of the best English people too. I don't mean the most virtuous, or indeed the least virtuous, or the cleverest, or the stupidest, or the richest, or the best born, but "the best,"--in a word, people about whom there is no question--such as the great Lady Fitz-Willis, that Patron Saint of Almack's, the great Lady Slowbore, the great Lady Grizzel Macbeth (she was Lady G. Glowry, daughter of Lord Grey of Glowry), and the like.

Now, I'm turning my attentions back to non-fiction, and am reading Collapse, a book about how societies are destroyed (by environmental issues, among other things). I also borrowed the same author's other famous work Guns, Germs, and Steel, which everyone I know has read and enjoyed. So I guess I should read it too.

Eternal Sunshine

I recently saw the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was, as usual for Kaufman-written movies, incredibly inventive and well-written. The direction was quite nice too. One though bothered me though: how would a company that erases memories get paid, since they have to erase memories of the memory erasal? Even paying up-front, the client would be confused why the bank statement shows they paid thousands of dollars to someone they have never heard of. Of course, this isn't a flaw in the movie, just a nitpick that amused me.

The Luck of Barry Lyndon

In my continuing effort to read books that Kubrick has made movies from, in conjunction with my effort to read more classic fiction, I just read The Luck of Barry Lyndon. A great book, although horribly depressing and oppressive at times. Kubrick's movies is actually very faithful to the book, only having minor alterations, except for the duel at the end of the movie (perhaps my favorite movie duel), which does not happen in the book. I think Kubrick added that duel to give some sort of climax, and also so that Barry can do something noble right before the end of the movie, instead of just being a complete jerk. Anyway, good book.

I'm a bit fictioned out at the moment, so I'm taking some time out and reading Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Should be very interesting. It fascinates me to be in an area with so much history. Every little place has had so many interesting events happen there. In Stranger in a Strange Land, when Michael goes to a city, he cannot believe how much psychic history there was. He almost cannot stand the collective remnants of so many emotions. It's easy to get a similar feeling walking around Manhattan when you stop to think about it. Well, at least that applies to my job is in Manhattan, I don't think where I'm living in Queens has much interesting history at all.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I just finished reading Heinlein's classic sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Such a class, I felt I had to read it. Well, I can see why it was a classic, it certainly has a story that would become an occasional sci-fi device: a visiting "alien" sees humans from an outsider perspective. Interesting. But actually, not that interesting, when you get down to it.

There are a few problems: Heinlein's dialog is way too snappy. No one talks like that. And the female characters are basically just there to look pretty and exchange this snappy playful dialogue with the male characters. I suppose it is a product of it's times, and probably was progressive then - at least in most ways. It is totally misogynist, though. And the last third of the book is just creepy, with the hero acting as cult leader, and killing scores of people without a second thought.

Did I mention that there were some scenes in heaven in this book? Well, there are. What the hell was that about?

The Aviator

I went to the Director's Guild last night with Adam to watch a screening of the Aviator, Martin Scorsese's latest movie. It was great in every respect. The story was fascinating, the acting was terrific, the cinematography produced a really great look, and of course innovative and impressive directing.

After the movie, Adam and I stopped by Carnegie Deli to get a sandwich. Not only is it $12 for a sandwich, but they charge $3 to split it! It was good, though.

