Currently at the Jonathan LeVine gallery, Invader's exhibition Top 10:

.

Also, a logarathmic spiral and the golden spiral. And many more.

The final instalment of the intrepid Bee-Jin's second adventure, "Motel Art Improvement Service" appeared today. I enjoyed the occasional appearance of this comic, which began over four years ago, and read it compulsively. I already await her next appearance ... and wonder whether this adventure will join "Shutterbug Follies" in hardcover.

The Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake is held annually near Gloucester, England. I learned about this through boston punto com's The Big Picture.

Here's some viral marketing for you: I saw this posted on a blog somewhere — where I cannot recall! — and looked at Madsen's site. The Utah-based cargobike builder are running a promotion in which anyone with a blog can win one of their bicycles. Splendid! I want a cargo bicycle: I can haul our groceries, the baby, and a whole lotta everything.

Yes. A whole lotta everything.

What do you call those noisy birds that fly over the ocean? Sea gulls. And the noisy birds that fly over the Rockaways?

Today I rode through Times Square.

vs.

The difference is not palpable, surprisingly: the sight of people lazing in deck chairs, of throngs passing through each intersection, all still blends with the oversized open-top tour buses and the yellow taxicabs. Everything is in its right place.

This GG Allin "throbblehead" action figure is pretty remarkable.

GG Allin's last show was at the Space 2B, which is somewhere under the rubble in this photograph. — which survives in this AOL Cityguide listing.

Aram steered me to Derek Erdman, repository of all the cool. Here's a shot of GG Allin's grave site.

(Audio of The Fall playing the Black Monk Theme)

A few months ago I saw Lucia Palacios's and Dietmar Post's bittersweet movie about the brief rise and fall of The Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback. It spun the tale of how the Monks played together while in Germany, and how their lives ravelled upon return to the States. I had first heard their music as noisily covered by The Fall on Extricate, and then on the revelatory american recordings re-issue in the '90s. Although I had heard that the Monks were GIs on a lark, I did not know the depths to which their image as a nihilist, surreal rock'n'roll combo depended on their Continental impressarios.

One of my fave-rave summer tunes from '08 reappears. Be sure to use the Track and Pan buttons for extra nuttiness.

This corner caught my eye for the faded advertisement on the façade:

The building itself has landmark status, but may be demolished due to its decrepit state.

I discovered the word equivoque through deepleap.org, my favourite online thing-to-do. Meaning a pun or a double entedre, it comes through the French équivoque, from Late Latin aequivocus, ambiguous.

I built up this bicycle in autumn of 2002, and it went through a period of light use until the theft of the belovèd Gold Dutchess in the spring of 2005. Since moving last year, it has been the only bicycle I ride.

More photos of this Kogswell in various configurations; the memory of riding the Kogswell on the last Krispy Kreme Klassic.

Tarkovsky's Mirror Set to Arvo Pärt's Mirror in the Mirror :

vs.

The first, from the cafeteria at work; the latter, from the chic restaurant down the fashionable street. Neither matches Roscoe's House of Chicken and W., a luminary institution just down the freeway.

St.-Marks-In-The-Bowery, at the intersection of 10th and Stuyvesant Streets and 2nd Avenue, often has something happening in front of it.

A group of young women, all wearing similar white blouses, medium-length black skirts, and bright safety orange face masks, stood in the square outside the church, calmly marching in place. As we watched, a similarly-attired woman opened the box and walked in; the man in front of me helpfully said that this was her work. Her dance? Her performance? Her political statement? He did not know, but expressed admiration and fascination.

“I would ask people to actually go see a donkey basketball game before they jump on the bandwagon of trying to put it down."

The truth, my friends, is stranger than any fiction. Dwarf-tossing, quadriplegic rugby, midget-lifting, cock-fights — donkey basketball?

The Maysles Institute in Harlem moved a few months ago; I have not yet visited it.

"Folks, brace yourselves; hold on to something. Here's Sonic Youth. Yeah!"

vs

and, although I cannot embed the video for Do You Believe in Rapture?, it gets me all worked up every time I watch it.

This next song is called, I'm sorry, I forgot to tune my guitar before we went on-stage:

In a finding that may open new approaches to treating heart disease, Swedish scientists have succeeded in measuring a highly controversial property of the human heart — the rate at which its muscle cells are renewed during a person’s lifetime.

From Latin vates, vatic means "prophetic". Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day comment notes: "Some people say only thin lines separate poetry, prophecy, and madness. We don't know if that's generally true, but it is in the case of "vatic." The adjective derives directly from the Latin word "vates," meaning "seer" or "prophet." But that Latin root is in turn distantly related to an Old English word for "poetry," an Old High German word for "madness," and an Old Irish word for "seer" or "poet." "

787 Cliparts by Oliver Laric.

Reading an article on beetle armament and sexual selection, I found ordure, a cognate with Latin. It comes to contemporary English from the Middle English, from Anglo-French, from ord dirty, foul, from Latin horridus horrid. The article also contains this colourful, editorial remark:

People have pathetically puny teeth and claws compared with the armaments of other dominant species. This is a sign not of pacific intent but of the fact that they manufacture their weapons. The manufactured weapons, just like biological ones, have assumed a display function — think of the fearsome appearance of samurai helmets or armored knights, or the menacing tanks and rockets that paraded through Red Square in Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union.

... which, upon re-reading, calls to mind a Gary Larson cartoon -- not any one in particular, but the notion of one.

Muto is an animated film with public walls for cels, drawn and photographed by Bolognese graffiti artist Blu.

Provides a splendid opportunity for picking off inane cyclists. I am somewhat embarrassed that Robert Sullivan, whose journalism I enjoyed in Rats, his account of New York City's most popular rodent (the bird is the most popular finger), endorses such pablum. I do not think that the Thoreau I know would have encouraged use of a push-cycle on a roadway shared with the fair sex.

The folksy fiddle music adds a ludicrous air to the proceedings.

This man tells a tale of his humble heroics:

“I was waiting for the C to go downtown to a reading,” he said from his office on West 30th Street, where he works as a proofreader. “I’m an actor — shocker.”

He said most everyone seems to be an aspiring actor nowadays, but in this case, it is a critical point to the story: Mr. Lindsey currently appears in an Off-Broadway show called “Kasper Hauser,” in a role that requires him to repeatedly lift a character who cannot walk.

[ ... dramatic rescue as train approaches ... ]

Then I sort of freaked out, and I was nervous and shaky. These five women opened their purses and gave me Handi-Wipes. I was covered in blood and dirt from the subway tracks. One woman was a nurse, and said, ‘Don’t have caffeine or cigarettes for an hour and a half,’ because of the adrenaline in my heart.”

James Street is also known as "Ancient Order of the Hibernians Way". It meets Madison Street (not Madison Ave.!) in a down-at-the-heels stretch of Manhattan just aft of the Brooklyn Bridge.

A bicycle built for two thousand.

One of my favourite shorts, Time Piece received an Academy Award nomination in 1965. The staccato paces combines with the visual and aural effects for an amusing and thoughtful film. I was glad to find this online, finally; the DVD copy I have no longer plays reliably.

Update: I changed both Lolita from 'Erotica' and 'Pride and Prejudice' from 'Chick Lit' to Classics. You Literature majors all lack any sense of humor. was the precursor to Virgil Griffith's Music That Makes You Dumb. I am off to listen to The Counting Crows.

but NO.

Today, the City Room blog of The New York Times offers a pop quiz:

... what, exactly, is a flat bush? “The English word Flatbush is likely a corruption of the Dutch ‘vlackebos,’ meaning ‘wooded plain.’”

The accompanying picture is an old postcard of the Rialto Theater on Flatbush Avenue. There are dozens of entries like that. That got us to thinking about street names all around the city, which seemed to be a good excuse for a quiz.

So here it is: 20 unidentified images of people, places and things; most accompanied by a hint or two. Tell us which streets bear their names. The reference may be direct or a bit oblique. The streets are in every borough of New York City."

This by way of announcing Brooklyn Revealed, a site about the streets of Brooklyn.

Or, The Mother of All Funk Chords (and then some).

I want to see this picture, published Friday, November 9, 1990:

Photo: A sculpture made from scrap materials now occupies the corner of Avenue B and Second Street in Manhattan. "If you live in the country, you use wood if you're a sculptor, but we live in the city sowe use the materials around us," said Ruben Garcia, who describes himself as curator of the open-air gallery that is home to "Space 2B Gas Station," which was crafted by Johnny Swing and Linus Coraggio. (Jack Manning/The New York Times)

which predates this photograph.

... oddly reminiscent of the chalk body outlines from homicides — only more blob-shaped.

This morning I saw this sign. More.

Greg Kot reports on the shrinking indie-rock giant Touch & Go. Here's a little Shellac to ease the pain:

and some more:

Just as Death Cab for Cutie sang, so Brooklyn fills in Coney Island:

We might be looking at vacant lots for a long time to come,” said Charles Denson, executive director of the Coney Island History Project. “Everybody’s broke. These massive plans, these visions, don’t usually work. But I hope for the best.”

They sang: "I can hear the Atlantic echo back roller coaster screams from summers past.
And everything was closed at Coney Island, and I could not help from smiling.
Brooklyn will fill in the beach eventually and everyone will go except me." The developers are singing the same song, and I will fondly remember the first time, every time, and the last time I visited Coney Island.

friggatriskaidekaphobia describes an irrational fear of Friday the Thirteenth. Also paraskavedekatriaphobia. The Phobia List has more.

pentimento describes the underlying image in a painting, often indicating that the painter changed part of the composition. Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait is a famous example.

