Author: cdwan

I should really just sign my opinions over to Jon Stewart and JWZ. They’re right about what I think so much more frequently than I am.

TRANSPORTER 2

Dumb fun. Not as good as the first one (which was… not great, but entertaining.) Very near the beginning, a skinny blonde woman dressed as a nurse rips open her coat and proceeds to aerate the building with machine guns while wearing only soaking wet lingerie. That kind of sets the tone for the rest of movie. There is some decent fight choreography. Unfortunately there’s also a precocious child, and an almost complete disregard for the laws of physics. The level boss ending is somewhat anticlimactic.

Google just released their blog search capability. Up ’till now our precious journals had been safe from the prying fingers of the googlebots, but no more. This very journal that you are reading, it has been indexed.

I feel dirty, as if fingers that have touched a million other people just now touched me.

I remember the days, more than a decade ago, when you established your ‘cred’ at a coffee shop by using the shorthand slang that the counter folk use. Coolness was measured in part by the brevity with which you could explain what you wanted in your cup. I would order a “double-cap” or an “au-lait”, because I was a regular and I knew that was what they were called. Losers read off the big menu behind the barista. Cool kids look them in the eye and speak their language.

The Starbucks person around the corner from me just called out a “double, decaf, white, skim, no foam extra hot mocha.”

Wow.

The contractors showed up today and brought this machine. They took these six foot lengths of “helical pier” (screw) and drove them into the ground using a monster motor attached to a bobcat. It was freakin’ sweet. There is one of these piers on either side of our master bathroom. The plan is to bolt a steel beam between them, and then rest the structure on that beam. At that point, we will be free to remove all the rotten, sub-code, resting-on-the-ground-getting-eaten-by-insects wood that is currently supporting the bathroom. Let the “screwing” jokes commence.

In other news, sleep obtained in a hammock in your backyard is approximately 10 times the value of sleep slept anywhere else. God … 15 minutes and I feel like a new man. Of course, I’ve been sleeping for crap because of the ragweed or whatever allergy it is that keeps me clawing at my eyes and scratching the roof of my mouth with a toothbrush. All praise clortrimaton and claratin. Between the two of them I’m twitchy, sleepless, lethargic, but mostly functional.

At least I don’t have to run vocal auditions in this condition. That always sucked back when I was doing the a cappella thing.

I almost lived up to the Mancuso challenge to observe September 11th entirely without mass media. The exception was my Sunday New York Times, the reading of which is about as close as I come to a religious observance these days.

technolope and capital_l came down last night, and we went to the Garden Grill, our local vegetarian restaurant. After that, we wandered around WaterFire and came back to chill. It was nearly midnight by the time they got here, so they made use of the Futon, and we took a pleasant morning walk to observe the birds and fish in the bay before they went back to Boston.

In “industrious around the house” news, I installed a pegboard in the garage, and have been relocating tools there from wherever I find them stashed (under the bed? kitchen drawers?). Also preparing a batch of watermelon pickles. A rare delicacy. Page 206 in the Farm Journal Freezing and Canning Cookbook. Said cookbook is the single needed reference for one who wishes to can, preserve, and pickle just about anything. Seriously. It’s all in there.

Watermelon pickles are sweet: The syrup is 3 cups vinegar, 2 cups water, 10 cups sugar, and some spices. You pickle the rind of the watermelon, after removing (and eating, if you’re me) the flesh, and also removing the peel. If you think you’re a badass with a kitchen knife, try peeling a watermelon.

redmed is studying for class and looking very serious. I should be similarly serious about this talk I’m scheduled to give on Tuesday, as well as about the fact that the contractors are showing up tomorrow morning to install “helical piers” which will serve as the new foundation for our master bathroom. Yes indeedy, the work may actually be accomplished by the time the pipes are scheduled to freeze again. Still no wager on that, though. They’re only scheduled to show up.

A guy I sometimes work with who runs marathons advised me, when I complained that I run out of things to think about while running, advised me to instead not think. To simply run. I tried this today, and it’s harder than it sounds. The first stage was me thinking “not thinking, not thinking” over and over again, in time with my feet. After that, it was sort of a fixed outward awareness…identifying birds, plants, counting things … still very deliberate. On the entire run, there was a tiny tiny moment when I realized that I had simply been running without thinking. I shall have to try this again.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the guy who told Dick Cheney to “Go f- himself”.

It was decided in the car today, between redmed, capital_l, technolopeand myself that the vice president should be thus greeted, anywhere he goes in the world.

Please, if you happen to see him, should “Go f- yourself, Mr. Cheney.” Preferably while the TV cameras are rolling.

Maybe, if it happens every day for the next three years … well … nothing will happen, but I’ll have a lot more to laugh about.

Contributions solicited for a list of the major problems in the world. Here’s my start, in no particular order:

depression inside

Horked from the aforementioned Jon Stewart monologs. He claims that presidential disasters, like hurricanes, are named in alphabetical order. Note that we’ve got plenty of space remaining among the possible 26.

Jon Stewart usually hits it on the head. Yesterday was phenomenal here are all the videos.

I had a novel hot sauce experience this evening. I decided to cook down some of my cayenne peppers into a small batch of hot sauce. I took a plateful of them, cut them in half, and broiled them for about 5 minutes (skin becomes black and crispy). I dumped them into about half a cup of boiling vinegar, added salt, pepper, and a few crushed garlic cloves, and let it return to a boil. I then dumped the concoction into my food processor and pureed it down to a paste. Yummy. The broiling added a pleasant flavor of the grill. Very southwestern.

At some point in this process, I spring a nosebleed. The parts with burning peppers and boiling vinegar in a powered appliance require a certain amount of focus, so I was totally surprised to find my hands and face covered in blood at the end of the process.

I feel so … hardcore.