As long as I'm complaining, I just had no luck with the subway system yesterday. I had 45 minutes after I put the kids to sleep to get into the movie, and I'm told that the Director's Guild doesn't let you in once the movie starts. So, I walk briskly over to my local subway stop, which has two express trains I can take: the F, which has a stop within a hundred feet of the theater, or the E, which is 4 blocks south and more than an avenue over. So I get to the subway, and arrive just as an F was pulling away. Fuck! So I wait, and in a few minutes, an E shows up. I'm holding out for an F, though, since that will save me almost 10 minutes of walking. It's now half an hour to the movie, and I know the ride takes 20 minutes, so I'm starting to get a bit nervous. Five minutes later, the next train comes, and it's another E! Now I'm doubting that waiting another 5 minutes or so for an F will be the right thing to do, so I just get on the E, cursing myself for not getting on the earlier E, thus buying myself some time. When I get off the E, it's just two minutes to the start of the movie. I run and run, and in about 4 minutes get to the Director's Guild, which hadn't started the movie yet. I saw Adam, sat down, and in a happy, sweaty way, relaxed and got ready for the movie. Coming home, it was after midnight, and trains only come about 1 every 15 minutes then. I get to the station right as the train is pulling away, of course.

The interesting thing is, I swear I saw Tom Gruber, the CTO of Intraspect, in the theater. He left before I had a chance to talk to him, but I've just sent him mail to see if it was truly him. It would be quite a coincidence if it was him, seeing as he lives in Palo Alto.

Screening

I had a chance to see a small screening of Before Sunset, with special guests Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, but I couldn't make it. My friend Adam went, though, and reported back. He said that Delpy and Hawke talked for about 15 minutes about the film. One of the interesting things they said is that there was almost nothing cut - what was filmed was almost exactly the script. They had only one line which was cut, a line about religion. I think the Delpy character asks if the Ethan character goes to church, or something like that. The Ethan character replies that he "doesn't like to take the guided tour". Nice line, I wonder why they took it out.

Thanksgiving in St. Louis

I went to St. Louis for Thanksgiving, to spend some time with my family and friends there. I made my usual roasted turkey, which turned out well. I had to use my mom's odd cookware, so I had to roast it in this very deep roasting pan. It was deep because it comes with a cover, and I guess people covered their roasts back in whatever era this roaster came from. It was made out of a strange material, a dull black speckled with white dots. I'm still puzzling over what material this is, no one else I talked to seems to know, although the usual reaction to my queries was "Hey, my mom has a roaster like that too!"

I went with my parents, sister, and nephew and niece to the City Museum, which was very fun. I did quite a bit of crawling through tunnels, crawling on top of barrels, squeezing through caves, etc. And this museum stays open until 1 AM! What a great place.

At night I went over to my friends Brian and Amanda's house off of Grand. They are currently complaining about how ridiculous housing prices have gotten there. The prices are even approaching $200K! Actually, I was amazed it was that low. Although with neighborhood features like the two big Rottweilers I saw running madly down Grand, perhaps I overestimate the broad appeal of the neighborhood. My friend Greg has moved into an apartment downtown, and has a million dollar view of downtown St. Louis, the Arch, and the Mississippi River. I hung out with Brian, Amanda, and Greg one night, and we had a nice, free, meal (Amanda got a gift certificate), and later hung out at a bar and watched a band called Diesel Engine (I think), which was several members of the Bottle Rockets, and a few other musicians playing covers of country-rock songs. Not my usual thing to listen to, but it was interesting, and the music was great.

Pictures of my weekend with my family are here. Hopefully it won't be too long until I can come back.

The Space Merchants

While lying around sick yesterday, I did some reading. I re-read one of the great classic sci-fi books, The Space Merchants. I have an old, beat up copy of this book, from the first printing of the paperback edition in 1953. At the time, it cost $0.35. The hardbound edition? $1.50. Amazing.

At any rate, it had been a while since I read it, and I'm just amazed at how dead-on of a satire it still is. For example, in the future of the book, there are no longer senators from states. That is an outdated concept. Instead, each corporation has a senator that will represent their interests. Compare that to today, where it seems that everyone knows who the "Senator from Disney" is.

The narrator, Mitch Courtenay, is a star-class copyright exec, one of the most important men at the most important advertising agency. He falls victim to what appears to be several conspiracies mixed into one, and ends up shanghied into a low-class labor contract in Costa Rica. The system there is expoitative, and is only a slight exaggeration of what happens in overseas sweatshops. He's paid a small amount of money, and has to pay for factory-supplied refreshments, which of course one needs when doing back-breaking labor. Mitch finds he racks up debt faster than he is earning money.

