Category: Uncategorized

Forget the Cardinals, Braves, Yankees, and Red Sox and all the baseball playoff heroics. Forget the Patriots and their winning streak. The truly memorable sports event of the weekend was the Bizz Johnson Trail Marathon, up in northeastern California, near where the Sierra Nevada give way to the Cascades and the mountain country opens into the Great Basin. Pete Danko, my friend and one of my athletic inspirations, ran. And he did pretty darn well. Way to go, Pete!

Having an infinitely diverse readership — including the author’s blood relatives, plus the dozen or so people in the world to whom he’s offered no mortal offense, and maybe one or two others — this site receives an extraordinary range of suggestions about web sites and other apparitions that may deserve attention and approbation. (If you can follow all that, let me know what it means.)

From Infospigot’s bulging in-box, the following are offered for your wonderment:

Exhibit the First: Some dorm-room humor at the expense of the graphic artists at the Department of Homeland Security. (Thanks, Endo.)

Exhibit the Second: Dan Perkins, aka Tom Tomorrow, boils down the Bush vs. Kerry issue in six panels. (Thanks, Garth.)

Exhibit the Third: An example of why, Bush or no Bush, we’re a great country and always will be: Beer bottles made from aluminum. It’s almost enough to make Osama crack a cold one and toast the Great Satan. (Thanks, Lydell.)

Found in the midst of serious legitimate journalistic research: a window, or perhaps just an unglazed hole, onto that strange digital intersection where poverty-inspired comic writing meets the cult of Swedish home-office furniture. And remember to click on the “Ikea Jerker” link.

Via v-2 Organisation.

The New York Times has a nice story — or actually, an online photo/sketch essay — on the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota. My dad and I visited in 1989, on our way west to see the Little Big Horn battlefield, and while the excavation was impressive, it was still a work of imagination. Now the chief’s features have started to emerge from the mountain. Don’t know if we’ll ever get to see if finished; the project’s proceeding at medieval cathedral pace, which means its sort of a generation-to-generation act of faith.

It may sound immodest, but I think I’ve discovered I’m an organizational genius. I had to find this out through an act of less-than-genius, though: starting our coffeemaker the other morning with no carafe to catch the cascading brew. After the hot coffee spread across the counter, it dripped into our “spice drawer” — the drawer where we keep spices and also things that aren’t spices, like batteries, herbal health preparations and kitchen-related curios. In the process of cleaning up the mess, I had a flash of insight — perhaps the equivalent of Newton’s apple — that if I lay the spice jars on their sides, instead of standing them endwise, that I’d be able to read their labels without doing a jar-by-jar search, as I’ve become accustomed to doing over the years. E=mc something! E pluribus unum!

So that’s what I did. And if that’s not organizational genius, I don’t know what it is.

A good long story in The New York Times Magazine today (registration required, etc., and it goes into archives in a week, so read it free while you can) on Rev. Billy Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping:

“In the Church of Stop Shopping we believe that buying is not nearly as interesting as not-buying. When you back away from the purchase, the product may look up at you with wanton eyes but the product dies quickly back onto the shelf and sits there, trying to get a life. The product needs you worse than you need it, remember that.”

The guy’s a righteous pain in the ass (here’s the S.F. Chronicle’s version of his story), which I mean as a compliment. It is odd to read about him though, in the midst of all the mag’s Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Armani, and other fashion and financial services porn.

(Disclosure: I am one of the fallen: I actively seek out Starbucks for solace whenever I’m outside the realm of Peet’s.)

In the Chronicle today:
Probe at plant finds no proof of pigeon abuse:

An internal investigation at Contra Costa’s largest sewage treatment plant found no evidence to support a whistle-blower’s allegation that employees killed pigeons by driving nails through the birds’ chests, officials said Thursday.

I don’t know. The sewage plant. The whistleblower. The nails. The investigation. What more could you want in a news story? News, maybe, I guess.

I have a front section of the Wall Street Journal that I’ve been hanging onto for a long time because I took notes on something in the margins and I thought that someday I’d be getting back to whatever it was I’d been writing. So today I had a burst of initiative and picked up the paper to transcribe these important jottings, if I could figure out what they were.

The section’s dated August 31, 2001, and I remember reading one story on the front page, about Wal-Mart’s success in Mexico. So I’ve had this thing sitting around for three years.

Trying to decipher the notes scrawled in the margins, I had no recollection what they were about at first. Some quasi-poetic musings mentioning Mount Tamalpais. Something like a prayer, too. Then a key phrase: “Over Oregon.” OK, so I was flying somewhere, looking out the window and indulging my penchant for scribbling notes on the landscape. But where was I flying? North someplace, Seattle or Portland. Haven’t been to Portland since when, January 2000. Seattle then. Maybe. Then I remembered a trip I took up to TechTV’s Seattle bureau, in a building across from the Space Needle. Yep, that was at the end of August. Flew on Southwest from Oakland, bumped into a Berkeley acquaintance who was on his way to Spokane, and I flew back the same day. What I wrote sounds like it comes from the trip north.

So what, exactly, did I scrawl? It’s quasi-poetic, remember? Maybe some other time.

My LiveStrong bracelet broke. I guess it couldn’t stand the strain of me putting it on and taking it off my meaty wrists every day. Of course, from here I could go off the deep end interpreting this as some kind of omen. Such as: Perhaps I won’t win the Tour de France someday as I had hoped.