Ignacio Mars

Hello, blogosphere. It's been a while.

Oblig.: What has happened?

• As part of a suicide / get-into-graduate-school pact with M-biddy, I took the CS GREs. No word yet on my score. Ironic: The CS GREs are administered and scored on paper.
• I failed my DMV road test for the fifth, and what I consider final -- at least, for the moment -- time. Sorry, Lester.

Nina, who finished her first semester and Columbia rather brilliantly, got me a copy of Guitar Hero II, which is pretty much the best thing ever. I thought I was doing well at it until I realized it was set on "easy" mode. I bumped it up to "medium," because, hey, I Am A Guitar Player, and it began to kick my ass rather quickly. Also, for the most part, the game consists of a bunch of colored symbols scrolling towards you down the screen, so when you look away, your visual cortex spends several minutes trying to compensate by making everything else you see kind of warp upwards. The gin and tonic I am drinking is probably not helping either.

As Katharine would say, Julian making a gin and tonic that's too strong? No way.

Gin and tonic

Making Monsters For My Friends

Nina and I went to a benefit for George Tabb (he of Furious George fame) the other night. He's got some auto-immune problem from living too close to the WTC, and people were selling booze and auctioning off artwork to help him out with his medical bills. The man himself wasn't there, but I guess a lot of his friends were? (Is it bad form to come to your own benefit?) There were a lot of high-toned Greenwich, CT types, which makes sense, I suppose, given who the guy is. The dude Nina was supposed to meet there had left by the time we showed up, though, so after downing a few whiskeys, we took the bottle of Glenlivet she'd bought for him and skedaddled.

On our way there, though, we took some pictures (well, Nina took most of the good ones) of these neat, old-fashioned-looking telephone booths dotting West End Ave. The evidence is in my Flickr photostream. I also got to hang out with her for a little while on the steps of Butler Library at Columbia, the campus of which is really pretty at night.

It's getting colder out. I think this is my favorite time of year, aesthetically. It's kind of hard to enjoy when you're in the thick of it, though.

Saturday night was Eve's birthday -- we went to Buttermilk, over on 5th and 16th. Eve, now 25, puked like a champ; I damaged my pelvis and testicles at Nina's behest trying to tilt the Star Wars: Episode 1 pinball machine.

CBGB is shutting its doors for good come Sunday. For having grown up next to the fucking place, I sure didn't go there that much -- the reason being that by the time I started going to shows in the early 90s, the only bands that played there were unlistenable speed metal and hardcore acts. I only distinctly remember seeing two shows there: The audition show for Alana and Serena's Contraband; and Wesley Willis w/ The Fiasco Band. I may have seen Jacques Aboaf's band (The Diplobrats, nee The Fiasco Brothers) audition there, but I'm not sure. And I'm only counting the main stage -- you know, the actual CBGB, the one with the revolting plywood palimpsest of a stage and those sort of dubious booths. I've been to the "lounge" part next door pretty often, actually.

Update: Sunday night Nina and I trekked up to Manhattan to eat dinner with her mom at Petite Abeille (mussels, etc.), and then headed down to CBGB to see what was going on. Predictably, nothing good -- a lot of NYU students, some of which were gawking from what is now the front porch of their dorm on the corner of Bleecker and Bowery; and a bunch of sanctimonious pricks complaining about the NYU kids ("I'm tellin' you, if you told me right now that this was the future of CB's, I'd burn the place to the fucking ground," said a guy who couldn't have been older than 30 to a bored-looking fat dude guarding the door). There were actually a few people who seemed to know what they were talking about -- they were the hobbity-looking ones. Barred from entering CBGB proper, we got a beer at the 313 Lounge, where there was an orgy of t-shirt sales taking place.

I've been finishing up the second half of the second season of Battlestar Galactica. It's, you know, okay. Good performances all around, except maybe for "Apollo," who seems to get far more screen time than he really needs.

Like A Drunken Fuck On A Saturday Night

As usual, I'm completely unable to keep this thing up to date. I don't even really have links to post; I send them all to Nina. So.