Mitch returns only by joining his old enemies, the conservationists (consies, for short). When he gets back, he discovers how no one is prepared to see how exploitative the system is, so no one believes his story.

My story was blasphemy against the god of Sales. He wouldn't believe it, and he couldn't believe that I - the real I - believed it. How could Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, be sitting there and telling him such frightful things as:

The interests of the producers and consumers are not identical;
Most of the world is unhappy;
Workmen don't automatically find the job they do best;
Entrepreneurs don't play a hard, fair game by the rules;
The Consies are sane, intelligent, and well organized.

Great book, as is the sequel, The Merchant's War. Of all the distopian futures, this one is the closest to actually being reality, and it's getting closer to reality all the time, as a story today illustrates. The whole thing reminds me of this Futurama quote, after Fry gets an ad in his dream:

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

Cryptonomicon

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon. I had heard so many good things about this book and Neal Stephenson in general, that I had to read it. I finished in a few days ago. It was a long book, around 800 to 900 pages of story, plus an appendix. The book was good, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations. While there are an uncountable number of very clever passages in the book, I felt the plot was a bit weak overall. There is was way too much going on, and at the end, many things never really got answered, and in fact the ending itself doesn't seem to follow from the rest of the plot. It's strange, it either needed to be edited down quite a bit, or given a hundred or so more pages.

Other books I've read recently:

• Baudolino by Umberto Eco: really wonderful, light-hearted tale by Eco. I love the historical sensibilities in this book. The last part of the book left me wondering what Eco was trying to accomplish here, but the ending was so clever that it more than made up for the previous strangeness.
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: First time reading it, it was unexpectedly funny and delightful.
• The Count of Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas: Engaging, especially the first part of the novel. After that it gets a bit too long. The book is a bit too serious for my tastes, it has none of the playfulness of The Three Musketeers.
• Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg (my second favorite sci-fi author). A great series of what-if short stories, the premise being that the Roman empire can never fade. Entertaining, occasionally thought provoking, but not his best work. Speaking of Silverberg, have I mentioned how incredibly bizarre and disturbing his book Kingdoms of the Wall is? I read it last year, and it freaked the hell out of me. Which is unusual for any book, let alone a Silverberg book. Good, though.

Before Sunset

I saw Linklater's new movie, Before Sunset today, in Times Square. It was a really great movie, and part of what made it special is how good the first movie Before Sunrise was. I came into the movie already knowing, and caring about the characters. It is ten years later in movie time and in real life, and when the characters meet again, it's apparent how much they had to say to each other, and how much we as an audience were waiting to hear it. The movie didn't disappoint, the acting was incredible, the script was mature and amazing. Like the first movie, it has a lot to say, but, as the characters have aged, it says different things. While watching the movie, I was wondering how they would possibly end it, but the ending did not disappoint. It was at the same time exactly the same, and completely different than the ending to Before Sunrise.

The movie was utterly engrossing. Although it was just a long conversation, I didn't want to miss a word. I'd say that there should be more movies like this, but I honestly don't think that there are many other directors other than Linklater that can handle such a subtle script.

The Curse of the Giant Subway Stop

There's an interesting new emotion I've been experiencing in New York. It's an emotion that you feel when you exit the subway, and walk to your destination, and you've been walking for about 10 minutes, and you still notice that you are passing entrances to the same subway stop you got out on.

Fahrenheit 911

I saw Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 911 on Friday night, in a theatre by NYU. I was surprised to see that most theaters in the area that were showing it, were showing it on two screens. I wonder if it's like that most places, or just the very liberal places like New York.

I thought the film was great. Moore has a great gift for combining humor, ridicule, and righteous anger. No, Moore was not fair, and he didn't try to tell just a little tiny bit of the other side of the story. But he shouldn't have to, because a one-sided attack is still morally superior to the administration's continuous lies.