The word comes to English directly from the Italian term for "correction", which itself comes from the Latin verb pēnitēre, to repent. This is telling! It brings to mind penitenziagite, famously used in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The heretical monk Salvatore uses this vivid term as a rallying cry. Lillian Hellman chose "Pentimiento" as the title for her collection of autobiographical essays.

The Utah Avalanche Center's online dictionary provides this definition for graupel:

Graupel is that Styrofoam ball type of snow that stings your face when it falls from the sky. It forms from strong convective activity within a storm (upward vertical motion) caused by the passage of a cold front or springtime convective showers. The static buildup from all these falling graupel pellets sometimes cause lightning as well.

Graupel may come from German, but I do not know whence.

It was the fenugreek! The New York Times's City Desk has the update, including the steps taken by the city's crack detectives:

On Thursday, the city announced that the mystery had been solved. The source of the odor was a plant in North Bergen, N.J., which processes seeds of the herb fenugreek to produce fragrances.

“Let me say at the top that the smell that everybody reported and has been reporting for a long time, from back, one of the earliest times was four or five years ago, has never been a health hazard,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said. “In this day and age, we must take every possible threat to our safety seriously no matter how innocuous it might be.”

He added, “It wasn’t exactly akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, but a smell over a very large area.”

The city even revised its protocols to respond to such “maple syrup events” to improve response times; it analyzed winds, tides and atmospheric conditions.

The Equal Area Series, The Broken Kilometer, and The Earth Room.

(01-26) 21:17 PST San Francisco -- A pedestrian was struck and killed in a crosswalk at the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Santiago St. in San Francisco tonight.

The woman was walking westbound across Sunset when a man driving a Toyota Corolla south on Sunset struck her at about 6:15 p.m. The woman was taken to San Francisco General Hospital where she died. Her name was withheld, pending notification of her family.

The driver had no stoplight or stop sign and stopped after hitting the pedestrian, and police said the incident was just a tragic accident.

"It doesn't look like he was speeding or under the influence or anything like that," said Sgt. Renee Pagano. "There's no crime here at all."

21950. (a) The driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within any marked crosswalk or within any unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, except as otherwise provided in this chapter. (b) The provisions of this section shall not relieve a pedestrian from the duty of using due care for his or her safety. No pedestrian shall suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard. No pedestrian shall unnecessarily stop or delay traffic while in a marked or unmarked crosswalk. (c) The provisions of subdivision (b) shall not relieve a driver of a vehicle from the duty of exercising due care for the safety of any pedestrian within any marked crosswalk or within any unmarked crosswalk at an intersection.

One could ask WalkSF whether there's no crime in failing to stop at a marked intersection, striking a pedestrian, and killing that person, but at this point any reasonable person would realise the exercise is rhetorical. The intersection of Sunset and Santiago has clearly-marked crosswalks, with lights to illuminate.

I sailed around the world in these photographs.

How to use a mobile telephone* vs. How not to use the cellular telephone.
* well, Facebook. But the 'phone figures into the analogy.

The first describes use of Facebook as inevitable; the second describes the use of a mobile telephone as the act of an enslaved man.

What's the social utility to Facebook—why should you join? Like with e-mail and cell phones, there are many, and as you begin to use it, you'll notice more and different situations in which it proves helpful. In general, Facebook is a lubricant of social connections. With so many people on it, it's now the best, fastest place online to find and connect with a specific person—think of it as a worldwide directory, or a Wikipedia of people. As a result, people now expect to find you on Facebook—whether they're contacting you for a job or scouting you out for a genius grant.

Ken Vandermark is not on Facebook. QED.

(but he is on twitter)

I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the roots of words, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson.

Labyrinths is also available online, in English, in a search-able edition. The story Borges and I begins on page 298:

Labrynth, Collection of Short Stories Louis Borges

Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama is your new bicycle.

At Ninth Avenue, my iPhone crashed; I did not realise it, as I was enraptured by the Albert Ayler improvisational piece playing at the moment. I did notice the crash, as the on-screen photograph (above) still showed; and because the Ayler composition was looping, imperceptibly, in just the right way. The blurting saxophone suited the piece, but after a half-minute I figured out that the phone was playing whatever had been in its buffer at the time of the crash, repeatedly. Such beauty in decay: as the phone crashed, it continued playing; as the mouse died, it enlivened a block of pavement with colour.

This photograph has made me laugh aloud, roll on the floor laughing, and blow milk out my nose.

Now imagine saying Blagojevich with a nasal, Jerry Lewis voice, and be sure you are not drinking milk when you think this. Thanks, Aram, for pointing out this photograph and bringing untold chuckles into this apartment.

See my photographs of Coney Island; the one above comes from curbed.com.

At the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones St., I saw this billboard:

and two thoughts occurred to me in the chill morning air: "Bad Brains!!!"; and "Wait: haven't I seen their logo somewhere else recently?"

Yes: shilling for our President-elect. Despite these generally positive associations (comfortable skater shoes, progressive American politics), I figured that the Bad Brains publicity machine has been working in overdrive lately, and suddenly I missed The Baffler. That magazine put on paper the words in my mind, and then some, and all quite witty.

The Great British Sandwich:

Currently taller than a phonebox, shorter than a Routemaster, this promises to become the world's tallest sandwich. I added a layer.

The Photographic Dictionary project entry for growth, nervous, queue.

compare garbage and trash.

courtesy the youtube.

An abnormal sound heard in auscultation, or an unusual cardiac sound, or, better yet, as a verb: to spread news; a rumour; a din.

I like street-cleaning equipment, and photos of ditto.

A fladry [line] consists of rope with strips of fabric, often red, to deter wolve. Fladry lines have been used for several centuries.

According to Polish Scientific Publishers (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, SA), fladry is the plural of the German flader or flattern, "to flutter." Fladry is probably not related to the Polish flądry, the plural of flądra, which signifies either "a flatfish" or "a slattern" (from the 2002 Oxford PWN Polish English Dictionary, which is not available online, but see this paper on machine translation [pdf]).

In English fladry tends to be used in the plural only, meaning you can have “some fladry,” very rarely “a fladry,” and never “some fladries.” The term has a cognate in French.

Researchers from the University of Calgary discovered that wolves will not cross this type of barrier for up to 60 days when it encloses livestock. In addition, it has recently been adapted to include an electric current, called Turbo fladry, which may provide a longer period of protection.

A most excellent series of ink drawings appears online, each depicting a certain fear (of bears, of beards) or a child in a certain fiendish scene: "Sadie's Hades", for example.

The New York Times rarely comes close to the tenor and topic of a Paul Auster story, but consider this:

The 1975 Alfetta was hardly pristine. Panels had been replaced, its body was pierced by splotches of rust, and its maroon coat was faded by the sun. But it was still an Italian sports car, designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, and it still made people stop. Mr. Banescu, who often wore a beret, was shy but friendly.

Sometime in early May, the Alfa stopped moving. Neighbors noticed, but then perhaps forgot: In Brooklyn, it was the summer of the parking spot, when the city announced that it was suspending the alternate-side parking rules in various neighborhoods as it replaced street-cleaning signs. Mr. Banescu’s car became one of dozens, maybe hundreds, of cars allowed to sit in the same space for months this summer.

The New York Times has a question: to wit, should I stay or should I go? The question, prompted by the cross-walk signs that simultaneously show the Walk and Don't Walk icons,has an answer: "Call 311" (that's 212-NEW YORK, or 212-639-9675).

My photograph, above, came from a cameraphone and does not adequately show either how clearly the two icons are simultaneously illuminated, nor how prevalent these malfunctions are.

Amy Thomas, writing in The New York Times, has an idea after mine own heart: cycle from chocolatier to chocolatier, covering ground and sampling chocolates.

My solution: devote one full day to chocolate boutiques, and do it in style. So, on my last visit to Paris, I took to the city’s Vélib’ bike system and mastered a two-wheeled circuit of eight of the chocolatiers that had the best reputations and most glowing reviews in city guidebooks and online message boards. It was exhilarating and exhausting, not to mention decadent. It was a chocoholic’s dream ride.

The Vélib’s — industrial-looking road bikes that are already icons of Parisian-chic just a year and a half after the city initiated the program — made the moveable feast more fun. Progressing from pralines to pavés, I spun by the Eiffel Tower, zipped across the Seine and careened through the spindly streets of St.-Germain-des-Prés alongside other bikers: Parisians in summer dresses and business suits, their front baskets toting briefcases, baguettes and sometimes even Jack Russell terriers.

Practically speaking, the bikes were all but essential. How else could I cover five arrondissements in as many hours, while simultaneously countering a day of debaucherous extremes?

You have broken faith with the eight million gods of Shinto ... The footless dead will come to you when the grasses sleep and bitch in your ear.

Codex Sinaiticus. Although the screen controls tend towards inaccurate, seeing the codex itself in such clear reproduction is a joy. The lettering is beautiful and clear, and the accompanying modern text rendering useful for navigation. Now if only I could find a reasonable online edition of the Hebrew text .... Aha: looking through Google for the Hebrew phrase turned up a few sites with multi-lingual texts (and some imaginative renderings) of Ecclesiastes.
יֵשׁ דָּבָר שֶׁיֹּאמַר רְאֵה-זֶה, חָדָשׁ הוּא: כְּבָר הָיָה לְעֹלָמִים, אֲשֶׁר הָיָה מִלְּפָנֵנוּ.

[The Max Planck Institute] wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.

Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but make sure you get the meaning of the characters straight before jumping right in.
... The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to "the northern mainland" seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor.