The Rase moved out, giving me less than a week's notice, which kind of sucked. A friend of hers from Greece offered her a place nearer her office. I'll never understand the impulse to gravitate towards work. Depressing. Also, though, she was living in a closet and having to feed my cat all the time. Now no one is going to feed Kitty. Requiem for Kitty. Also, while I was cleaning up in Sophie's room, I unplugged the router, and now neither the router nor the DSL modem will give me an IP address. I've been relying on unsecured local networks for my fix, but I don't know how long I can last. Update: Yeah, so I bought myself a new router, and things seem to be working okay. R.I.P. Goethe; long live Flute Loop.

I signed up for Netflix, which is great. Are any of you 'flixers? Add me! I'm watching Night Watch right now, though, which is a mess.

As we did last year, a few weeks ago we all went apple picking -- me, Ted, Tom, Nina, Emma, and Katie. It was hotter and muggier than last time, and I don't think I picked as many apples -- and I was certainly down some after spilling a bunch all over the floor of the Gowanus Yacht Club, where we went in the evening to celebrate Katharine's 25th. I did, however, buy a bunch of preserves, including a jar of "dilly beans," which you all should probably try at some point before you die. Okay, I'm just kidding. They're basically pickles. Update: Nina and I used some of the apples she picked to bake a pie, which turned out okay, if a bit bitter. I ended up throwing most of mine away -- they got rotten.

Ted and Aanie threw a dinner party on Saturday night. They made, among other good things, roasted dates wrapped in bacon. That is actually something you guys should eat. They just taste right together.

I've got another road test on Wednesday. (Update: failed again.) Past two lessons with Lester have been good, parking-wise, but, you know, I have no idea why I'm good or bad at it, ever. Here's some Lester porn for you: "My mom came to stay with me last weekend. It was fucking torture. I think she's getting a bit of the, what do you call it, dementia. She says everything twice. She goes, 'Lester, when are you going to give me back my gun?' I'm like, 'Ma, you asked me that three hours ago, and I said no!'"

Also: "Yeah, I don't go to the movies any more. I like to rent movies. I like the darker stuff. Here, I've been trying to remember the name of this one movie I saw a long time ago -- it might be a book or a song or something, I'm not sure. I think it's called something like 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' or 'Johnny Comes Home' or something. But it's about a guy who goes off to Vietnam, and, you know, he gets his arms and legs blown off, he's nothing but a torso, right, and he's in this hospital bed. And he can't see -- the screen is black the whole time -- and he can't talk, but what he really wants is for the nurse to give him a blowjob."

Me: "So what happens?"

"Yeah... yeah, she helps him out. She gives him a blowjob."

Gunshot

So I went to Europe last week for the first time ever, and visited three countries in nine days. The whole thing is a bit of a blur and I can't remember to whom I've told what, so this is the best I can do:

In an effort to avoid bumming around Brooklyn feeling sorry for myself while Nina hung out in Italy with her family, I decided to go to this "bug-squashing party" in Gütersloh, which is sort of a suburb of Dusseldorf, Germany. By way of explanation, sometimes Free Software projects throw these kind of marathon programming sessions before a new release, where a whole bunch of developers hang out in a room or something and try to fix as many bugs in the software as possible -- so that's what this thing was supposed to be. It was hosted by the German head of the Skolelinux project, whose aim is to make a sub-distro of Debian for use in primary and secondary education -- it was his girlfriend's house that we (yours truly and a bunch of French dudes) were put up. Also in attendance was the head of the debian-installer project, which was supposed to be the focus of the party.

I flew out of JFK on Friday afternoon and arrived in Dusseldorf early Saturday morning. The plane trip was uncomfy (tried to sleep but couldn't, unlike the short, standoffish woman who had the window seat next to me and conked right out) but uneventful; flying over the Atlantic was very cool -- I think we must have been flying between two cloud layers, because whenever I looked out the window, we were suspended in this kind of dark blue soup, with no way to tell which way the ground was. When I got to Dusseldorf, I hopped on the train to Gütersloh and was on my way. German high-speed (well, medium-speed) trains are as impressive as you might imagine they are -- they're fast, punctual, and practically silent. I sat in the first-class upper section of the train by accident, but second-class, to which I was escorted by the conductor, was equally well-appointed, with comfy seats and big tables. We passed a few stations in towns whose names I recognized as being... significant during a time when a bad thing was happening in Germany.

