lakewood ave, 1.5
We are snowed in yet again. There’s about 4″ down on the ground right now, and the sky is that peculiar reddish-gray which accompanies snow in the city. The trees outside the window are draped with blankets, my neighbor is shoveling our walk and the street is free from traffic—the only sounds come from people quietly calling out to each other as they walk to and from the store. For a brief moment in time, the city is a peaceful place to be.
Tonight Jen and I are braving the snow and people to begin Round 1 of Us vs. Christmas. We are journeying to the Columbia Mall to seek out interesting, insightful gifts for our loved ones.
Got any suggestions?
Looks like the roads are pretty clear out there, which is a Good Thing. We also got word today that one of our freelance gigs is swinging into gear—good news.
Outside the Port Discovery museum downtown, they have an exhibit featuring a large balloon tethered to a winch. During the summertime, I would drive to and from work watching the balloon rise and fall in the sunshine, filled, no doubt, with happy children enjoying a bird’s eye view of the city. Today on my way to work, by chance I pulled up behind my friend Todd, who pointed out a very limp and deflated balloon covered in snow, huddled over the cold ground outside the museum grounds.
urban paralysis (a social experiment), 12.01
Indeed, I bought the milk, the bread, and the coffee, and lo, the heavens did unload. And yea, verily, we did sit and listen to the Prophets proclaim doom.
The salt truck, representing the taxes I pay to the city, rolled through at 6:20, after the sun went down and the temperature dropped below 20 degrees. Thanks guys.
backyard, 12.01
The Thanksgiving feasting is over; the fridge is stuffed with Tupperware and bursting at the seams. All was successful with the meal, and the Meeting Of The Two Families went off without a hitch, thankfully. Everybody had a great time together and we dined in Little Italy. (Rather fitting, given the motif, eh?)
We were also lent the first season of the Sopranos on DVD the day before Thanksgiving, and spent a good portion of the holiday loosening our belts and travelling to North Jersey to peek in on the lives of Tony and his family. I realize I’m about four years behind the curve here, but I have to say this is a fantastic show. Jen and I are totally hooked.
I finally got a sheet of UV glass cut for three gifts my house presented me when I began demolishing the basement: a collection of Tijuana bibles fell from the ceiling over the old bathroom as I tore the tongue and groove down. (Additionally, I was presented with a series of letters to Santa and a series of longshoreman’s pay stubs over the old kitchen sink, a very old and used tampon in the bathroom, and an envelope containing $50 in bills circa 1969 up front in the old closet.) In doing some research on the eight-pagers, I found a link to a book on the subject as well as some other sites. It’s nice to have them framed, finally.
I got my CD-burner in the mail today via FedEx, and so far I’ve made a backup of my freelance directory; I’m in the middle of burning all the stuff off my old internal hard drive so I can use it for music storage. It’s a bus-powered FireWire 8x8x24, it’s small, and it does a pretty good job. I’m happy.
They got the asshole responsible for the sniper attacks last night; turns out he was sleeping in his car in a gas station around the corner from where Jen works. (That was where he was ticketed by the cops on October 8.) Thank god that area didn’t fit his MO, and that Jen doesn’t loiter long outside in that area.
It’s another dreary, wet day in Baltimore. It’s also freezing as hell outside- there’s some kind of front in over us right now that is bringing frigid air all the way from the steppes of Russia; I woke up this morning with two cats glued to my body, drowsy from the heat of the wool blanket.
I suppose I should be thankful though, because along with my CD-burner (classified as a business expense) I’ve also made a long-awaited upgrade to my kitchen; I threw out the 1980’s era microwave (lined with solid steel, finished in that lovely fake wood vinyl stuff they pasted on all appliances during the Reagan era) which had been, over time, cooking my reproductive organs from across the room. I threw it in the back of the Scout and heaved it into the Dumpster behind our office building, on top of a pile of old office chair boxes, never to smoke up my kitchen again. I then went and picked out a lovely new white microwave from the Sam’s Club.
backyard progress, lakewood avenue, 10.24
For the last few days, I’ve been setting up an outdoor work area in the backyard while I build the stairs. This includes plugging in the 13-year-old black-and-white TV my parents bought me when I first came to college and tuning in to The West Wing while I run the circular saw. (My neighbors love me.) In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been this idiotic nut running around shooting random people in the southern DC suburbs, which is far enough away that I’m not afraid to visit the Home Depot after work every day, but close enough that every dumbass local newscaster is having a brain hemorrhage attempting to channel Dan Rather.
Baltimore is a quiet, relatively peaceful blue-collar city where housing is cheap and the commute isn’t too bad. So we get the third-rate newscasters, who attempt to put a serious spin on the spiraling murder rate between cheerful program shills for “Crossing Jordan”.
Which is why I wince when the talking heads come on and fill up a half an hour of my time with in-studio and remote broadcasts dissecting what little information the PG County sheriff is releasing, injecting the most banal pop-psychology drivel imaginable into news items the size of walnut shells. Imagine Anna Nicole Smith giving a stream-of-consciousness dissertation on the socio-economic impact of the Gulf War and you understand my pain.