To be sure, the Romans of yore had courtesans; I expect classical Chinese society ditto.

Different revolution, different cube, still fascinating. Also: JP Brown's Serious LEGO, All Too Flat's Astor Place Rubik's Cube.

In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.

For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.

And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped scientists understand the biology of learning, memory and physical dexterity, as well as the fragile nature of human identity.

A few months ago, the City Editor of The New York Times published comments on how the paper chooses subjects for its obituaries. And Bruce Weber wrote about writing obituaries.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Christoph Niemann is a genius. From the adventure of The Boys and The Subway to the story of coffee, his illustrations and dry prose make me laugh, make me think.

Some photographs of Astroland, being dismantled and packed in to shipping containers.

The New York Times sounds the death knell for the French café: In 1960, France had 200,000 cafes, said Bernard Quartier, president of the National Federation of Cafes, Brasseries and Discotheques. Now it has fewer than 41,500, with an average of two closing every day.

In Paris, Bernard Picolet, 60, is the owner of Aux Amis du Beaujolais, which his family started in 1921 on Rue de Berri. “The way of life has changed,” he said. “The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons,” the British and the Americans.

“They eat less and spend less time at it,” Mr. Picolet said.

People grab a sandwich at lunchtime and eat as they walk or sit at their desks. They stand in line to buy prepackaged espresso sachets, to drink coffee at home ....

* that's a waiter joke

Witchi Tai To.

WITCHI-TIE-TO, GIMEE RAH
WHOA RAH NEEKO, WHOA RAH NEEKO
HEY NEY, HEY NEY, NO WAY

WITCHI-TIE-TO, GIMEE RAH
WHOA RAH NEEKO, WHOA RAH NEEKO
HEY NEY, HEY NEY, NO WAY

Richard Hayes has a good piece on the reliability and accuracy of mechanical voting machines.

The New York Times" has some coverage of Rachel Trachtenburg's testimony.

I used to entertain the notion of retiring to the middle-south of Portugal, not quite as far to the Mediterranean end as The Algarve, and settling in to a quiet life of cork farming. The farm would have a few chickens, for the delicious eggs of a morning, and from time to time I would harvest the cork.

Now I have a new retirement plan: away to the rocky north coast of Scotland, my ancestral home, where I will set up a punk-rock bed-and-breakfast, with a nice bit o' land around it. Call it the Inn on the Kilt Acre; my uncle can build a stone fence. He is a renowned builder in those parts.

Ayveq died yesterday (this last story uses a photograph of mine as the illustration).

Ayveq the Walrus

Photographs of Ayveq, which, curiously, I have never uploaded to flickr.

Harry J. Aleo, the colorful and plain-spoken horse-racer, real-estate dealer, and baseball player (baseball player!), died over the weekend. Although I knew him from the signs in his 24th–Street storefront, he had led, by all accounts, a rich and sincere life.

I will never recover from that first shock of seeing a Reagan poster in Noe Valley.

One of the aspects of New York City's streets that has me shaking my head: the prevalence of half-stolen bicycles. Almost every block has a utility pole or parking meter with a scavenged bicycle stuck to it; I thought that, should I win sacks full of money by playing the lottery (which I don't), I would cycle around town fixing these bicycles and redistributing them. This idea now strikes me as naïve and optimistic: a more constructive approach would be to repair everyone's bicycle, for free, with priority to people who use the bicycle for everyday work (deliveries, commuting, et c.). Roadies and recreational riders probably don't want me wrenching on their bicycles, anyhow (me, tired after fixing on bikes).

I began taking photographs of these, which I call Unhappy Bicycles. See the slideshow of this neglected and picked-apart bicycles of Manhattan.

Hatred for stroller-pushing latte-sipping line-cutting moms in Brooklyn bike shops; hatred for the disappearing, long-forgotten past; and hatred for things in general, dammit. Warning: Some links more bilious than others.

Sometimes I find that a word in a completely ordinary context leaps away from the page and stands out. When reading Alberto Manguel's editorial piece on libraries — on his personal libraries — in The New York Times, prurient leaped out at me. From Sanskrit through Latin, it denotes something "marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire". It has as its immediate root the Latin word "to itch" as in "to crave": prurire, which the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests has a shade of "to be wanton". The Sanskrit root means "to singe", which conjures up all sorts of Roman poetry.

Alberto Manguel is a fabulous author and a writer of breathtaking skills.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been dropping bird balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in order to control the creation of carcinogens within the water. The LA Times reported that "The water needs to be shaded because when sunlight mixes with the bromide and chlorine in Ivanhoe's water, the carcinogen bromate forms, said Pankaj Parekh, DWP's director for water quality compliance. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, he said, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix. The DWP drop was designed to stop the three from mingling in the 10-acre, 58-million-gallon Ivanhoe Reservoir. The 102-year-old facility serves about 600,000 customers downtown and in South Los Angeles." Donna Barstow's blog has a different, well-informed take, describing possible risks to human health from the degradation of the plastic balls; the risk to avian life from the sudden inaccessibility of the water; and the overall inutility of the balls, considering the water flow through the Ivanhoe and Silver Lake reservoirs.

Dan Koeppel, author of the outstanding history Banana, has an editorial piece in today's New York Times. He suggests that the rising price of fuel and the ongoing floods in Ecuador will combine to produce $1/lb. bananas, a significant price threshold for this ubiquitous food. He discussed the factors that have kept banana prices low, and the monoculture that makes the contemporary consumer banana extremely vulnerable to blight, and draws the conclusion that we ought to look for a different fruit to enjoy on our bicycle rides.

His book (full title: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World) does not directly answer a question that pops into my mind almost every day: why do bananas from the street vendors always cost a quarter? His methodical research and vivid writing have brought me a more clear understanding of the supply chain and shenanigans of getting a banana to the cart. Last week I tried a short red banana, a different variety from the standard Cavendish, and found it surprisingly difficult to eat. After having eaten at least a banana a day for decades, I am completely accustomed to the specific taste and texture of a particular banana; this Red Banana (PLU 4236) took me by surprise.

The editorial is a reprise of themes from his book, written with a more moral tone than the book itself.

… the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis.

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable. …

In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?

But bananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.

From Wikipedia:

Just after "I Fought The Law" became a top ten hit, Bobby Fuller was found dead in a parked automobile near his Los Angeles home. The police considered the death an apparent suicide, however many people still believe Fuller was murdered. The investigation was botched from the start. The scene was not taped off and no fingerprints were taken from the scene. A witness also had clamied seeing a Police Officer throw a can of gasoline found at the scene into the trash.[1] Police later changed the cause of death to "Accident". He was found with multiple wounds all over his body and covered in gasoline leading many to speculate that the perpetrators fled before they could set the car on fire. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) in Los Angeles. Dead at age 23, Fuller barely outlived his idol, Holly, who died at 22.

Like Emily Jo Cureton's daily crossword-inspired sketches, Steven Frank draws inspiration from the electronic everyday. His muse: SPAM Subject: lines. Some favourites: thank snoop, Bug Message, and like flipping a switch that will allow you to get exactly what you want. Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

While reading through the NYC Donut Report!!, I found further evidence that the rumour of a below-ground Krispy Kreme outpost may hold truth. On National Donut Day (the first Friday in June), they gave away donuts to all comers. I need to draw in a deep breath and venture back into the bowels of Penn Station, so that I can treat myself to the yeasty sugary delight.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a beautiful poem. Wordle, an online application that creates art from type and text, reminds me of the first java applet I wrote. (Yikes! I can't believe that is still taking up disk space!)

Over three decades, Camilo José Vergara has photographed decaying gas stations. The New York Times published a slideshow of his photographs. Vergara photographs many aspects of decay and blight across America; the Chilean-born photographer received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.

While looking up the mythical town in France, Wikipedia's helpful disambiguation page pointed me in the direction of the yoctosecond, a unit of time representing one-quadrillionth of a second. Yocto is the smallest of the SI units, denoting a factor of 10⁻²⁴. The yotta in yottasecond, with the same ys abbreviation, denotes a factor of 10²⁴ and is the largest SI unit.

Although I have not seen Tom Sachs's massive bronzes at Lever House, I did walk through the Animals exhibition at Sperone Westwater.

The title of the exhibition might as easily have been Sounds, rather than Animals: the sounds of an absent cat, of tools on their racks, or deadened (or amplified) pianos, and especially of animals becoming extinct -- all these sounds played an important role in the pieces. The Waffle Bicycle broadcast the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, from loudspeakers mounted to a massive modified bicycle. The bicycle has all of the necessary ingredients for making waffles, from the live chickens for producing the eggs to the refrigerated whipped cream for topping the end product.

I first encountered Tom Sachs's work in the infamous Barney's Nativity display, and more recently on the cover of Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. I am still uncertain about my grasp on the intersection of consumer culture and art as Tom represents it, but I enjoy the very visceral presentation of his work in the gallery setting. Tom brings a lot of surprisingly frank and violent ideas to his outwardly-calm pieces, such as the wood block with King Heroin burned onto gold leaf.

Instant Rimshot vs Sad Trombone. If only the iPhone supported Flash ... well, that can be fixed: I recorded these into .mp3 files and made them easily accessible for my own nefarious purposes.

“It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies,” Mr. de la Torre said. “But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.”

An article in The New York Times discusses the precarious position of the guano-collecting industry off the Peruvian coast. I learned of guano from the Tintin adventure Prisoners of the Sun.