Most of the film was old news to me, with the notable exception of the parts about Bush's previous dealings with the Saudi's and James R. Bath, and the 10 congressmen that tried to challenge the 2000 election, all without having the support of one single senator. But even the parts I knew were brought home by the grisly footage of burned children, limbless soldiers, destroyed homes and families, and grieving mothers. We're not supposed to see war footage these days. It puts a damper on things. But I'm glad I saw it. Everyone needs to see it. Maybe next time we go to war we can be a little more fucking cautious about it.

3 movies, no trailers

Since I've moved to New York, I've seen three movies. The amazing part is, I didn't have to sit through one damn trailer, and only had to pay for one movie.

The first movie was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The movie felt kind of rushed, but the storyline was coherent and the direction was a little more interesting than the last two. I especially liked the handheld camera in the Dursley's house. I saw this for free at the Director's Guild on 56th St. The Screen Actor's Guild can see movies there for free with a guest, and I went with a friend who was borrowing someone's card. There were very strict rules, I was told. Make very sure your cell phone is off. Don't talk at all during the movie. Stay until the credits have stopped rolling. Don't get up at all during the movie either. It was all worth it, and the movie had very nice credits anyway, so I didn't mind.

The second movie I saw was The Chronicles of Riddick. Not exactly the kind of movie I would see by myself, but my friend Adam got a free ticket. I didn't think it was so good. One of the characters seemed so familiar to me, and I just now looked it up and saw it was Karl Urban, who played Eomer in Lord of the Rings. I saw this movie in Brooklyn, and ate a nice dinner afterwards, but it took me two fucking hours to get home. Still, two hours to get through three boroughs (I had to go through Manhattan) without a car is not horrible, I guess.

The last movie I actually paid for. I saw it just last weekend - City of God, which I've been meaning to see for a long time. It was completely wonderful, and horrifying, and funny at times too. The direction was great (everyone compares it to Scorcese for good reason), and the storyline was captivating. It really showed something I've never seen, the life in a Brazilian slum, and the characters that inhabit it. It was sort of like V.S. Naipaul's excellent book Miguel Street about the slums in Trinidad, except with all the light-heartedness in that book replaced by people shooting each other.

Subway ride from hell

The public transit is supposed to be great in New York. Well, I suppose it is great, it covers a wide area, runs frequently, and runs all night. Sometimes, however, it makes Caltrain look good.

This weekend, Greta and I went to Manhattan to buy some furniture. The first problem was getting in, my great E and F lines which are supposed to be express on weekends, were local, so it took about 10 or 15 minutes longer than it should have to get into Manhattan. But the real problem was on the way back. I got on an R line, which strangely stopped at Queen's Plaza at which point the conductor told everyone to get off and get on the next train.

So we get off and wait, and about 10 minutes later, a train shows up. We get on the train, and there is no room to sit (not unusual). The train starts to move, and of course it is local, not express. It moves very slowly, I could probably run faster than it. It stops unexpected for about five minutes in the middle of the tunnel. The conductor has a mumbly sort of announcement about "congestion on the tracks". What congestion? There wasn't any other train before this one for 10 minutes. How the hell could there be congestion? So, the train proceeds like this, either very slow, or stopped completely, for about 6 or 7 stations. Even though it's not that bad, the train starts feeling crowded and uncomfortable. At about the third stop after we get on this train, someone on our car starts vomiting uncontrollably, vomiting a curious green color. We just stand there and try and think pleasant thoughts, but we know we must have entered what must be transit hell. Eventually, the speed picks up again and we eventually reach our destination, about an hour and a half later. It should have taken half an hour.

That kind of thing never happened on Caltrain, not even when there was an earthquake while I was riding. Maybe next time I'll take the Long Island Railroad, which only takes fifteen minutes to get into Manhattan (but is more expensive).