So it was with interest that I read the Baltimore City Paper’s interview with Michael Moore, who coined the phrase “Sniper Porn”:
“You have to ask yourself…after the first 15 minutes of sniper coverage on the 6 o’clock news, ‘Am I learning anything here? Does this help me or my family? And if not, why I am still watching it?’ Because at a certain point it becomes pornography—sniper porn.”
I found a really good website, run by the EFF and a consortium of law schools: chillingeffects.org. Very good information about interent copyright law. Metafilter had this interesting link to some demographic information based on census data and purchase records: You are Where You Live. For the record, I don’t use call answering, I hate Face The Nation, and I certainly do not have a subscription to Elle.
change of the seasons, lakewood ave, 10.11
I thought I had lost my birth certificate this Monday. For work, we’re getting passports in case of travel, and I had been a good Boy Scout and gathered my birth certificate, carefully filed away in the archives at home, as well as passport photos and the application. I put them in a white manila envelope and tucked them away at work until we got a caravan of people together to go to the post office.
Fast forward to this monday, when we got a group of people ready to go. I can’t find my envelope anywhere; it’s not in the hastily organized shelf that acts as my desk (we work at folding banquet tables here- no desks to be seen) or in my laptop bag, or my sketchbook. I’m screwed.
Fast forward to last night. I open my file cabinet to organize my invoices, and what is sitting in the invoice folder? the envelope with my passport info. I had tucked it into my laptop bag for safekeeping and it got stuck in the invoices folder. Too bad I already put that $30 check in the mail to the Massachussetts clerk’s office to get another certified copy…
…It’s amazing how much darker the photo below is on my PC’s CRT than it is on my Powerbook.
Todd sent me a link today where I can see just how many crimes were committed within a variable distance from my house. There’s also a website devoted to my little corner of the world; now I can pull up important information like recycling dates.
Apparently there’s some crazed asshole running around with a sniper rifle shooting random people in parking lots. What would make somebody do this? I just can’t figure it out. My theory: another ex-Marine with an axe to grind.
Now that I’m 31 years old, I look back on what I sneered at as a punk 17-year-old and marvel at the power of early R.E.M. Boy, was I stupid.
Huh. Somehow, Amazon must have gotten some data on me from somewhere. Fully 60% of my Gold Box offers (6 out of 10) were in the ‘Tools and Hardware” category. Does anybody know how they tailor their offerings in that category? I would be the first to suggest that it’s based on past purchases, but I’ve never bought tools or hardware from Amazon before (that’s what Home Depot is for, baby.)
The Annual Lakewood Ave. Halloween Window Display was erected yesterday and lit up last night; I will be in scuba class tonight but attempt to take pictures for posterity’s sake tomorrow night for your enlightenment.
Here’s an old link that I dug up from my dot-boom days: Pornolize. There’s nothing funnier, after wading through days of re-reading and formatting the same new-economy doublespeak, than filtering it all through the pornolizer. It made all that marketing talk of synergistic cross-platform vertical tier-to tier value-chain plays so much more interesting.
The weather has definitely turned. I opened up all the windows and turned off the CAC last night. Woodsmoke drifted in through the windows and the cats were glued to the screens, sniffing the air. This morning the weatherman forecasted 70 degree weather for the whole week.
I got my official copy of Emperor today, courtesy of Sierra. Nice to have a game I can put up on my shelf and claim some ownership of.
I got an email inviting me to submit an application to meet and marry Beautiful Women of the Phillippines this afternoon. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to take advantage of this outstanding opportunity. (Not that I am dissing the Beautiful Women of the Phillippines, it’s just that I’m already involved. Sorry, Beautiful Women.)
korean grocery, 9.22
I’m back in the admittedly flat and boring OS9 right now, for reasons I can’t quite explain to myself. Maybe it’s the comfort of the application menu in the upper right corner, where I can hide any window I want immediately. Maybe it’s the speed of the interface—I’m on a 400Mhz G3, and I notice a slight lag while it figures out what to do. Maybe it’s the way OSX writes three files for every one it works on (iPhoto comes to mind here).
Maybe I’m just getting old; I don’t know. I’ve made almost a ten-year investment in the interface I use every day, and it’s not going to be easy to switch.
Jen and I went to the Korean grocery store this weekend and bought an entire meal’s worth of vegetables, about a pound of sliced rib-eye steak, and assorted other items, and walked out $13 lighter. There is a certain sense of culture shock walking through that store—from the mingled conversations in several different languages to the mind-boggling assortment of exotic fruit, vegetables, and spices, to the old-world butcher and fish market in back—you feel as if you might be strolling through a market in Seoul or even Tokyo.
What happens when you spend all the money you make on opening new stores so that you can make even more money to open more stores? You start knocking down the old ones to make newer ones. Suggestion: Make decent food, train your employees to treat customers better, pay them more than minimum wage, and rebuild the expectations of your client base.
Nate sent this thought along in response to an email I sent about a cartoon that has some people upset:
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war to whip the citizenry into a political fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.
Julius Caesar, 101 – 44 BC