Arf's Sensible Units web site elegantly converts one measurement — 181 cm, say, — into something less abstract: 1.3 Alaskan moose antler spans. 15 CDs side by side. A little less scientific (and more joyful: "Convert boring units to real objects as you type!" is its slogan) than the sensational Google Calculator, but no less useful. For the record: 1 Wales is 8.0 Luxemborgs.

EV Grieve writes about an old New York magazine article lamenting the yuppification of the East Village -- the gritty neighbourhood party to labour riots, to burned-out crack houses, to endless attempts at urbanization and revitalization. Scans of the article are in the blog post:
http://sophiesbar.blogspot.com/2008/06/lower-east-side-there-goes-neighborhood.html.
How long will it take to get there (or here)? An Avenue C bar owner prognosticated five years in The New York Times: "C will keep its edginess for five more years," predicted Melvina Goren, a partner at Porch. That was two-and-a-half years ago; in a survey of places to drink beer of a Sunday afternoon, Aram and I found all of the contenders overrun with everyone (and thence retreated to the excellent Creative Time installation at the Governor's Island Ferry Building).

This should have been a perspective of the setting sun, the disc revealed in its entirety, but clouds moved in late afternoon and spoiled an otherwise spectacularly sunny day. The phenomenon of Manhattanhenge occurs a few times each other, but none as spectacularly as in late May. The term comes from an article in Natural History magazine by the astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Google's new translation tool has more languages and more shine. This tool has helped me read through innumerable web pages in the past. Although it does not answer all questions about internet sites in other languages, it provides excellent tools for reference-checking and for aiding me in understanding foreign-language posts.

The new languages include Bulgarian and Greek (although not Attic, or classic, Greek; I am encouraging Google to apply statistical machine-translation methods to the corpus of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit literature), as well as improvements to the existing languages' translation facilities.

I didn't say babel fish, nor babelfish. Nor 72 views of the tower of babel (I have been waiting for a while to incorporate that into something. Now is the opportunity!).

Jesson Yip's Analogy.

The Burton Baton is the first beer from Dogfish Head that I have enjoyed quite so deeply, and possibly also the first IPA I have enjoyed in years. The heaviness of the beer offset the sparkle of the IPA, and overall it was a joy to drink.

I am perplexed and fascinated, not necessarily in that order, by Reportet the "gallery of reconstructed portraits". The gallery includes Herodotus and Vercingetorix, about whose physical characteristics I have never really been curious. Attila, however, does stir one's curiosity, as does Charlemagne, short and fat.

The New York Times's obituary has a good summary of Robert Rauschenberg's career and influences. Mr Rauschenberg died on Tuesday.

Andrew Bird wrote a piece about recording songs for his new album. Part of the New York Times's Measure for Measure blog, it has insight and humour and beauty. I love reading about the minutiæ of recording, especially about the contemporary music I really enjoy. Seeing large tape machines rolling, thinking about sliders and pots and mics and speakers and amplifiers, it's all quite exciting. Thanks, Aram, ever keen to the intricate technology of sound recording, for pointing this out.

Shoddy entered our language as a noun, mid-nineteenth century; it denoted a garment made from recycled or already-used wool, and shortly afterwards became an adjective describing anything shabby or inferior (it has an interesting secondary meaning, "pretentious vulgarity": showy).

Where it came from, I know not; nor does Etymology Online.

In looking over photographs on the internet, the short attention span in me enjoys many of the amusingly-captioned contributed-photography sites. LOLCats, of course; and also Man Babies, photobombing (not photobombing). Of course, plenty of stuff on flickr: sticker art, smashed cars, bicycle parking: something for everyone, especially for me.

Aram pointed out, via the excellent Brooklyn Vegan, that stalwart Gang of Four rockers Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham are leaving the band (again).

Did I write stalwart? I meant totally awesome. I could hope to fit all of that cool and kickass into my whole lifetime — they stuck it into each of their records. I got a copy of their first record from a girl at my high school who was moving to California (to attend Berkeley, if I remember correctly); I was a couple of years younger than she, and received a stack of her hand-me-down records (Psychic TV amongst them) when she cleaned house. I was not prepared for what came over the speakers when I first put the needle down: the rhythm! the energy! the anger! Give me punk rock! Give me funk!

The first video is from The Old Grey Whistle Test television programme twenty-five years ago, the second from the Electric Picnic festival recently.

The New York Times ran an excellent and exciting story about research at Lake Baikal. The story excited me for many reasons: a family has, from one generation to the next, steadily collected data about the water and the ecology of the lake.

Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on Baikal’s northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.

Soon his daughter Olga M. Kozhova began assisting him and, eventually her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, joined the project. They kept at it over the years, producing an extraordinary record of the lake and its health.

Now Dr. Izmesteva and scientists in the United States have analyzed the data and concluded, to their surprise, that the water in Lake Baikal is rapidly warming. As a result, its highly unusual food web is reorganizing, as warmer water species of plankton become more prevalent. These shifts at the bottom of the food web could have important implications for all of the creatures that live in the lake, they say.

Although Dr. Kozhov is famous among scientists who study lakes — his 1961 book “Lake Baikal and Its Life” is considered a classic — the new report is “the international debut of the Kozhov family’s legacy of research,” Stephanie E. Hampton of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail message.

Props to the New York Times for implementing a "Share" feature that provides an easy-to-use "permalink" to each of its articles. This is the paper of record, yearning to be free.

Emily Jo Cureton takes a few clues from each day's New York Times crossword puzzle and illustrates the resulting, sometimes fragmentary phrase. Favorites, though I needn't pick: bonsai egret, lets dropit, and ALIEN SOUSA.

I get a shifty feeling when people call me "Sir". I admire honorifics and epithets, but none apply to me: I am neither lord nor baronet to anyone, nor am I their sire. I suspect that people calling me sir have a mild inferiority complex, or a misguided sense that they are being polite, or labor under the painful misapprehension that they need to defer to a client.
Just as on the venerable television news program "60 Minutes", which I watched assiduously as a young'un, I see a pattern. When someone being interviewed on that program started calling the reporter conducting the interview "sir", then they were hiding something. The "sir" was a verbal distraction, a sleight-of-tongue (as it were) that meant, "Oh, I'm entirely honest and without reproach".

I don't mind if someone calls me "boss" or "chief" as much, although those do have a slightly disparaging edge (perhaps I read The Catcher in the Rye too often?) I prefer that people call me by my name, and, if they do'n't know it, that they ask.

During a business transaction, the man on the other side of the handshake kept calling me "Sir", without irony or sarcasm or even a hint of inflection other than his northern New Jersey accent. I found myself wondering, Why? and after we parted company (deal intact) I was humming a song with the refrain "Don't call me darling".

Of course, this video is available from the YouTube. Bless the YouTube for its ability to fulfill the vision that Eyebeam had two decades ago: FTv, or Filler TV. This channel gives you endless two- and three-minute pieces of programming designed to fit into the awkward gaps between other programs, before leaving the apartment, perhaps even between courses. Filler TV! The Fall!! Don't Call Me Darling!!

The New York Times obituary; the BBC report (with a classic photograph); and the Albert Hofmann Foundation.

I often think of Albert Hofmann's first deliberate trip -- on a bicycle, riding home from his laboratory.

update My father pointed out Albert Hofmann's speech at his hundredth birthday celebration, and some comments on the speech Hofmann gave.

I appreciate the cooky as a unit of measure, as a mathematical proof, but mostly as a chocolate-laden treat.

A few nights ago, the Empire State Building was lit in honor of the singer (and, lest we forget, actress!) Mariah Carey.

With her new album (E=MC2) and its first single, she now stands second only to The Beatles for number-one singles on the Billboard Chart. (Does her new album count as "math rock"?)
I like Mariah Carey: her voice, her songs, and how criticism about her enriches my vocabulary. I wonder how she ends up driving the music industry and having the lights on the Empire State Building honor her; why not Thurston Moore?

Cenotaph was a word familiar to me from name-play in Asterix and the Normans, in which the Gauls seek out the meaning of fear. I have yet to use it in a sentence, however; I could say, "What is the way to The Cenotaph" if I were looking for the memorial in London which has all sorts of curious geometry; I could more usefully ask, "Is this a cenotaph or a tomb?" when looking at a memorial; or I could wonder about the word's origin (literally from the Greek κενοτάϕιον, κενοϲ "empty" + ταφοϲ "tomb"). Or I could consult Wikipedia for a list of cenotaphs around the world.

An encomium of the Donnell Library Center, which is closing to make way for a luxury hotel-condo building; a picture, a thousand words:

Seeing these empty shelves stunned me; even though I knew the library was closing, I did not count on having my muscle memory (here is Calvino; here is Wodehouse; here, sometimes, are copies of Murder Must Advertise) thrown off completely. The empty shelves brought home the imminent closing of the library, and I wound up trudging to the Young Adult section upstairs to find a book. Some (adult) fiction remains on shelves adjacent the science and history sections, but most of the collection is headed to storage in anticipation for the summer-time closing of this library.

Often, when riding a crowded subway car in the morning, I will necessarily stare at the advertising placards, reading in each medical condition for which a cure is on offer (bunions! hammer-toe! skin blemishes! weight loss! weight gain!) and the social ills I might solve with a phone call: bankruptcy, a divorce, an injured child; the pleasures I will gain from cologne, whiskey, candy, patent medication. I stare at the ads to avoid staring at the newspapers around me, which I have learned is not done (in fact, I learned this from a whisky ad on the subway and then confirmed it with Anna). Sometimes I bring my own book, but more often I stare at the ads. On occasion, music from someone's headphones will bleed out into the subway and a tune will stick in my head.

