Two Dishes But To One Table

Raison d'etre

Three weeks to the big game.

Don't Know My Own Strength Dept

On the new (used) bike I have already
Broken the back axle in half (Sept 16)
Blown out the sidewall on a one week old Kevlar tire (Sept 29)
Broken the smallest gear into two loose pieces (Oct 25).
Total expenditures on the used bike.
Bought bike: $125
Two new tires: $50
Axle $15
Seven sprocket cassette: $35.

It could be worse.  My friend locked her bike at Astor Place all day Wednesday and someone stripped every component, from the Handlebars to the headset to the rear deraileur, plus  all the cables and levers.

Low-Rent Flickr

The conduit I use for uploading phonecam photos is public, so if you want to see lots of tiny photos and absolutely no explanations go to my T-Mobile photo album.  The photos themselves aren't too amazing but taken in total they are some sort of revelation of how little it takes to amuse me.  About a dozen new photos go through there a week.

Richard Dawkins Would Not Consider This a 'Meme'

Ah, a music related list from people who are obviously my age.   

Last Saturday

It was one of those parties where I found myself locked in conversation with a Dutch physicist.

Why I Haven't Posted Or Answered E Mail

Monday:  Spilled apple juice.  Near the computer.  Puddle crept under laptop.
Tuesday:  No boot, no harddrive, no lights.
Wednesday:  Tried to take back off of laptop.   Couldn't disassemble; 17 screws removed, still some hidden catch on computer case.
Friday: Paid $80 to a tech guy.   He found water and corrosion on the copper connectors of the RAM.  Dried it.  Everything lit up and worked.  He said next time buy a Dell.  Or an Apple.  "None of the other computers are made to be fixed."
Saturday:  Had better things to do than use the Internets (thank God).

1995, 2000, 2005

Washing a plate in Istanbul
Infatuated with Turkish think tanks
Jogging, wishing to “pass” as non-American
But still burning with a patriotic pride for “Enter the 36 Chambers.”

Lying on the cement, 3AM in Taiwan, gazing fondly at the two gas giants,
Feeling nothing, longing for nothing, pleasantly alienated, blank for three years.

Sitting in a drafty liquor store apartment in Brooklyn
Smug about making it to New York
Pretending I look cosmopolitan
But  dreaming of the motherland, the Midwest, every time Modest Mouse’s hyper-hick accent emerges on “The Moon and Antarctica.”

Fast, Cheap, Well Framed

IFC on 6th Ave is showing a very low budget Wim Wenders this week only. Wenders had a project cancelled, got depressed, his wife urged him to not mope around, get out and do something. And so he ran out, wrote a script in 3 weeks, shot it in two weeks, total cost less than $500,000. I saw it last night and it’s good. There’s a bit of “L.A. Plays Itself”, for example, the extras that look like homeless people really are homeless people. The only homeless actor were the stuntmen in the scene where the homeless guy gets set on fire. The story features a weird re-connect as an uncle and his niece converge arriving from opposite ends of the world as well as opposite ends of the political spectrum. The film is called Land of Plenty. There’s a whiff of the 2003 zeitgeist in Land of Plenty, Wenders having created the entire film, cradle-to-grave within the atmosphere of our “victory in Iraq”, [that summer when all the newsweeklies had glossy souvenir editions recounting the glory and wonder of America’s rapid triumph. “When I made this film I was walking around with a T-shirt that said ‘Proud to be a Weasel. ’(i.e. Murdoch’s so called Axis of Weasels). It wasn’t a pleasant time or place to be a German.”

Where to go today (in New York).

Possible alternative to the Village Voice.  Warning: Not safe for eating while surfing; the web page layout is in  Never-Mind-the-Bollocks Pink.  Further caveat: must pay to reveal event location; not a problem for the moderately web savvy.

Either Or

I will take  upbeat fruit over weeping Our Lady of Fatima any day of the week: good news from a watermelon at via Negativa.And how about a trenchant analysis of a poem by a five year old, at Slowreads.

(BTW, a Googling of upbeat fruit returned 22 matches, all in skin lotion, wine, and online gambling)