The bug-squashing party turned out to be a bit less productive than I thought it would be, though it was a lot of fun nonetheless. The Skolelinux offices were located in a "kulturezenter" that had been converted from an old weaving mill (the sign above the door said "Die Weberei") and also played home to a nightclub and a pizza restaurant -- as part of the details of their lease, we ended up eating a lot of German pizza, which is not actually as bad as you might think, though it's more like a loaf of bread (with a whole lot of cheese melted on top than it is like a pizza. The first day, I got to the kulturezenter right after I got off the train and just plain sat down to work, pretty much passing out from exhaustion around 11:30 at my host's girlfriend's house. I did the same thing the next two days, as well, though I took more smoke breaks and walked around the grounds of the kulturezenter a bit more. Testing and fixing bugs in the installer is hard, because you can't actually run the installer on your computer without fucking up your own operating system, so you need to run it on a virtual machine, which is slow, and getting your code fixes into an out of the virtual machine is incredibly frustrating. I was the only guy who knew C, so the official Debian representative guy recruited me to do some native fixes for IBM's S/390 architecture, which I did but couldn't test (or even compile, much less debug) without his help with the emulator. Ultimately I ended up fixing about one and a half bugs over the course of three days; I think the representative was a little disappointed in everyone's output -- nobody besides me fixed any bugs, I don't think, and the testing they did was mostly on this piece of software that wasn't related to debian-installer at all. Oh well.

Everyone there was very friendly, especially Kurt, my host, whose girlfriend's place was totally charming and cozy. She's an architect, apparently, and designed the house herself, full of naked wooden beams meeting at acute angles. One room had three walls of windows; Kurt called it a "winter garden" and said they slept there sometimes in the snowy months.

Mike Bell is living in Budapest now, where he's doing this math program at the American university, and I flew from Dusseldorf to Budapest via Prague to stay with him for a few days. He's living in this great, ancient-looking apartment house in downtown Budapest, a few blocks from the Danube. I'm not much of a student of history, but the buildings there all looked like they hadn't been touched or rebuilt at least since the first World War, and there was a very sort of Soviet aesthetic to them: Block-long faceless, doorless expanses of plaster with rows of grim little windows set into them -- very intimidating and beautiful.

Mike speaks enough Hungarian to ask for the good stuff at the enormous indoor marketplaces where we bought our food. I managed to pick up a little of the pronunciation; the requisite "please," "thank you," and "sorry;" and absolutely none of the grammar. On the second day I was there, we walked over the Danube and up this enormous hill overlooking Pest. We also walked around this ancient stone fortress monument into the side of which was built an enormous government office building. There were big square slots left open in the sheer face of the rock where the Nazis or Soviets had removed / destroyed the enormous statues that (we think) used to hang there. We also visited Terror Haza ("Terror House"), which is a museum about the Soviet occupation of Hungary between World War II and 1990, installed in the former national headquarters of the Party. In the basement, we got to walk around in the dank rooms where political prisoners of note were kept (and executed), including a closet-like solitary confinement "room." It was pretty fucking terrifying. Mike's apartment building had a basement area that, weirdly, you could only access from the second floor. There no lights that we could find, and it was filled with rooms that were currently stocked with rubbish and broken appliances but which had doors with ominously-shaped gratings and movable slots, the purpose of which seemed a lot more suspect after visiting the museum. We were never able to spend more than a few minutes down there. (I suspect Nina, had she been there, wouldn't have had a problem with it, but from what I can tell, she's basically a Kender.)

The first day I was in Budapest, I got the go-ahead from Nina to join her and her mom and brother in Rome, so, amid much fretting and ticket-searching, M-Biddy and I booked some tix there. The flight got into Ciampino at noon, and I got to Roma Termini, the major transit hub, by around 2:00. While I waited for Nina to pick me up, I watched a bunch of off-duty cab drivers torment an old drunk near the exit -- he'd scream at them and wave his fist (with his dentures in it; he'd always take them out before beginning the invective) for a few minutes, they'd let him calm down and trudge a few paces away from them, and then they'd say something about his mother or sister or something, and he'd come roaring back.