This morning, the word bibelot popped into my head, and I couldn't get it out: where does it come from? (Latin, through French) How might I use it? (in lieu of bauble, chachka, geegaw, gimcrack, knickknack, trinket, or whatnot; the latter is a special favourite of mine).

One of P G Wodehouse's most outstanding efforts, replete with: the country house; the village intrigue (in this case, an election); the newly-rich; the thieving butler; the do-good putative fianc�e; the haughty millionaire; and a napping cat. I hugely enjoyed reading Much Obliged, Jeeves.

MTA Service Specialists have taken to the rails; never mind that straphangers will be shouldering the costs of Albany's rejection of the congestion plan, this is a certain way to improve subway ridership and have riders enjoy the trip.

The State Legislature's surprising decision to table the New York City congestion-pricing proposal still staggers me. Not only would does proposal address congestion within Manhattan, it tackles the critical issues of transportation funding and infrastructure. The Legislature's action smacks of provincialism. Streetsblog has excellent coverage of the congestion-pricing issue.

The New York Times had an enjoyable article on the new Hudson tunnels for New Jersey transit, a great feature discussing the urban communities around street design in "Taking Back The Streets", and a vehement editorial on equitable tolls for highways.

Everyone rides the subway: day or night, express or local, whenever I board a subway train the cars are full of people. The streets too are chock-full of cars, trucks, and buses; something must give, and sooner rather than later we must address both the cost and the financing of transit in New York City. The pillbox-hat-wearing stewardesses underscore the lack of service on the MTA: after exchanging a fare hike for service improvements, the agency reneged on the promise and left riders with the increase in fares but without a commensurate increase in service.

Sounds familiar, from what the San Francisco MUNI pulled in successive years.

The New York Times describes restoration of a acres-large terrazzo map in the Tent of Tomorrow, part of the fabled World Fair of 1964-1965.

Just what you would do with such a map — other than admire it — is unclear. Even after conservation, it would be too fragile and uneven to serve as a walking surface, much less a driving surface. (One World’s Fair-era photo shows a girl at the wheel of a toy car tooling down Route 83 out of Fredonia.) And it will almost certainly never again be used as a concert venue, as it was in the late 1960s, or as a skating rink, as it was in the early 1970s, when the terrazzo was covered with a layer of polyurethane.

This feels like an episode from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which an imagined world is laid out as part of a funfair; eventually Scharlach the Dandy runs his well-meaning quarry to ground, explaining that the hapless academic was drawn in by the promise of an antique manuscript, clues to which were found only in the map. The manuscript does not exist; the map was made for a promotion with a children's breakfast-cereal company; and the academic was the last witness in a case against the Dandy.

"The Bowery itself had fallen into desuetude."
desuetude: "disuse," from desuetus, pp. of desuescere "become unaccustomed to,".

Re-reading Luc Sante's Low Life, an account of New York's nineteenth-century underbelly, has proven a mixed bag. I enjoy the anecdotes and historical tit-bits about ragamuffins, pick-pockets, houses of ill repute, and political antics; but I yearn for more, and perhaps even a highly-illustrated reference to the dissolute Manhattan of yesteryear. An edition replete with maps, historical documents, and larger prints of the photographs Sante already includes would be splendid.

In conjunction with my perpetual reading of Burrows's and Wallace's Gotham and of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's monumental biography of Robert Moses (the latter links to his typsecript comments, from The Bridge and Tunnel Club web site), books such as Low Life provide a more digestible, or at least more portable, account of Gotham's yesteryear.

Every few weeks, I haul the pocket-sized sack of coins that I have accumulated to the store around the corner; there I exchange them for a certificate I can redeem at a favorite online merchant. Many of the coins are pennies, but some of the sackful includes nickels, dimes, and quarters; half-dollars rarely circulate (and, I imagine, annoy cashiers at least as much as the Sacagawea dollars and Jefferson twos I cheerfully use to pay).

The United States' approach to coin and paper strikes me as woefully sentimental. David Owens's penny piece in the New Yorker touches on points historical, technical, and social. It's great, including the misquotation (eggcorn?) of "hordes" for "hoards". I appropriated the new Jefferson nickel as an illustration, rather than the similarly expensive penny, because it is a truly impressive piece of engraving.

SFist has a nice roundup of recent Translink developments. I complained that the Translink developers were new to the transit world, only to hear that the Cubic Corporation, developers of New York's MetroCard

What is the importance of automated fare collection? and now of "touchless" fare collection? The accounting needed to manage fare collection, especially

http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/transportation/20060213/16/1758

The genius of this sculpture outside the site of the 2002 Commonwealth Games comes from a quotation attributed to the British sprinter Linford Christie (who is eminently quotable, and apparently ready to rumble): I start running at the 'B' of the Bang from the starter's pistol.

Never mind that the whole thing is slowly falling apart, and even when I walked past I thought it was still under construction (it's not; it's under litigation).

This one goes out to the trumpet player on the Lexington Ave. line, whose unexpectedly jazzy version of this song caught me unawares mid-day. I had a big-hole single of this song which split, perhaps from overplay, rendering it forever unplayable. I taped it to the front of the shoe-box which held all of my seven-inch singles. Consider the above video vs this one (warning: animated content).

vs

The former has amazing footage of a breathtaking band at its best; the latter is delightfully perverted. Neither is artful, but both make a point.

This fellow read the OED from soup to nuts (perhaps from alpha to omega?) and is now blogging about it; this fellow documents the inconsistent treatment accorded to the letter L in hand-written signs, and blogs about it (with photos!); me, I am fond of the grocer's apostrophe and puzzling punctuation.

... as are other people: Apostrophe Abuse illustrates the perils of modern-day puncuation; ritual observation of the importance of punctuation happens on National Punctuation Day; and the "emphatic" use of quotation marks in signs and signage.

And the most excellent writers of The Language Log share this gem:

Proofreaders rejoice! The missing apostrophe on the granite base of the new Ernie Banks statue is now in place. It took a stone carver about 30 minutes Wednesday morning to complete the work, said Lou Cella, the sculptor who made the statute. The missing punctuation was noticed when the statue was unveiled on opening day at Wrigley Field Monday.

later corrected to

I have been mis-using the word nonplussed for quite some time; like fey, inflammable, and unravelled it means the opposite of what I think it does (the latter two more so than fey, I suppose; I became overly excited about the denotations of fey one day in the eleventh grade, and eventually the teacher removed me from the classroom.)

Nonplussed means "surprised, perplexed to the point of speechlessness":

... The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: “Nonplused does not mean fazed or unfazed. It means bewildered to the point of speechlessness.” To me, it does (more or less) mean ‘fazed’ but does not mean ‘unfazed’. Despite this confusion, perhaps The New York Times copyeditors should pay more attention to the basically sound advice in their usage book. The fact that this book takes on the topic shows that the meaning of nonplussed has indeed become an issue; the previous edition did not have an entry for this word ... "

vs

shout out to Aden and to Mark Athitakis, and to the Hillel House concert where the former played this song with the name of the latter cleverly substituted into the chorus. I never especially enjoyed Superchunk, but the familiar name made the melody so much more appealing. Now, these fifteen years later, I find myself humming the refrain at all sorts of odd places (killing time on trains, for one).

vs

shout out to Aden and to Mark Athitakis, and to the Hillel House concert where the former played this song with the name of the latter cleverly substituted into the chorus. I never especially enjoyed Superchunk, but the familiar name made the melody so much more appealing. Now, these fifteen years later, I find myself humming the refrain at all sorts of odd places (killing time on trains, for one).

Read more at http://jameth.livejournal.com/3982795.html.

Seeing an article on Richard Box's Light Field brought to mind Walter de Maria's Lightning Field, a beautifully-conserved large-scale outdoor work. Conserving and curating environmental art is not a new challenge, as surely the Greeks has to protect the Parthenon and the Babylonians the Hanging Garden. Our attitudes towards art may have changed fundamentally, however, and we no longer separate it into the religious and civic spheres, but also into a realm removed from any function other than art. That is: art qua art. Care-taking of the Parthenon, a monument devoted to the goddess of wisdom, formed part of a religious duty.

Richard Box, artist-in-residence at Bristol University's Physics Department, employs the fluorescent bulb as an artistic element. I recently saw this in the work of Dan Flavin at the dia:Beacon galleries.

mattymatt, writing on sfist.com, has a handy chronology of TransLink. This is why the Bay Area will never host an Olympics event.

Oh, yes: I love belly-aching about TransLink. I even see OysterCard-style smart-card readers on some of the vandal-proof MTA turnstiles these days, and wonder down which road we are heading: MasterCard sponsors the system.

The sight of a rat in the subway fills me with joy, not horror. I have a superstition: a rat augurs well. I especially enjoy the sight of a rat gambolling along the tracks late at night, in the utter silence of a quiet subway station.

The Billboard Liberation Front helps put things into perspective.

I enjoy reading both passive-aggressive notes (especially this fine example!) as well as mis-cased &mdash not merely mis-spelled! — posters.

Of course, I also enjoy puzzling puctuation, grocer's apostrophes, and signs showing food eating itself.

Did Apple make a clbuttic mistake? Whose conbreastitution does President Bush trample? Whose parish buttets are up for sale?

Although spell-checkers are a boon, arbitrary use of global replace can be devastating. Take it from me, who removed all of the us from a client's web site some years ago.

A photograph is worth a thousand words:

(via)

I have written previously on TransLink: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2006, 2006,2006 (I think I gave up, eventually).

