Parapoetica

A few weeks ago, I finally washed out two years of gunk from my bird feeder and hung it back up with fresh seed. I hear the birds around, and I occasionally see them flitting in the trees, but I have yet to see a single one at the feeder. Two summers ago, we could spend hours looking up finches, nuthatches, and all the other birds we’d seen. Pewter was a happy camper, since his cat hammock sits right in front of the feeder. Now: I got nothing. Do bird feeders wear out, you think?

I love chocolate-covered coffee beans. The other day, I bought a 10-oz pack from Starbucks and ate about half of it in one sitting. Then I felt very, very, very awake. I got to wondering just how many of those buzz-nuggets are equivalent to a shot of espresso.

The math alone was pretty revealing. I have a one-shot iced latte every morning, and I have to put about two handfuls of beans in my espresso maker about once a week. So if two handfuls = seven shots, one shot is not a whole lot of beans. Certainly not, say, the 20 to 30 I tend to eat at once. Gulp.

A quick google confirms it: One shot of espresso, or one cup of coffee, equals five or six chocolate-covered coffee beans. Be careful out there, folks.

I may have to switch to chocolate-covered cocoa nibs. That’s right: Some wonderful cocoa maker actually said to themselves, “I love eating the sweetest, richest part of the cocoa bean, but if only there was some way to make it more chocolatey.”

Somebody in Somerville’s signage department has a sense of humor:

!http://www.jay.fm/albums/friends/fp_596a.jpg (Bow wow ruff woof)!

Some unedited lyrics from last November..

when the trees drop their petals
as the morning settles
the jasmine carries your name

and though the limka is sweet
you can’t keep the beat
in the shadow of paternal shame

the apologies are shallow
and a spark just isnt enough

…Missing the you that you seemed to be when you seemed less like me…

And some bonus rhymes:

Elusive/delusive
Exotic/psychotic
version/aversion

Who can sleep with a view like this?

Jonathan Adler is a law professor and Volokh conspiracist.

Jonathan Adler on torture, September 2006:

Assuming a good faith effort to operate within accepted legal norms, the clearer the rules about when one may engage in potentially tortuous behavior, such as the use of force, the less likely it is that such conduct will result in liability for the officer in question.

Jonathan Adler on, um, threatening secured creditors with bad publicity in press briefings unless they cede to unsecured creditors during White House-Chrysler bankruptcy negotiations, May 2009:

incendiary, and quite disturbing… more than Nixonesque thuggery…the sort of thing one expects to see in a Banana Republic. It is antithetical to the rule of law and undermines the trust necessary for liberal economic institutions to function.

Sometimes a man’s just got to take a stand.

You walk into a room and notice that a picture is hanging crooked.
You…

A. Straighten it. B. Ignore it. C. Buy a CAD system and spend the next six months designing a solar-powered, self-adjusting picture frame while often stating aloud your belief that the inventor of the nail was a total moron. The correct answer is “C” but partial credit can be given to anybody who writes “It depends” in the margin of the test or simply blames the whole stupid thing on “Marketing.”

There’s a building next to the Mass Pike, with a huge (and expensive!) banner for their management company, 119BRT, that’s just been dangling in strips from the windows all winter. Now, that’s technically not a consumer issue, but it does call for a snarky interview e-mail, so your intrepid Shopwatch reporter is on the case:

As you no doubt know, the beautiful banner you’ve had hanging from the side of the building started to come apart several months ago, and at this point it’s nearly completely fallen and shredded.

1. Since that banner’s purpose is to tout your building’s availability to potential clients, would you say that you’re attempting to project a flexible, contemplative, hands-off approach to building management?

2. What one word sums up your maintenance philosophy?

UPDATE 4/7/05: Got a pained, earnest reply from a Michael Blank there this morning. Ten points for a quick and honest response, even though I’m just some shmoe. Minus 50 for leaving the banner up all winter. You know the first thing an airline does after a plane crash? Paint over the logo.

Jay, thank you for your response to our banner situation… We are removing it this weekend. The fact that it has taken so long to repair is a function of triaging 60+ projects currently in progress at the premises. We take great pains to be as responsive as possible no matter where or how a request originates.

I almost feel bad now for teasing them. It’s rough running a renovated building – don’t I know it! Oh, wait, but they’re a business, and they’re there to make a profit and serve customers. OK, then. Fair game.

Oh, and here’s a pic:

So I finally woke up one morning and realized that there is absolutely no good reason for me to stay in Wellesley. I don’t belong here. I’m young, and single, and I like the city. So I’ve been looking at places in the South End.