Forest Hills

I just got internet connection a few days ago, so now I can take a moment and finally update the blog. I've moved into a two bedroom apartment in Forest Hills Gardens in Queens. It's a beautiful area with great stone houses and apartment buildings, with an old-world sort of feel. It's very close to a shopping district and public transportation. My commute to 22nd St. in Manhattan takes 30 minutes.

The food here is very nice. Well, in Forest Hills I've only eaten a few times, but what I had has been good. One of the places I've eaten is Nick's Pizza, which has the reputation of being one of the best of New York City. The crust is thin, scorched, and tasty. The tomato sauce is wonderful and the mozzarella is great quality. During a street fair that happened last weekend, I ate at the Tres Burros booth, and they had a sort of burrito-like thing with wonderful grilled beef. Very tasty!

I've gone down to Jackson Heights (also in Queens) a few times. That's where Little India is. The food there is great, and they have these guys in tiny little stores that make you a pan, which is a betel leaf wrapping some lime spread, some sweet fennel seed, two kinds of betel-nut, some sweet syrupy thing and a bunch of other things as well. It cost one dollar. The guy who made it for me gave me instruction on how to eat it: "This may cause your tongue and teeth to get a little red. Also, just chew it with one side of your mouth". It was kind of bitter, minty, and sweet at the same time, with lots of interesting flavors.

OK, hopefully I'll start posting more regularly again. Sorry for the delay.

Manhattan

I've been in Manhattan for a few days now, so it's finally time to write a blog entry about it. So far I'm really enjoying the time I spend here, although starting a new job and looking for a place to live is stress-inducing. One of the great things about Manhattan is how late everything stays open. When I flew in on Saturday, I had dinner at 11pm, and on subsequent days I usually eat around 9 to 10 pm.

Another interesting thing is that it seems that every place is also a cafe or other type of eatery. The people at work go to a furniture store for coffee. They say that "Bed Bath & Beyond" has the best burritos in the neighborhood. This is very bizarre to me.

The food is good, although not as light as California food. And the portion sizes are bigger, as well as the prices.

Well, those are pretty basic observations. More later.

Weekend in St. Louis

I just came back from a weekend in St. Louis. This was the first trip I made with the kids to St. Louis. Everyone there was happy to see us (see my sister's and my parent's blog entry), and I got a kick out of interacting with my niece and nephew. Besides that, all my relatives came over for an open house, so I got to see all of them, which was great.

I also met my old friends Hal, Greg, Brian, and Amanda. Greg gave me a copy of the Riverfront Times Best of St. Louis issue. It was an interesting read, and I wish I had a little more time in St. Louis to try out some of the places mentioned. This last weekend was actually the 100-year anniversary of the famous 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and the 200-year anniversary of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Greg, Brian, Amanda, and I discussed, among other things, our quest to find the Father of Nitro, so we can somehow get more Nitro. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but I've put in a few inquiries already, and hopefully we can contact him.

I wound up in Atlanta with Greta's sister. Greta and the kids are staying there, while I make the move to New York, find a place, and make it livable.

I fly out on Saturday.

More ramen

Wow. Yet another Ramen place has opened up this past week! This one is called Himawari. I noticed it today, and talked with a Japanese guy who was waiting on his friends to go eat there. He told me he already ate here a few days ago, and he thought it was the best Ramen in the Bay Area. I asked him if it was better than Santa, and he said yes - he doesn't particularly like Santa's soy sauce flavor, but Himawari has a good version of that. I agree, of Santa's three flavors they offer, I always thought soy 1000 sauce was the weakest. I can't wait to try Himawari! I'll report back as soon as I do. I don't have much time left here, so expect it soon.

Moving

Big news. I've accepted a job at Visible Path, headquartered in Manhattan. So, I'm moving to New York!