The Priccis were staying in a pensione two blocks from the station, in a building that was also home to three other hotels, all situated around a strange little indoor courtyard with palm trees and electric light.

We spent the first day just kind of walking around the popular parts of the city -- we saw several enormous fountains, a couple of columns (Trajan and Aurelian), and the Pantheon, among other things. In the evening, with Nina's brother Michael, we crossed over the Tiber into the Trastevere district, which is what we were given to believe was the Roman equivalent of Williamsburg. This turned out not to be quite true -- it was more of a market district (a la St. Mark's), with a main drag packed with gypsy types hawking bootleg DVDs and mangey-looking parakeets. We bought some gelato and sort of lurked around the alleyways and side-streets until it got too late to go on. Way more than Budapest, Rome seems to be less a city than, you know, an exhibit. I didn't really see any stores that sold the amenities of everyday life, even in the more residential areas we walked around in. Even the houses themselves seemed kind of temporary, like lean-tos amid the ruins. This is just three days' worth of impressions; I understand that many people find it quite livable.

The next couple of days, Nina and I explored the Palatine Hill and the Colosseum, which are both kind of preternaturally quiet and beautiful despite being thronged with tourists. The ruins on the Palatine are shot through with these strange, enormous trees that all seem to fork in the same place near their tops. At the Colosseum, we took turns repeating to each other the words of the little audioguide earpiece we rented; best fact about the games: During one victory celebration held in the arena, an enormous mechanical whale crafted in the shape of a real one that'd washed up on the beach during Septimius' reign was wheeled out to the center. When the whale opened its mouth, a multitude of bears came charging out to meet the swords of the beastiarii.

You guys already know about my adventures getting home, I think. The Virgin Atlantic flight I got on was about as comfy as a 7-hour flight after a 13-hour sleepless sleepover on the floor of an airport can be. I watched episodes of Extras and Little Britain, as well as the movie Brick, which was pretty perfect.

Last night, Rancid played at B.B. King's Bar & Grill in Times Square, and I went, because, you know, how often does that happen? Not often. They were okay. I dunno. I've never quite gotten used to this vibe that I think is sort of peculiar to West Coast punk and that was heavily on display at the show -- namely, this idea that punk rock is some kind of extended family for you, and that all those sweaty naked fat dudes in "the pit" are just there to have a good time, and, you know, that you love the band and the band loves you. I mean, come on, right? At one point a fight broke out near the stage and Lars stopped the show until it was broken up. "Either you guys work it out or we're leaving," he said. "There's no fighting in punk rock." What? I don't know, I guess all these guys were in gangs or something, so this type of dare-to-be-sensitive shit is important to them, but it doesn't do it for this snotty, middle-class software guy. Another ridiculous moment: The band came out for the first encore and did Tim Armstrong's song about his divorce all-acoustic -- Lars, Tim, and Matt all standing at the edge of the stage and sort of swaying gently. Ugh. But they played a really solid set otherwise -- fanboyishly, I could've really done with a little Maxwell Murder, which was missing, oddly enough -- and Matt Freeman is an incredible bass player, so, you know, all told it was a good time. And Larry Livermore, whom Chrissy Rodney may remember as being the object of address by Joe King's "Hey, Livermore, you fuck" on some live Queers record, was in the audience, though I didn't get to see him up close.

Then Eve and I met up and got shitfaced at O'Connors.

The Rase bought me a copy of Dragon Quest VIII for my birthday, and I've started playing that these last couple of days. I like it okay, but I'm getting my ass handed to me pretty frequently by the Mischievous Moles, which is frustrating. The game comes with a playable demo of FFXII, though, and I played through part of it that really makes clear the new difference between Active Mode and Wait Mode. The game is gorgeous and the part that I played was super fun -- who knows? I may actually buy a video game for the first time in a long time. Might get it for a like-minded friend, also.

Tonight I'm taking my boss out for what would be a bachelor party if he were the kind of dude who'd have a bachelor party or I were the kind of dude who'd throw one. I think we're gonna grab a bite to eat with Chump Change and then head over to this. We'll see what happens.