But, if you’ve seen my house, you know that I have a nicely-equipped home studio to do projects in. This one’s not soundproof, since I’m in the suburbs, but obviously in the city it would have to be. All serious studios are. You can’t have a garbage truck or a neighbor’s cough interrupt a great take. For the new one, I’m probably talking about 100dB of isolation, no windows, buried in the basement. When I play drums, the neighbor’s water glass won’t so much as ripple.

Yet when I say “recording studio”, for some reason, everyone’s mind shouts: Concert Hall! Festival! Mardi Gras! Loud music and parties and loose women! They soon realize that’s not the case, but their brain just jumps there reflexively. It’s as if I said “I’m planning to record ex-con rap artists from the West and East coasts together, to try to bring an end to the gang wars and violence in our lifetime. In my dining room.”

Now, the South End is not a stodgy neigborhood. It’s young, and trendy, and revitalized, and restaurants are actually open past 8 p.m., and it has deliberately attracted a large gay/lesbian and visual artist population over the past few years. Whereas Wellesley IS highly conservative, traditional and stuffy, but my neighbors never batted an eye during construction. Which leads me to my realization:

Saying “I’m a musician who’s building a recording studio” in the South End gets exactly the same reaction as would saying “I’m a photographer who takes tasteful nude photos of my gay lover” in Wellesley. And vice versa.

Driving eastbound on the Mass Turnpike tonight to South Boston, there was a variable message sign that repeatedly flashed “STATE POLICE ADVISE MOTORISTS TO CALL 911”. I figured it was just some emergency message that accidentally got triggered, but the very next overpass happened to be filled with flashing red-and-blue emergency vehicles of some kind, and so, as a concerned citizen, I called 911 to find out if there was some urgent safety alert that, for some reason, they weren’t just putting on the sign itself.

“911, this call is recorded. Please state your emergency.”

“Yes, hi. I’m driving eastbound on the Pike, and the sign said for drivers to call 911. Someone probably just hit the wrong button for the sign, but I thought I’d check.”

“So what is your emergency?”

“No, I was expecting you to know what’s going on, is there some message you’re supposed to give us?”

“Sir, that message says to call 911 if you have an emergency.”

“No, it doesn’t say that! It just says that motorists should call 911!”

“Well, that’s what it MEANS, sir.”

“Well, you might want to come up with some better wording, then!”

Isn’t that sort of an important distinction? The westbound signs are programmed correctly. Let’s compare.

A: State police advise motorists to call 911.
Message: The sky is falling! Call in for escape routes.

B. State police advise motorists to call 911 if they have an emergency.
Message: We care.

That’s sort of like the difference between “State police advise motorists to abandon their cars immediately and run like hell” and “State police advise motorists to abandon their cars immediately and run like hell, if the engine should catch fire.”

As G.O.B.’s wife on Arrested Development says, “Oh, I should have finished that thought.”

If you haven’t already seen this… Burger King has created a “viral marketing” site that truly gives you chicken your way. Commands to try include rotisserie, moonwalk, sing, air guitar, backflip, camera, hop, leave, tell me the time.

Subservient Chicken

If I’m curious about something, it’s usually only a matter of hours before I google for the conventional wisdom on it. I’m pretty thorough, and I’ve got a knack for finding the right search keywords, so there’s not much I can’t find. Why not, I said to myself, collect all that mundane knowledge in one handy, publicly searchable place? So here it is.

Whether or not to wash mushrooms is a touchy topic among cooks. Many believe that it destroys the flavor and texture, and that they soak up too much water. However, every single food safety site insists that washing, not brushing, is the only way to remove bacteria from the growth medium (which is often horse manure). And when Harold McGee (author of the Curious Cook) soaked mushrooms in water for five minutes, he found that they absorbed only 1/16th of a teaspoon of extra water. Wisdom: Wash ‘em, or at least wipe with a wet paper towel. If you’re going to use them in a salad, dry them quickly to preserve the texture.

So simple it’s crazy. To dice an onion quickly, cut it in half. Then slice each half vertically from the stem to the root, but – and here’s the trick – don’t slice all the way to the root! Leave the root intact, and it holds the onion together while you slice it. Make the horizontal slices, and the layers of the onion form the third dimension of the dice. The last slice cuts the root off.

Obvious.. in retrospect…

Obvious.. in retrospect…PS – despite the well-worn phrase “slices and dices”, no home food processors actually dice things; they slice or shred. If you want a machine that dices, you’d need to spend $2000 on a commercial model.

A bipartisan report states that Libya may be hiding chemicals and germs, and that it has been “less than forthcoming” about that. As sanctions didn’t work, no doubt some will propone military actions.

Another article informs me that my sponge harbors many anti-personnel bacterial colonies as well. And I have not been very forthcoming, even to those using my kitchen.