Twinkie, Deconstructed was a surprisingly difficult book to finish. The author's premise fascinates me: investigating each of the several dozen distinct ingredients in the Twinkie snack cake (that phrase alone makes me shudder).

The writing made reading the book painful: the text is rife with mis-spellings and poorly-chosen phrases, and has an abundance of commas, often where instead a semi-colon or colon is appropriate instead. The book also confuses the reader by introducing jargon tens or hundreds of pages before actually defining the phrase or using it in context; I had to look up Maillard reaction after re-reading a chunk of the book to see what I had missed (nothing), and ultimately found a definition towards the very end of the book.

Despite the poor editing, Steve Ettlinger tackles a tricky topic with aplomb. His investigation takes him into the bowels of the earth, through monumentally large factories, and into areas made for the industry of food production.

By arranging the book so strictly along the ingredients, Ettlinger misses some intriguing connections amongst the processes and ingredients: security, petroleum, and food science. He mentions the importance of protecting the food supply ‐ food colouring especially at risk — from antagonists, but does not discuss what might happen or how; he does not discuss how so many of the ingredients, refining processes, and transport of the Twinkie require crude oil; and he misses out on explaining how and why so many emulsifiers, preservatives, and anti-caking agents fit together into the diminutive snack cake.

More fun with Twinkies.

Jim Jones, the longtime guitarist for Pere Ubu, died.

Authors and orators often use the expression "beg the question" to mean "This brings up the question ...". This is wrong: to "beg the question" means to assume, incorrectly, in order to make a point. The wikipedia has a section "Modern Usage controversy" in its entry, but reduces the problem to pitting prescriptive grammar against descriptive. Being a stout prescriptivist, I disagree: the damn phrase has a specific connotation. Mis-use of this phrase, especially by those putting on airs, irritates me.

To borrow from another playbook: I mean Fidel Fucking Castro!!!

I get really worked up about Cuba, partly from my romanticized notion of how the socialist ideal has played out. I saw Mikhail Kalatozov's Soy Cuba and fell in love with the stories, the colours, the tracking shots; I read Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana and thought about the intrigue of the island. The photograph and implied capitalist-style product placement come from The New York Times.

I picked up this volume over a collection of short stories because the title sounded appealing; I had never before read (nor seen the famed television series) Rumpole's exploits, as chronicled by John Mortimer. The story turned out dull, with the ending telegraphed from the get-go: not only the general outcome, but even very specific details, were patently obvious quite early in the narrative. The cast of characters, a hidebound British barrister's Chambers, has not quite the appeal of Sarah Caudwell's modern group of barristers. Rumpole himself is writing his memoirs in this book, and much of the action happens long in the past; this may be atypical, or too late in a series familiar to many readers, but the setup is slightly confusing, and contains altogether too many condescending remarks to his now-wife and to their relationship. These remarks may be hallmarks, rather, of the dry British wit.

The murder story itself is uninteresting, and devoid of technical details (as I, a fan of Dorothy Sayers and Conan Doyle, appreciate!) and the trial features dull repartee between the Lord Judge and the "white-wig", or newly-called-to-the-bar, Rumpole. The book was not engaging enough that I read it in a sitting, as I often do with thrillers or mysteries.

The New York Times writes in praise of the semicolon, as found on a placard on MTA trains.

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

"Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

This particular semicolon has aggravated me, perhaps because I prefer staccato sentences in advisory signs. This sign's exhortation becomes more of an admonition with the sentences split that way; the semicolon becomes a lengthier pause than a period, because the reader may have to read the following clause, and then re-read the entire sentence in order to parse it properly. The sign does have sophistication; I give it that. As for the New York Times: I am happy that they, despite their plummeting level of sophistication, printed this piece.

Aram's gig is online, or will be, soon. I wonder if he will recreate those beautiful stamped-metal business cards I last saw him handing out on our back porch on Kimbark Street just before it became Allan's bedroom for that summer.

Word is that Gordon has a new shop, too. Word!

Elevator-simulation software uses concepts from the field of discrete event simulation. I am not familiar with the algorithms used, but have read about systems used for these simulations.

One thing I wonder about whenever I ride an elevator: why do the floor-selection buttons not cycle through on and off?

Lobby
Mezzanine
Gallery
Penthouse
Terrace

(compare to:

The sudden transition from subway and the horizontal motion to the elevator and its vertical movements sometimes jars me, especially on mornings when I take the train directly to the office building, and expect a jarring forward motion to accompany the closing elevator doors.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Neutral Milk Hotel album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I would not have noticed were it not for coming across a crisp cover of the title song and following links.

The Lazy Catfish presents video interpretations of the album this Thursday at nine o'clock; the poster above is the advert for the gig.

While riding the rush-hour subway northwards a few evenings ago, I overheard a few medical students talking about how they would rather be in a car, or on the shuttle, but the subway was faster. As we progressed northerly, more and more people crowded in to the carriage, and the medicos pressed together, joking about how tight the space was becoming. One asked another about a syndrome in which people derive physical pleasure from pressing up against others in crowded area, and pronounced it "frawternize", somewhat along the lines of "fraternize" but distinctly different in its first syllable. I could not find references to the word online, and wonder if the M.D. wasn't joking for the sake of eavesdroppers, but am curious.

The MTA announced its trip planner, which looks a sight nicer than HopStop, and is speedy.

Wordcraft is Alex Frankel's examination of the business of branding: of finding words, creative slogans, and stories to express a brand's identity.

He presents five case studies: BlackBerry, Cayenne, Accenture, Viagra, and IBM's e-business, each peppered with anecdotes and solid first-hand reporting. The studies veer between business journalism and language commentary; Frankel's practical, straight-forward prose makes them easy to read and to follow. Although far from thrilling, this book was much more informative about brand development and identity than Dana Thomas's Deluxe, and provided more insight into why people want to identify with a brand. It's cool to think that you are part of the same consumer experience as your favourite sports figure, motion-picture actor, or politician ("Bob Dole knows a thing about Viagra.").

Gunnel, /ˈɡʌnəl/

gunnel is a nautical term describing the top edge of the side of a boat; it is synonymous with gunwale. The word may come from weal, the ridge formed in a skin injury, but more likely comes from wale, a plank.

Traquair, The "House Ale ... of the Oldest inhabited House in Scotland", is a fine malty beer, heavy without being sweet. It pours cleanly with a small thick head, and only make its fruity sweetness apparent in concert with its maltiness.

Delicious stuff, excellent for a cold wintry evening (the first with snowfall, all season!).

Damien Hirst's School:

School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge

Math and music, but not math rock: "Guthrie's daughter Nora eventually figured out that the [mess of wires] wasn't a bomb, but rather a recording of her father on a device that predated magnetic tape. After a year of searching, she managed to track down someone with the equipment to play it."

"Fortunately, math can help. Howarth had developed algorithms to correct these recordings. He looks for extraneous sounds, like an air conditioner or fan in the background that creates a rhythmic sound. Instead of simply removing these sounds, he uses them as a clock, a kind of built-in foot-beat in the recording that tells him what the true timing should be. When a recording is made, this background rhythm is even. But when it's played back, it speeds up and slows down in perfect timing with the errors in the recording. That allows Howarth to adjust the timing of the recording to make it much more similar to the original sound."

For the past several months, I have been enjoying New York State apples in the form of Doc's Hard Apple Cider. Facing the long cooler at the grocer's a few days ago, I instead picked up a bottle of J K Scrumpy's, a hard cider from Michigan. The difference between the two is huge: Doc's is dry, tart, and crisp; Scrumpy's is sweet, bold, and sits heavily on the palate. Scrumpy's tastes like what apple juice tastes like, but has alcohol; it is too sweet to enjoy except perhaps in small quantities.

The International Beer-Mapping project will come in handy at home and abroad.

Dana Thomas's Deluxe, sub-titled "How Luxury Lost Its Luster", an exploration of brand-name fashion, disappointed me: I was looking for a deeper cultural history, one that would explore the connections consumers have with marks and brands.

Her research focuses entirely on modern and contemporary fashion, and almost exhaustively so. Her presentation of the history of various houses, such as Chanel, Herm�s, and Louis Vuitton does dig into the social aspects of their creation; she avoids the ingrained aspects of our desire for specific luxury goods. She hints at this when she makes a contrast between Herm�s, which does not ostentatiously brand its clothing with its logo; and Gucci, which does.

I have a vague recollection of some Aristophanic humour involving slaves who came from the wrong trader, but on the other hand the joke may have only been in an Asterix comic. The desire for association with a well-known purveyor certainly dates back far into history.

Aside: "the quality guarantees the brand", as Lord Peter Wimsey pointed out in Murder Must Advertise.

A word meaning "mist" or "fog", brume comes to English from Fr., whence Old Fr., perhaps from Provençal; ultimately from Latin brūma, winter; I wonder why I have never seen it before, as it is so pretty and expressive. I read it in a New York Times article on the Morgan.

Stout is one of my favourite beers, although one particular beer represents the genre so strongly that it has become synonymous with "stout" (for Irish stout beer, I much prefer Beamish!). Stout tends to be slightly sweet, with its the warm taste of toasted malts or barley accompanying the syrupy alcohol. I sat down recently and drank a few more pints of the Sly Fox O'Reilly's Stout, one of the most outstanding stouts I have enjoyed. I then leaned into a pint of Young's Oatmeal Stout, and thence a bottle of Sam. Smith's Oatmeal Stout; these two have thick, dark heads with creamy tastes. I later had a bottle of Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout, which has a thin but heavy head and a dense array of flavours."Imperial" stout has more alcohol than most stouts, for fortifying it against travel; it sometimes has the label "export".