I already feel sad about leaving the Bay Area. It's really a wonderful place. The weather is mild, the food is great, the surrounding nature is wonderful, and San Francisco is, in my opinion, the most beautiful place I've ever seen. I have great friends here, and I'm happy with my job at Vignette. But the prospect of working with Visible Path was an offer I couldn't refuse. Plus, New York should be lots of fun.

I'll be a Social Network Analyst, working on both code and statistical analysis of social networks with Stan Wasserman, who was one of my professors at UIUC.

Boar's Head Mushrooms

About a year ago, I went to Chinatown and noticed some strange looking mushrooms called "Monkey's Head Mushrooms". They were dried, black, lumpy, and hairy looking. I didn't pick one up, but I probably should have.

A while ago (I intended to blog it right away, but forgot), I went to the Tuesday Farmer's Market in San Francisco, and the mushroom stand had a lumpy, hairy, white mushroom called "Boar's Head Mushrooms". I asked, and they were in fact the same thing as Monkey's Head. I bought some at $8 a pound, went home, and cooked it. It had an unusual, spongy, seafood-like texture, and a nice sweetness to it. They were delicious! Here's a picture:

Don Quixote

I recently finished reading Don Quixote. I figured it's supposed to be the greatest novel ever written, it might be worth my time to read it.

I liked it a lot, actually. It was pretty funny, and much more modern than I had anticipated. There was a lot of winking at the reader, at least in Part II. Another thing that surprised me was finding the hangman paradox in the book. That's the paradox where a judge questions each traveler over a bridge, and if they answer truthfully where they are going, they are allowed to pass. If they lie, they are hanged. This works fine until one day, a traveler tells the judge, "I am going to be hanged". Pity poor Sancho Panza, who had to figure out whether to let this guy live or not.

There's a lot of very clever stuff in this book. I'm sure it would have been even more enjoyable if I had read more books of chivalry. It struck me at how similar those tales were to modern superhero comics. According to a passage in the book, every knight had a certain special talent, such as the ability to resist enchantment, or some sort of invulnerability.

I also thought about how both Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam had famously tried to film the book, and both never could do it (well, couldn't do it yet in the case of Gilliam). Due to the structure of the book, and it's length, it's hard to see how any sort of coherent plot could be filmed.

One bad part of the book, however, is the ending. Cervantes spends way too much time and effort on decrying the Don Quixote knock-off that appeared before he could publish Part II himself. In the book this appears because Don Quixote finds out about this knock-off, and it describes a bunch of things he never did. Cervantes goes on and on about this, even to the very end of the book. I guess I'd be pretty pissed too, though.

One final thought about the book. I don't know for sure, but I think Cervantes had a shepherdess fetish.

Working In San Francisco

With the acquisition of my employer Intraspect by Vignette, we have moved to Vignette's San Francisco offices, at the One Market building. It's really great, not only do we have a great view of the bay, and the Bay Bridge, but we also are right in the city. So far I'm having fun exploring the places around the office.

I've found a good way to spend a lunch hour. I walk up California St. to Chinatown, which is a rigorous 18 minute walk (to get to Stockton St.). I then go to one of those dim sum counters and get some cheap dim sum. The prices is really cheap - I can get a good meal for 3 to 4 dollars. I walk back, and have gotten both exercise, and a cheap and good meal. Wonderful!

The Club Dumas

On the trip to Los Angeles, I finished reading The Club Dumas. I read it basically because I was totally amazed by Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. Many people disagree with me on that point. To me, the movie was great - it was completely engrossing, filled with great European scenery, interesting characters, a puzzling mystery, moments of hilarious campiness, and moments of bizarre creepiness, and a wonderful original score. And it really had a love of old books.

The book was very good itself, and reading it I understood how the movie brilliantly adapted it, fusing two storylines into one, with the best elements from each. Well, except for the book's character of Flavio, who was hilarious. The other plotline in the book was about a handwritten chapter of Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

The plot was very clever, and certain elements felt like they were from the pen of Stanislaw Lem (my favorite author). If there was a flaw to this book, it was that some of the expositions about Dumas felt a bit extraneous.