To stave off any sort of pre-emptive strike, then, let it be known: I come in peace. The germs I possess are part of a delayed-phase maintenance system known as “I wash it when it smells”. I am a patriot. Please don’t bomb me.

Forgot to blog these the first time:

• Swiss (not SwissAir, not for a few years, just http://www.swiss.com, thank you very much) has a ghoulishly cute air-safety video with an animated family including, so far as I can tell, “Boo” from Monsters, Inc. She winks at you in one scene—watch for it!—and in general seems thrilled to check out the emergency-exit brochure and go down the big slide. Whee!

• In the same safety video, they demonstrate the electronic items you shouldn’t be using during takeoff and landing—cell phone, laptop, MP3 player, etc. And they play little sound effects for each one. I don’t know what brand of laptop they use, but it seems to have a squeaky flywheel. I want a flywheel-based laptop.

• Many of the French phrases that we borrowed and turned into cheesy cliches here in the 1970s -“ooh la la!” and “voila!”, for instance-are alive and well in French common usage. Every time someone made me a cappucino, I thought they were going to pull a rabbit out of a lam{e’} hat.

The bad news: The Fostoria Bureau of Concern, a charity that helps the poor via soup kitchens, clothing drives, and the like, was broken into via a back door, and the thieves took a large safe.

The good news: The safe was empty.

The better news: The FBOC had been trying to get rid of the safe for some time, but it was too heavy for them to move. Said Susan Simpkins, the director: “It is really quite comical. It was very heavy, and they did us a favor by taking it.”

NOTE TO ALL THIEVES: I have a towel warmer, two front seats for an Audi, and 19 pallets of bricks that are very poorly guarded.

If you haven’t already discovered Clublife, go read it now. (But not at work. He uses bad words.) It’s the biting, sociospective journal of a twentysomething grad student who ekes out extra income as a bouncer at two of New York’s swankier clubs.

Standing watch over Manhattan’s club scum grants him plenty of material, but Rob can just as easily craft a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses girl story from the dust of a single Altoid.

A brief sample of his cynical style:

There exist misfits in our world. Nonconforming, unfortunate, lonely people who experience a singular compulsion to attach themselves to something with which they can somehow identify because, for whatever reason, other people find them unattractive or distasteful to be around. They find this something, and whether they genuinely like it or not, they’ll cling to this entity for dear life, because the object of their devotional obsession is the only thing they have, or have ever had, to give meaning to their lives.

Mmmm. That’s good reading.

So, as anyone who actually reads this so-called blog knows, I’ve left the suburbs for the lights of the Small City. I’m writing this from the 24th floor of the Devonshire apartments in Boston, which, I have to say, are pretty darn sweet, considering I lucked upon them by, er, luck. Granite counters, stainless appliances, new kitchen and bath fixtures, multiple thermostats, new carpeting, and six, count em, SIX closets.

This was one of only three two-bedroom apartments in the Greater Berklee Area that had laundry and A/C and would allow cats, and the rent for this 1000-square-foot flat is actually comparable to the other two, since utilities are included and there’s no fee. But, instead of being tucked into a mother-in-law apartment, I’ve got a 90-degree view that runs from the North End, continues past the Mercantile Mall and the Long Wharf, takes in the airport and East Boston, and finishes up with a bunch of pretty buildings I can’t yet identify except for the State Street Bank. Some pictures below the cut!

As far as I can tell from the lease, they’re pretty strict on
o holes in the wall", so not only can’t I hang art, but I can’t put up utility hooks, elfa closet systems, etc. And I’m really big on hooks and mounting and such. I’m going to talk to the leasing office about that, but I saw the lease agent in the elevator this morning and she had her hands full with a whole group of visitors from MIT Sloan, so not a good day to ask those sort of questions. I was excited to find a whole collection of magnetic kitchen organizers at Container Store yesterday, but came home to find that, apparently, that backboard is aluminum, not steel. Sigh.

The much bigger downside is that, being an older apartment, it’s not “wired”. We do have high-speed Internet in the building through Comcast or Verizon, but there’s no Ethernet in the walls or anything like that for local-area networks; there’s only one cable jack in the living room. In fact, the bedroom serving as my office has no phone or cable jack at all!

No problem, I thought – I’ll set up a wireless network. Went to CompUSA, bought a router and adapter, came home and set it up. Everything works great. Except, sometimes, when it totally goes off the air. Not just bogs down – disappears. (It does bog down, too.) And this is no ordinary 802.11g setup. No, this is atomic-age super-double-MIMO-with-strawberries, Linksys’s SRX400, which according to the packaging, not only eats interference for breakfast, but reprocesses and repackages it into small hazelnut truffles.