Sheldon Brown died last night. His writings on cycling, photographs of his bikes and exploits, and peerless attitude towards creating community will live on.

Several years ago, I made a detour in to the Harris Cyclery to see just where this man held court. Sheldon "CaptBike" Brown was the personality that characterized all that is good about cycling and about community. In an era of instantaneous, plentiful communication, he had a distinctive and constructive approach to writing email; he posted excellent, informative essays on practical and technical aspects of cycling on his web site; and his many other interests revealed him to be a lively, loving man.

New Zealand: ‘No Tears’ Onions

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: February 2, 2008

A New Zealand concern called Crop and Food Research said on its Web site that it had created a tearless onion by turning off the gene that produces the enzyme that causes a person slicing an onion to cry. It hopes it can hit the market within a decade. The breakthrough was featured in the December issue of Onion World, the international onion trade journal.

Voyagers in the Age of Discovery trained in formal schools, where they learned the science of navigation, theories of cartography, and the immense trove of history essential to understanding of exploration. In Castilian Spain,the Casa de Contratraci�n's "School of Navigation [provided] formal training [to] pilot[s], probably from the boastful and controversial Amerigo Vespucci .... Students received credit in the form of beans won from their instructor; if they successfully completed a course, they were awarded a dry bean; if unsuccessful, they received a shriveled pea." Casa de Contratraci�n was the "House of Commerce", and provided the financial backing for the highly-speculative and incredibly dangerous voyages to the Spice Islands.

Contrast this to the school in William Langweische's Outlaw Sea, which involved real-world simualations in the South of France, complete with scale-model ships of all varieties.

Laurence Bergreen's story of Magellan focuses on his monumental 'round-the-world voyage. Leaving much of Magellan's early story behind, he paints a portrait of a barely competent navigator whose luck and hardheadedness combined to take him most of the way around the globe. Although Ferdinand Magellan's expedition and its findings (yes! the world is round!) are tremendous, they now seem to me more the result of chance than of calculation. Magellan did not have an aptitude for scholarship, and was no master of instruments; his cosmologist collaborator went insane before the ships sailed. He faced many political obstacles, both in the Portuguese empire and in the Spanish court of Charles I, and showed little aptitude for handling the intrigue. . The book itself starts slowly, but once the voyage is underway the excitement begins: cannibals! giants! williwaws! mutiny! exotic islands! spices!

I enjoyed reading this NYT article about declining use of plastic bags, and feel encouraged by the suggestion that a very high tax on the consumption of bags will

The Alegbra of Need, expressed by my friend William S. Burroughs, describes how this works: so long as demand exists for the item, suppliers will find a way to bring it to market. Eliminate the demand, in this case by jacking up the cost suitably high and by providing a reasonably-priced alternative, and hey presto! consumers switch to the alternative. Last year, San Francisco enacted a follow-up piece of legislation that requires large stores to cease using plastic bags; previously, the large stores (the definition is along the lines of how many outlets a particular store has, or how many square feet the store is) needed to provide a "recyling" facility for plastic bags. New York has now taken this same step, and hopefully will move quickly to the second, and discourage the use of plastic bags entirely.

2% of our landfill mass that will stay with us forever; hundreds of millions of carrier bags stuck in trees from Bryant Park to The Siq; a whirling mass of tangled plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean.

In reading these two novels, I found myself immersed in the psychological turmoil of each book's protagonist.

Italo Svevo's As A Man Grows Older reflects some of the author's fascination with the exciting, contemporary field of pscyhoanalysis. The protagonist, a promising novelist himself, becomes infatuated and involved with a flirtatious woman. In Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Törless, the protagonist is a pubescent student at a boarding school, caught up in the machinations of both his peers and the school administrators. Both novels explore the dense world inside the minds of people in love, capturing the confusion and anxiety of this complicated sensation. I did not enjoy either book, though, for they were both too inwards-looking for my taste.

A concept that I have long favoured for San Francisco may be coming to New York: free transit. Ted Kheel has proposed a "Free Transit Plan (PDF), balancing transit and Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan. Kheel's proposal includes convincing analysis of the costs, to the city and to commuters, and he presents his ideas boldly but without hubris. I like it.

Meanwhile, San Francisco's independent auditor has recommended against further study of free transit, citing unbelievably low costs for fare collection and an anticipated rise in ridership. Just six months ago, Mayor Newsom was calling free transit in San Francisco a possibility.

Robert Lang writes on origami art and science. He makes mathematical, handsome arthropods from paper.

Stephen Hawking presents an illustrated, clarified version of his A Brief History of Time. This edition presents the enthralling concepts of particle physics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other concepts understood by fewer than a dozen people throughout the space-time continuum.

I do love a book in which the author describes physical laws through narration, rather than through
This presentation falls back a little too easily on a Creator, and does not strongly suggest that physics can indeed solve all problems — as I know it does.

The illustrations in this edition struck me as kitsch, which at some level is appropriate for a discussion of cosmology, but ultimately distracted me from the useful passages in the text itself.

From Wikipedia: A plurale tantum (plural: pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant, though it may still refer to one or many of the objects it names. Many languages have pluralia tantum, such as the English words "scissors" and "pants", or the Swedish word inälvor "intestines".

Something I have always wanted to know, but never actually did know. Also: The plural of plurale tantum is pluralia tantum.

I found also: Mass noun. I came across these terms while sorting out whether "ox-tail" refers to meat from the same species of animal as "beef" (bos taurus, although I once ate aurochs, and now discover that they were part of an unsettling "back-breeding" scheme). "Cattle" is an example of a word in plural only, with no singular.

I used Google to help me understand the "öffner fur schraubverschlüsse" that I picked up today from the not-quite-a-store, not-quite-an-art-gallery Kiosk. I know that the device, a Monopol Hermetus, can open a beer bottle with a patent top; and, with its rubber gasket, can keep an open bottle, patent or cork-topped, sealed. The schraubverschlüsse opener works on screw tops, which may sometimes act recalcitrant.

I used Google to help me understand the "öffner fur schraubverschlüsse" that I picked up today from the not-quite-a-store, not-quite-an-art-gallery Kiosk. I know that the device, a Monopol Hermetus, can open a beer bottle with a patent top; and, with its rubber gasket, can keep an open bottle, patent or cork-topped, sealed. The schraubverschlüsse opener works on screw tops, which may sometimes act recalcitrant.

From Wikipedia: A plurale tantum (plural: pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant, though it may still refer to one or many of the objects it names. Many languages have pluralia tantum, such as the English words "scissors" and "pants", or the Swedish word in�lvor "intestines".

Something I have always wanted to know, but never actually did know. Also: The plural of plurale tantum is pluralia tantum.

I found also: Mass noun. I came across these terms while sorting out whether "ox-tail" refers to meat from the same species of animal as "beef" (bos taurus, although I once ate aurochs, and now discover that they were part of an unsettling "back-breeding" scheme). "Cattle" is an example of a word in plural only, with no singular.

I used Google to help me understand the "�ffner fur schraubverschl�sse" that I picked up today from the not-quite-a-store, not-quite-an-art-gallery Kiosk. I know that the device, a Monopol Hermetus, can open a beer bottle with a patent top; and, with its rubber gasket, can keep an open bottle, patent or cork-topped, sealed. The schraubverschl�sse opener works on screw tops, which may sometimes act recalcitrant.

I appreciate the skilfull application of colour and symmetry to a project of technology, and wonder: is it art? Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder; lately I have visited some galleries and museums which make me wonder about the optical receptors these people must have, for I see little beauty in a scrap-heap of cardboard on the floor, or a "sculpture" of pasta and glitter, or a piece that looks exactly like the bunch of keys I have in my pocket.

However, I enjoy looking at pictures of neatly-cabled datacenters and server racks, and am thankful that I do not run cable or crimp connectors. Nor shall I, now that slackers has moved out of my closet and into a real colo.

If your beer keg runs out early, there is probably a drunk midget inside. Recently, I drank the delicious Allagash White ; a couple pints of Bass, the quintessential lunch-time ale; and a satisfyingly stupefying bottle of the Brooklyn Monster Ale, a barleywine with three types of delicious malt (apparently).

That's sleeveface to you.

If your beer keg runs out early, there is probably a drunk midget inside. Recently, I drank the delicious Allagash White ; a couple pints of Bass, the quintessential lunch-time ale; and a satisfyingly stupefying bottle of the Brooklyn Monster Ale, a barleywine with three types of delicious malt (apparently).

That's sleeveface to you.

Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food goes to great lengths to explain why we should eat whole foods, and plenty of leafy greens.

My mother's advice, and my parents' general attitude towards food, was "Everything in moderation. Know what you are eating." This assumes that I am both rational and intelligent, which are the same assumptions that Michael Pollan makes.

For the past eight years, I have been keeping a record of what I eat. I am pretty happy about it.

Today, three years after opening their landmark kiosk on Linden, Blue Bottle Coffee threw open the doors to their fully-fledged caf� in Mint Plaza. Undoubtedly Blue Bottle changed the way I think about coffee, the way I drink and enjoy coffee (which I do, a lot), and my enjoyment of San Francisco. They are one reason that Anna and I made regular weekly visits to the Farmers Market at the Ferry Building.