Trip to L.A.

My family and I made a trip to L.A. last weekend. It was the first time in a few years I got a chance to go down. We stayed at my sister-in-law's friend's apartment in Playa Vista. He took us to Venice Beach, which was fun and interesting. I also got a chance to hang out with my friend Ben. I told Ben I wanted to eat at the strangest, most unique Chinese restaurant he could find. So we went to the Monterey Park neighborhood, and ate at a Yunnan-style restaurant. Yunnan is a region of China close to Sichuan and Guangzhou. It is renown for it's tea implements, if I remember correctly. The food at this restaurant was very spicy. Ben and I got these dishes:

• A corn, fish, pine-nut stir-fry. This was very tasty, the fish was so light, and the sweetness of the corn went well the the slight saltiness of the fish.
• Part of a pork hip, with vegetables. I've had this before in a Shanghai restaurant. The skin was nice and dry, and there was a lot of very succulent fat right below. Very nice.
• Vermicelli noodles. But these noodles were much thicker then the thin, transparent vermicelli noodles I'm used to. Very interesting.
• Spicy yunnan style yam cake. This was interesting for two reasons. First, the stir-fry itself was spicy and had a hard-to-place flavor. It was a bit different then other spicy stir-fries I've had. The star of the dish was not the usual meat or tofu, it was a sort of a resilient gelatin-like substance made out taro root. It didn't have a whole lot of flavor, but it carried the spices of the dish in a nice way.

We could only finish the pork, the rest we took home. We were so stuffed we didn't need to eat dinner that night.

Meanwhile, Greta and everyone else went on a quick tour of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and other places, including Mann's Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame.

It was a nice trip. My only regret is that I wasn't able to visit my friend Farhang when I was in town.

Sweet, sweet schadenfreude

Today I had a wonderful moment of schadenfreude. But to explain it, I have to give some background.

Occasionally, I would take my car to the gym, and go at around 9am rather then my usual time of 7am. When I did this, there was always this guy parked up in a van, who had this incredbly massive poster (something like 10 feet by 10 feet) of an aborted, mutilated fetus. The van also has written on the front "Disobey God and GO TO HELL". He loves to park it so that everyone who goes into the gym has to see the mutilated baby. Needless to say, I hated this guy. I am not the only one. I once called the people who manage the parking lot to see why he's allowed to park there. They said it was freedom of speech, but I think it is actually advertising, which is a restricted form of speech. There wasn't anything I could do about him, evidently. But everyone already hates the guy. I learned that his giant poster had been vandalized once, but he just went out and got another one.

So today, I happen to pick up a San Mateo Daily Journal and read their headline 'Pro-life' activist jailed. When I read about his arrest, I had one of the great schadenfreude experience of my life. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Finishing reading

I have been reading a bunch in the past few weeks. I'm almost done with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's going well, still interesting, and I've read all of the songs. Lately, though, I've become annoyed at all the "lo!" and "behold!"s that litter the pages of The Return of the King. Everything is "lo!" this or "behold!" that. Alas, I am stricken with annoyance.

I also managed to borrow A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius from the library. It was quite good. Very funny, very sad, and the writing was excellent. The best thing about it is that it is a great statement of sort of Generation X attitudes. The writing is self-aware, and self-aware of it's self-awareness, etc, etc, and it's all very modern and hip.

Jay's new mustache

My old friend Jay came up to see us a few days ago. Surprisingly enough, he was sporting a brand new handlebar mustache.

So you see it's sort of a "grumpy pitcher", or "1890's stockbroker" look.

Currently reading

An update on what I"m currently reading. I fully intended to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It's supposed to be quite amusing. I certainly enjoyed Eggers' Pirate Store in San