The problem, I suspect, is that I’m sitting here in a building full of wired-to-the-hilt yuppies, and surrounded by financial-district offices. I can see 30 wireless networks from here, and those are just the ones that aren’t running in stealth mode. Add in cordless phones, microwave ovens, etc., and it’s a wonder that I even need to heat up my breakfast.

I’m going to try an 802.11a network, since that’s a less crowded band. But I may have to set up a wired network, and that won’t be pretty. Literally. The way the apartment’s laid out, I’m going to have to string wire straight across the floor (or up and over doorways), and I’ll never be able to shut any of my doors.

Good thing I don’t depend on the Internet much.

I took Amtrak to New York this week for Passover, and spent much of the trip gazing out the window at life on the wrong side of the tracks. On the outskirts of Bridgeport, CT, there is a small club called the Pleasant Moments Cafe, which is what you think it is. They’ve got a sign out front that says:

OVER 50
DANCERS WEEKLY

It took me a few horrified minutes to realize that that was in fact one sentence, and not two.

Like many Americans, I now read my newspapers on the Internet. Six years after leaving D.C., my “home” paper is still the Washington Post; it’s free, it’s national, and while it’s sometimes painfully liberal (even for me!), I know what to expect.

But in order to fit their headlines into the tiny three-column front-page format, they have to do some shortening. A lot of shortening. Four words, maybe five if they’re short. They’re not headlines anymore; sometimes they’re not even coherent. For a day or two, I was convinced that the editors had been replaced by some type of automated thesaurus, so bad was the misuse of pseudo-synonyms.

And sometimes, that gets pretty funny.

Like many Americans, I now read my newspapers on the Internet. Six years after leaving D.C., my “home” paper is still the Washington Post; it’s free, it’s national, and while it’s sometimes painfully liberal (even for me!), I know what to expect.

But in order to fit their headlines into the tiny three-column front-page format, they have to do some shortening. A lot of shortening. Four words, maybe five if they’re short. They’re not headlines anymore; sometimes they’re not even coherent. For a day or two, I was convinced that the editors had been replaced by some type of automated thesaurus, so bad was the misuse of pseudo-synonyms. It gets better, because throughout the day, someone’s constantly tweaking the headlines—whether for fit or meaning, I don’t know, but they don’t always succeed.

And sometimes, that gets pretty funny.

The rules: The “headblips” are real. The subheads are fictional. Unless otherwise cited, they are from today’s Washington Post.

Parents now see significance of Hess truck, chemistry set, My First Boxcutter

Life’s too complex to predict.

There’s controversy in the Rails community about a presentation by Matt Aimonetti called CouchDB: Perform Like A PR0N Star. Some discussions and repercussions:

• Sarah Allen: gender and sex at gogaruco
• Julia Evans: Update on the porn preso
• Audrey Eschright: Dear Fellow Rubyists and So Now What
• Mike Gunderloy: A Painful Decision

The most disturbing comments, to me, are the folks who insist that those offended by the presentation have “no sense of humor”, and that Matt and DHH and whoever are just being edgy. (Conversely, I think we can all agree that when Giles Bowkett is the sensitive voice of reason, we have some soul-searching to do.)

Folks, it’s not about being “edgy”. Ricky Gervais is edgy (by American standards, but probably not UK). Sacha Baron Cohen is edgy; so much that I can’t even stand to watch his show, despite being fully aware how brilliantly edgy he is.

Inappropriate isn’t edgy. Inappropriate is trying to be edgy—and missing. Edgy is brave. Mimicking edgy is lazy, boring and awkward. Saying “fuck” doesn’t make you edgy, and hasn’t since Lenny Bruce got arrested for it. Saying “fuck” on a slide may have been edgy for a millisecond. But as soon as DHH did that, it began the standard swan dive from edgy to meme to cliche.

I think, as programmers, we’d like to believe that there is a Logically Consistent Set Of Rules to define “conventional” and “edgy”, and that we can logically prove that we are edgy-but-appropriate. (See all the “you can see this on TV” comments, and Matt’s original my wife’s a woman and she liked it reaction.) That’s not how it works. Sorry, Aspies.

Here’s the thing: Business presentations aren’t performance art. The social contract is different. “Edgy”, in the artistic sense of “breaking social mores to foster introspection”, is not what you want in a presentation. We’re not attending them to have our gender stereotypes challenged; we’re attending them because we’re technophiles. And, frankly, you’re no artist.

For many of us, we’re at work. It’s about context. And yes, that context includes the country you’re in; behavior that’s appropriate in France is not necessarily so in America, and vice versa (as I discovered when undressing for a massage in Brides Les Bains). Dig:

Early Sarah Bernhardt: Edgy. Titling your mainstream play the “Vagina Monologues”: Edgy. Roseanne Barr farting through the national anthem: Inappropriate. Explaining object deconstructors by calling them “abortionists”: Very inappropriate.