Although I may not visit the caf� for some months yet, and have not seen the awesome bronze and glass of the halogen-powered siphon bar they installed. I do like the prospects of a thousand sawbucks' worth of coffee, though! For my part, I am now using a twenty-dollar AeroPress, which looks awfully dangerous but produces a decently smooth cup of coffee. I am not yet convinced that it surpasses a French press for quality or for ease of use, but it is compact enough to keep on my desk at work.

update Not only have a dozen people forwarded the news of Blue Bottle's opening (huzzahs all 'round!), but the San Francisco Chronicle notes that "Miette's Caitlin Williams is on pastry duty."

Winner of the Gold Medal at 1998's Great British Beer Festival, this delicious and archetypical bitter transported me. The Pitchfork Rebellious Bitter uses single-origin ingredients and is bottle-aged, unlike most bitters I have enjoyed recently (which were cask- or barrel-aged). The hop flavour was distinctively strong; unlike hoppy North American beers, and especially hoppy West Coat beers, I find the hoppiness in bitters more pleasing than [India] Pale Ales.

I came across this word, distinctively hyphenated, in a translation from the German original of "The Confusions of Young Törless". It struck me not only because I had never before seen it, but in using this word -- from the English byre, "a building for sheltering cattle; a barn", the translator's art impressed me. The choice of words in German must also have reflected a certain time, for in these times one would never write "cow-byre" where one might instead write "cow-barn" or simply "barn". A byre might also be a shed or other generic outbuilding, but the emphasis on cow-byre seems unusual and significant. I could not glean the shade of meaning from the context in which the novel presented it, however (and have lost the note in which I jotted down the page number).

Frequent — and easy! — backups accompany all the best software systems. I was perturbed this morning when my telephone crashed, hard enough that it needed a full reinstall and restore. I was happily surprised at how completely the software restored itself: all of the settings, down to the "wallpaper" photograph. Hooray! All I lost was a list of words to look up from the book I was reading yesterday.

I came across this word, distinctively hyphenated, in a translation from the German original of "The Confusions of Young T�rless". It struck me not only because I had never before seen it, but in using this word -- from the English byre, "a building for sheltering cattle; a barn", the translator's art impressed me. The choice of words in German must also have reflected a certain time, for in these times one would never write "cow-byre" where one might instead write "cow-barn" or simply "barn". A byre might also be a shed or other generic outbuilding, but the emphasis on cow-byre seems unusual and significant. I could not glean the shade of meaning from the context in which the novel presented it, however (and have lost the note in which I jotted down the page number).

Frequent — and easy! — backups accompany all the best software systems. I was perturbed this morning when my telephone crashed, hard enough that it needed a full reinstall and restore. I was happily surprised at how completely the software restored itself: all of the settings, down to the "wallpaper" photograph. Hooray! All I lost was a list of words to look up from the book I was reading yesterday.

Belatedly, and reminded by fresh news reports of the Poe Toaster, I celebrate the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

In the dead of night, someone came again to the Baltimore cemetery, as happens every Jan. 19. When the figure melted into the darkness, three red roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac were found at the grave site. Once more, tribute had been paid to Edgar Allan Poe, poet and master of horror; born Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston; died Oct. 7, 1849, in Baltimore and buried in the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church. For years � exactly how many is a matter of dispute � a person who has come to be known as the Poe Toaster has made an annual pilgrimage to the site. This year, nearly 150 people gathered outside the cemetery, but Jeff Jerome, above, the curator of the Poe House and Museum, said the toaster was able to avoid being spotted, The Associated Press reported.

The first line I encountered by Poe is cemented in memory: "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could ; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." The story that unfolds in The Cask of Amontillado has chilled and enchanted me as no other. Although Poe's poetry and stories have all gripped me, none has stuck in my mind as much as this, with its passionate dialogue and diabolical, calculated protagonist. I read it just after starting primary school, and I wonder (now) how one explains jokes about Masonry to eight-year-olds. In those days, each new story or poem I read offered beautiful new vocabulary: niter, fla�on, roquelaire, motley, and the hypnotic plural flambeaux.

John Stewart died today. Widely known for his work with The Kingston Trio, he also produced four dozen solo albums.

He also wrote (and sang, on the canonical Monkees recording) Daydream Believer, one of the most pervasively catchy sugary pop songs ever.

John Stewart died today. Widely known for his work with The Kingston Trio, he also produced four dozen solo albums.

He also wrote (and sang, on the canonical Monkees recording) Daydream Believer, one of the most pervasively catchy sugary pop songs ever.

Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster presents the poignant story of closing night at a Red Lobster restaurant in a Connecticut mall reminded me of a story by David Mamet, and of the movie Reach the Rock. The author quickly drew out the characters, delineating their relationships and their habits, and let the quotidian events unfold.

One sees the inexorable arc of the story from the first page, but O'Nan's narration allows it to unfold at a welcome pace. He treats the story and the characters with respect, allowing their thoughts and their voices ample space. He gives plenty of room to the manager Manny DeLeon, the romantically-ambivalent protagonist, from whose limited third-person perspective we see the last night at the Lobster. Everyday events at the restaurant give Manny the occasion to contemplate and to reflect. He tries sincerely, if na�vely, to make the day's events perfect for the remaining staff and for himself. The novel is a pleasant, quiet presentation of dignity and everyday people.

A couple pints of North Star Brewing's excellent Blue Star Wheat, a delicious beer to drink cold and with a meal (oysters! deep-dish pizza! a meatball sandwich!); a bottle of Southampton Publick House's superlative Double-White Ale, a wheaty Belgian-style wit, which is one of my favourite beers, at least a favourite amongst what I have tasted in the past year; a Duchesse de Bourgogne, a potent and sweet Flemish "red" ale that comes in a distinctive, demure brown bottle; a Hinano, from French Polynesia — the exact opposite of a local brew, and one I am not quite certain I should have ordered. The standouts are the Blue Star Wheat and the Southampton, but those are both ringers, as I have enjoyed them before.

The Duchesse merits a warning: drink with the appropriate meal, as the thickness of the beer and its sweetness both make casual sipping difficult. Pairing it with a pork roast or other mild meat would balance it.

An image that maps each state in the Union to its counterpart in GDP, showing the formidable economic power of the United States.

Upon checking in to a hotel a few days ago. I arrived in the dead of night, and the night clerk was reading a slim volume with an attractive cover. I eyed it while we went through brief formalities, and then asked about it. An Atlas of Radical Cartography: turns out that I know the editor, if slightly, through Lize Mogel's excellent map of green space in Los Angeles. I spotted this map several years ago on a bus shelter near the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax, and subsequently obtained a copy.

I have always enjoyed visits to Brooklyn, but have never quite felt at home in this, New York's most populous borough. This week, I had several bottles of the environmentally-minded Brooklyn Brewery's Lager, Pilsener, and Pale Ale. All reasonably tasty beers, but none of the subtlety that I have come to enjoy in craft-made beers. I have found that bottled beer really does taste less excellent than the same beer from a tap or cask; sometimes beer bottled in small batches, or purposely bottle-aged, will have characteristics that elevate it past other bottles, but generally bottled beer has become less exciting.

Brooklyn, however, remains intriguing. There are several good places to have beer, as well, although Spuyten Duyvil (Williamsburg, not Inwood) stands out amongst them.

You don't have to be weird:

I don't know why I only looked for "The Fall" on YouTube now, but a trove indeed lies within. The Fall colour more of my memory than any other band, I think, from discovering "Live at the Witch Trials" (and the cover of Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister always reminds me of Live at the Witch Trials, not of The Trial), to obliquely bumping into Brix in college, to finally seeing them perform in concert for the first time (after years of swapping cassettes, — yes, cassettes — over Usenet), to chatting with a Kiwi who walked past the stoop only to find that he was their number one, yes, indeed, he was at the recording of Fall in a Hole. It's like that, see: The Fall bring people together.

Big New Prinz and Cruisers Creek.

I should also note that this morning, while waiting for a table at a popular bar-caf�, I asked the barman (at the four-seat bar) for a drink. A slightly greying man came back inside from smoking a cigarette, saw the barman pulling out a small jar of pickled pearl onions from a corner of the bar and remarked: "Must be an old-timer in here. No-one orders drinks like that," and looked around -- expecting what? someone rail-thin and in a three-piece, a slightly worn fedora atop a mostly bald pate? A comfortably portly man of prosperity, a well-loved tweed jacket over baggy trousers? And saw me, chuckling at being called an old-timer. The greying man went on to say that the Gibson is a great drink, and we agreed that it was good for mid-day (check), sunny weather (check), early afternoon (check), in fact, just about any time. "My father used to make those," he said.

The Harvieston Bitter and Twisted Ale is a delicious ale, served in a wonderfully tall pilsener glass. I had it after an imperial pint of the Chelsea Brewing Company's Winter Wheat from the cask at Jimmy's.

The photograph has nothing to do with beer other than that I like bridges and beer both.

Briefly: I heard Robin Nagle of NYU talk about the history of the New York City Department of Sanitation.

More soon.

Pierre Celis has his signature on this bottle of a Brown Ale. The Brown is not a type of beer I associate with Belgian brewers, but the labelling might be special for the States.

This particular bottle yielded a pleasant, strong ale, but not extraordinary, and not on the same level as the other beers from St Bernardus -- who make an especially nice Wit. I ate it with a baguette and some cheese, but think that I could have done better in terms of the ale itself.

David Flannery's book √2 is a beautiful explanation of the properties of this irrational number, presented as a dialogue between a master mathematician and an eager student. The dialogue is in the tradition of Socrates, of Galileo; it is an explication of a sublime concept, presented clearly and logically, with succinct interludes of history and anecdote. I learned more about the symmetry of standard paper sizes in Chapter 2 of this book than I ever thought I might encounter!