Naming your gay rights group “Queer Nation”: Edgy. Making a mainstream feature film about gay cowboys in love? Very edgy. Naming a movie prop the Orgasmatron: Neither edgy nor inappropriate. Naming your Asterisk distro the Orgasmatron? Inappropriate. Naming your token-ring network the Computer-Oriented Collective Kernel? Very inappropriate.

Doing standup comedy about “black people and white people sure are different”: No longer edgy. Daniel “fried chicken” Tosh: Edgy. Carlos Mencia: Edgy. Illustrating red-black trees with whooping, scalping, feathered red nodes, and gang-sign-flashing, watermelon-eating black nodes? Inappropriate.

Broadway nudity in “Hair”, 1968: Edgy. TV nudity on “NYPD Blue”, 1993: Very edgy. Programmer nudity in a presentation about thin/thick clients, 2009: Inappropriate. (And again, my deep apologies to the entire Louisville branch office for that incident.)

Jew making a movie about a Broadway musical about the Nazis: Edgy. Goy making a heartwarming, slapstick comedy feature about Nazi death camps? Very edgy. Presentation discussing the Final Solution to scaling problems: Inappropriate. Presentation discussing the Final Solution to JDate’s scaling problems: VERY inappropriate.

Giving any of these presentations at conferences? Inappropriate. Filming yourself doing so? Inappropriate, unless you’re Sacha Baron Cohen, in which case: edgy. Jewish, too.

Dig?

If you don’t get it—instinctively—don’t try it. If you’re not Ricky Gervais, you’re David Brent.

I’ve been using Barnes & Noble’s web site to order books for as long as I can remember. Amazon was big, and evil, and patented obvious ideas, and spammed so much they earned the nickname “Spamazon”. B&N was corporate, for sure, but was usually the good guys. I used to use Powell’s, but Barnes and Noble bought them.

Any time I see a book that sounds interesting, I add it to my wish list, and then when I hit $25, I order, and get free shipping. Sounds like a good deal. But yesterday, I added two books to my wish list, and an hour later, I added a CD – and it was the only item in my wish list!

I talked to Melvin in technical support (who, by the way, sounded just like a Melvin ought to sound). He told me that I must not have been signed in to my account, in which case, “Add item to my wish list” does absolutely nothing. Nothing? Well, then, shouldn’t they remove the button when I’m not signed in? Melvin replied, “Well, that would take graphics,” at which point I asked to speak to a supervisor. We got off to a rocky start.

I had a large pine trunk taking up space in my driveway, so I called BFI to pick it up. The driver showed up yesterday…

Hi… I’m here to pick up a car.

A what?

A car. A child’s toy car of some sort.

Well, I do have a large item for you, but it’s not a car…

No, they told me I was to pick up a 4 × 3 × 2 wooden truck.

I want this for my studio:

ane PI-14 Pseudoacoustic Inflector":http://www.rane.com/pdf/pi14dat.pdf

Like many folks, I do my best thinking in the shower. And I’m starting to use the Getting Things Done system, which insists that you write everything down, so you’re using your head for thinking, not remembering.

The natural outcome: I just ordered me a waterproof notebook for three bucks. World, look out.

So there’s these guys, right? And they’re like running from the cops who are chasing them, right? And, like, they jump out of the car and are all “Ha! They’ll never find us now!” because they can hide behind a porch until the cops leave? But we just had a blizzard? So they left footprints?

Boston Globe: Footprints in Snow Led To Arrest

At some point, passion and allergies are indistinguishable.
— Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

You can only blog for so long without getting drawn into political matters, I suppose. So here I go.

Disclosure: I consider myself a liberal; I identify strongly with most liberal causes, although I certainly disagree on a good number of issues. I voted for Kerry, but only as the lesser of two evils; I would have really loved a Dean – McCain fight.

That said, I probably read more conservative blogs than liberal ones, because who wants to live in an echo chamber? And I’ve tried to live an objective life; too many people on both ends of the political spectrum get blinded by allegiances.

Yet, naturally, as a liberal, it’s the tunnel vision of the conservatives that gets my goat, so I’m more likely to rant about that than about the latest crazy thing that Sharpton or even Kos says.

Given that introduction: Hindrocket writes in Friday’s Powerline about the “partisan hatred” going on in the Schiavo case, and opines:

I don’t know how to account for it, unless one concludes that for some liberals, politics is about hate, period.

Well, the signs in the accompanying photo, which say things like “Jeb is like Terri – Brain Dead!”, are hardly the epitome of a dignified political debate, but frankly, I’m more concerned with the death threats made against not only Michael Schiavo, but the judge in the case, and even a Florida legislator who voted against Yet Another Special Law to, er, encourage the judiciary to reconsider.

Yet I don’t consider these threats to be the mark of a “conservative”. I consider them to be the mark of an idiot. In this case, an idiot who probably does vote Republican. But, first and foremost, an idiot, and one with a God complex. Or, in the case of the sign holder, an idiot with poor taste in metaphors and no gift for grammar. Key takeaway, though: Idiot. I wish Hindrocket could see that too.

I recently got back from my first trip ever outside the United States, not counting Club Med or Canada. (I know, it’s embarrassing. We got kinda busy creating that Internet thing, okay?)

Aside from my general dumbfounded “Wow! There’s a whole planet out there!” discovery, here are some things I learned:

• Everybody in Europe smokes. Indoors. Even people who rent non-smoking rooms (in the rare cases they exist) smoke in the rooms.

• Balisto bars are like what Twix should have been. Imagine a Twix made with wheat flour and including raisins and hazelnut. Yum. They’re almost healthy.

• Fondue in France is like fondue in America. But that’s because they have something better: raclette. It’s like fondue with a better UI. Take cheese (usually raclette cheese, of course), melt it on a non-stick tray with a handle, and scrape it off with a wooden scraper onto your potatoes, bread, or what have you. Yum. It IS healthy.

• Brides-les-Bains is a “spa town” with a “thermal bath”. In America, that would mean hot springs and luxurious massages. In France, it means 20-minute lackluster rubdowns on a latex sheet under running water, and a “tepid spring” of 32{*} C – that’s 89{*} F. Oh, and you need to make an appointment in advance to get into the bath. Oh, and you need a doctor’s prescription, because the bath is a medical device.

• The French health ministry requires that you wear footwear at all times near a pool, tepid tub, etc. to prevent catching any waterborne diseases on your bare feet. However, dogs in restaurants are A-OK.

• The Alps at the edge of a city are stunning, no matter how many times you look up at them. And past every breathtaking view is another that’s even better.

• But they’re really tall. Don’t fall.

• Despite its French name, and the “Liqueur Royale de France” moniker, Chambord is difficult to find in France, and our ex-pat tour guide said he hadn’t seen anyone drink it in his four years there. (Then again, he wasn’t very reliable. He sent us to the spa town.)

• Apparently, they don’t have Au Bon Pain, La Madeleine, or “Le Menu” either. They do have Evian.

• The Swiss have really neat gadgets everywhere, like an automatic slot for your hotel card key, so that when you leave the room, the lights go out, and when you come back, they go back on in the same configuration, or cool fiber-optic lighting displays. Their trains are comfortable whisper-silent.

• But they can’t make a “walk” button for their traffic lights that actually lets you know when you’ve pressed it.

• It is possible to pick out an American accent in a crowd, even when you can’t actually hear what the person is saying.

• The French do not send their crack forensic-science detectives to the Gendarmarie at Courchevel 1850. They send polite young men who refuse, on grounds of security, to give you a copy of the police report they have just taken.

• John Williams sings and plays guitar in the bars of various French tourist hotels. Avoid him. He has good intonation, and half-decent guitar chops, but he has only one vocal style: lounge-with-a-slight-original-artist-impersonation. He does not sing songs; he sings the words to songs.

• But if you must see him, don’t miss his sparkling acoustic lounge rendition of Guns ‘n’ Roses’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine”. I only wish I could have recorded it.

• If we assume that Swiss citizens move their legs at the same rate as Americans when walking, and that they have the same leg-to-torso ratio, we can deduce from their pedestrian-signal timing that the average Swiss citizen is 18.3 meters tall.

• Geneva’s Promenade-du-Lac is a beautiful place to walk on a warm afternoon, with its 140-meter fountain and its flower clock. Sadly, it is overrun with overprimped pre-teens on roller skates. Not blades. Four-wheeled skates. And when I say overprimped, I mean “dressed like Madonna on tour in the 80s”.

I don’t usually blog about my personal life, or, frankly, create much original content or opinion at all; this has been more of a site for collecting interesting things that I’ve seen elsewhere, sort of a central “Hey! Did you see? Did you know?” resource to supplant those annoying mass-mailings all your friends do.

But a single snippy interjection from a woman I’ll call “Josie” at the end of my plane ride – interrupting a congenial conversation I was having with a fellow traveler – really threatened to spoil my evening, and I just don’t feel like letting it pass. It’s not that it really bothered me; I shook it off after a few minutes. What really bothered me was my inability at the time to articulate what a rude, obnoxious woman she was; it wasn’t until later that night that the words really came to me. And they’re going to stick in my head until I write them down.

I’d initially vowed to write a venomous, snide entry here, publish the woman’s full name and e-mail address, and thereby make my editorial garrotting the top Google search result for Josie’s name, while simultaneously making her the target of every spambot that comes to call.

I’ve decided I have more class than that. But not more class than this.

Josie: I may, in fact, be too talkative sometimes, because my brain moves faster than my mouth. And I may be too energetic, even hyper, because my head imagines more endeavours than I can enact. I’ll even concede that these flaws and foibles can be annoying. But even at my most irritating moments, the people around me know that I’m kind-hearted, and thoughtful, and sensitive to others. And they respect me for that.

You’re sort of my opposite. You’re no spring chicken, but you still live life loud and with gusto. You’re apparently a blast to go drinking with, quick with the wisecracks, and a ready source of gossip and opinion at the table. Like a rock star on a reunion tour, you come with an entourage and a make-up kit. But your most enthusastic devotee is a middle-aged man who rooms with his mother and worries about blacks in his neighborhood. And some of the others seem to find you entertaining, if not necessarily admirable. As for the rest of our party? Best I can tell, they genuinely dislike you.

One of my cats, now halfway through his little life, still thinks he’s the vicious tiger he never was as a kitten. He’ll grab a toy with his teeth and growl at it. But despite the show of force, the most damage he can do is to push it across the room. He’s harmless. He just doesn’t know it.

You kind of remind me of him.

During an economic boom, you can’t get good service, because unemployment’s low, employers can’t hire enough people, everyone’s overworked to make up the slack, and they’re not really hungry for your business anyway.

During a recession, you can’t get good service, because morale is low, companies are cutting costs, everyone’s overworked from their second job, and they can’t really take on new business, anyway.

So when do you get good service?

Buster: I don’t care about Lucille! She lies.

Life imitates art.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not watching Arrested Development. Just read this.)

Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, is starting his own Florida town—Ave Maria—and implied that he would be banning birth control and porn in the city. Now he’s trying to clarify. “There are a lot of misconceptions,” he told the Associated Press.

Well, sure. That’s what happens when you ban birth control.

Googling for some lyrics, I came across the LiveJournal of qwantz, who has come up with what he calls the best format for music EVER. I have to agree. The formula: Turn any pop song into outline form.

Just one example out of a thread filled with hundreds (credit to vitoverde):

• Types of wine available
  • Depending on your appetite
    • White
    • Red
    • Perhaps some Rose instead
• Preferred seating
  • a table near the street
  • our old familiar place

• Guest list
  • You
  • I

• Seating arrangement
  • Face to face

• Preferred Seating
  • Anytime you want

• Preferred Dining Establishment
  • Our Italian Restaurant

• How are things these days?
  • Okay
  • Good job
  • Good Office
  • New wife
  • New life
  • Family doing fine

• When we lost touch
  • Long ago

• Since then
  • You’ve lost weight

• Things I didn’t know
  • how nice you could look after so much time

• I question your memory regarding:
  • Those days hanging out at the village green

• Your attire
  • Engineer Boots
  • Leather Jacket
  • Tight Blue jeans

• Features worth recalling
  • a jukebox song regarding New Orleans cost $.10
  • the beer was cold
  • the lights were hot
  • The nights were sweet and romantic
  • I was a teenager

• Brenda and Eddie
  • High School relationship
    • Popular steadies
    • Attended prom
      • Named King and Queen
    • Rode around
      • Car top down
      • Radio on
    • Areas where they outstripped others
      • Looks
      • Being a hit at the Parkway Diner
• Things we never knew
  • that we could want more than that out of life
  • Brenda and Eddie’s inability to survive
• Post-High School relationship
  • Purchases
    • an apartment
    • deep pile carpets
    • painting from Sears
    • another painting from Sears
    • Big waterbed
      • Cost 2 years savings
  • Reasons for fighting
    • a shortage of capital (too much on the waterbed?)
  • Things they didn’t count on
    • Apparently noisy tears, sounding like
      • ‘whoa-oa-oa-oa, whoa-oa-oa-oa’
      • ‘yeah rock and roll!’
  • Circa summer 1975
    • Status of their relationship
      • Had it
      • highs complete
      • lows complete
      • show complete
      • Lifetime ban imposed
    • Alternatives
      • Greaser option exhausted
      • Picking up pieces appears likely
    • Public reaction
      • “always knew they’d find a way to get by”
  • My reactions today
    • This exhausts my knowledge on this topic
      • Can’t state any more facts than I already have stated
    • Wish for you to join me in waving farewell to Brenda and Eddie

• Recapping our dining options
  • Available wines
    • Depending now upon your mood
      • Red
      • White
      • I’ve spoken so long, apparently the Rose is no longer available
  • Meeting time
    • At your discretion
  • Location
    • Our Italian Restaurant

I’m a pretty skeptical guy; I don’t believe in homeopathy, astrology, or premonitions, and I read James Randi on a regular basis (though his vitriol impedes his ability to convince the faithful). And while I’ve heard of the birthday paradox before, I never quite extended the analogy the way Thomas Gilovich does in How We Know What Isn’t So.

Here’s the paradox: In a group of 23 people, there’s a 50% chance that two will share the same birthday. And if the group has 60 or more, the chances grow to 99%.

I sent the following e-mail to Thomas Pica, the press contact for Verizon Wireless, on 2/19/05. He did not answer. The first rule of Shopwatch: If you don’t answer, your e-mail address gets published.

—

1. According to your press center, 393,000 customers call Verizon Wireless every day. When they do, depending on what call center they connect to, they may hear this message: “All representatives are currently assisting other customers at this time” (emphasis mine). My question: Have you ever seen such a perfect example of the distinction between “redundant” and “superfluous”?

2. This morning (Saturday), I called Verizon Wireless customer service at 611, and after pressing 0 to speak to a representative, I was told “Press 0 to speak to a representative.” After pressing 0 to speak to a representative, I was told “Press 0 to speak to a representative.” My question: Have you read Kafka’s “The Prisoner”?

—

UPDATE: There is no Kafka story called “The Prisoner”. There is “In the Penal Colony”, but it was “The Trial” I was thinking of.

The Globe’s Sam Allis sums up the odd New England nether-winter season":http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/02/27/so_near_but_yet_so_far_in_the_midst_of_winters_grasp_the_light_is_a_tease/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+—City%2FRegionNews

We live in the Moon of the Brown Snow. What’s on the ground is a dark granulate the color and karma of petroleum byproducts. What lies below it is unspeakable. When the snow melts, as it does chaotically, the grass below rises, bald and raw, the mud particularly mean. Potholes multiply like ants at a picnic and the sidewalks bruise our bones. Boston is plumb winter ugly and we are, too.

Every few weeks, I see a truck labelled “Graffiti Busters” at City Hall next to the Government Center T stop. This is a volunteer service, run by the city, that tries to eliminate this blight on our cityscape, this self-adulating, cultish vandalism put there by thugs who fancy themselves artists.

But it’s not working. City Hall is still there.

The Indian guy from the Village People (who is, in fact, part Lakota) donated his gold “YMCA” record to the National Museum of the American Indian.

And the museum happily and ceremoniously accepted it (a Lakota prayer was sung first, then everyone danced to “Y.M.C.A.”), on the precept that sooner or later they might need such an artifact of a bygone era, perhaps to flesh out a future exhibit on the folkloric value of disco, and native cultural responses to it. (No, you shut up. It could happen. Why not? There are only so many ceramic pots, war bonnets and kachina dolls that people can stand to look at, and so when the day comes that someone asks, Hey, what about the Indian dude from the Village People? the Smithsonian, as ever, will be ready.)

Celebrity Artifact (washingtonpost.com)

Proverb 4a: Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, is the definition of insanity.

Proverb 4b: You can’t cross the same river twice.

These are in direct conflict. If two situations are never the same, how can you know if you’re really “doing the same thing”? Time is one of the variables, and it moves steadily forward. If you repeat an action two seconds later, it’s not the same action.

(Don’t believe me? Compare these two timelines.

a.

12:00:00 “Heads up!”
12:00:02 ::toss keys::

b.

12:00:00 ::toss keys::
12:00:02 “Heads up!”

Big difference.)

We try things randomly, and through operant conditioning, we learn which ones work and which ones don’t. And then we stop trying the ones that don’t. But what didn’t work last year might work today.

There’s no easy way around that. If we try every possibility every time, we’ll never get anything done. But life’s too complex to predict, so neither can we know in advance which ones will work.

Best we can do: TATFT. Know why something worked before. Figure out how those rules can be generalized. Use thought experiments to devise lightweight tests or heuristics that will help you know when the rules have changed.

Example:

The best way to choose a new alarm clock is to buy three, try them, and return the worst two. Why? Because I live across the street from Best Buy, so the cost¹ of a return trip is lower than the cost of doing consumer research. If I move somewhere else, the rules change.

¹ Not just the financial cost. Time, effort, annoyance, distraction, they all count.

Someone posted a flyer outside my building this morning:

“End the war. Google Ron Paul.”

So I did. Didn’t work.