M-Biddy re-did his 'blog. I put Ubuntu on snark-star and changed the hostname.

Thirteen Hours In London Heathrow

...is what I'm experiencing as I type this. So I went to Europe, everyone, and there'll be a full post-mortem shortly, but at the moment I can't really think straight because I've been using my sneakers as pillows for the past 6 hours. Alitalia overbooked the flight from Rome to London that M-Biddy helped me schedule, and, as a result, it was an hour and a fucking half late, causing me to miss my carefully-booked flight back to Newark. Virgin was nice enough to put me on the first flight to JFK today, but those Etruscan cunts refused to cover me for a hotel room (not to mention threatening to raise the alarms because I decided my $17 sleeping bag wasn't worth waiting for at the baggage claim), so I'm all "fuck it."

Anyhow, I'm boarding in 5 minosk. In the meantime, check out my photostream.

Squash-A-Bug

Had another road test; hit the curb; failed it. This seems to surprise many of you who took your road tests in these sleepy little suburbs or in DMV parking lots, and not at the toughest DMV test site in the toughest state in the union, but, yeah. It's hard. And it's a real fucking bummer to fail the test, because I don't have my own car to drive at the test site, so it costs big U.S. Auto School bucks whenever this happens. At least I didn't cry tears of frustration in front of Lester (though my face got a bit pinched up).

The Rase bought me If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Like I think I've mentioned, I spent a lot of my childhood listening to The Pogues and only realized embarrassingly recently that it wasn't just weird "world music" that my dad had scooped up somewhere. I'm listening to the album at work and it's stirring up these really vivid memories of sitting on the warm windowsills with the built-in radiators in my parents' apartment on 4th St. and staring out the thick, gritty chickenwire windows at snow falling on the Old Merchant's House. Maybe a cup of hot tea and a notebook. Orange streetlights. That's the setting when I think of my childhood in Winter. Why Turkish Song Of The Damned was in constant rotation in my dad's stereo during the holidays is a bit hard to fathom, but, you know. Don't even get me started on Fairytale Of New York. I basically can't even listen to that song in public; it's just too much.

KT had a little birthday party at The Friends' house on Saturday, and someone got hold of a camera. I think this sums up my relationship with Tom pretty nicely:


I've bought a ticket to Germany for next week, so expect to see me next week... if you're fixing debian-installer bugs in Gutersloh. That includes at least a dozen of you, I know. Razor and Chrissy Rodney kind of crapped out Headliners-taking-Europe-wise, so I'm Trying to arrange spending a few days with M-Biddy in Budapest, where he's been attending Math Camp for the past ten years. Why hasn't he solved tic-tac-toe yet?!

Says My Auld One To Your Auld One

It's hard to keep this thing updated; I find that when I actually do things worth mentioning, I'm too busy to blah blah blah. Same old song and dance.

Started up lessons with Lester again -- got another road test in a few weeks. We spent the entire time parallel parking on Saturday. I think I've narrowed my problem down to not adequately watching the car in front of me. Lester also bolstered my spirits a bit by pointing out that the inspector I was assigned last time (#700) is widely regarded as being the toughest out of all them. Dunno, maybe Lester's just earning his keep, but I'm feeling better about this next test. Also, he'd burned his hands something terrible in a grease fire at his apartment a few weeks ago; the blisters are only now starting to heal.

Nina and I managed to attend the Saturday presentations at HOPE 6. I gotta say, it was a bit disappointing. One of the seminars I'd wanted to attend (on quantum cryptography) was cancelled, and the other stuff was all pretty much, you know, entry-level. Ultimately, she and I variously managed to attend:

• Constructing Cryptographic Protocols (given by one of the main dudes from cDc)
• Breaking Down the Web of Trust
• Law Enforcement Wiretaps: Background and Vulnerabilities

We ducked out of that to hitch a ride on the Q-train party that was going down, but when we got to Union Sq., the attendees seemed a bit too awful to deal with. From what I can suss, there's this kind of geek party scene you can tap into these days in NYC, and, you know, people throw these "theme" parties, and every dresses up in homemade costumes. The way I've been describing it to people is that there's this SNL sketch about a student council election getting "swept by nerds," and Rachel Dratch, thanking her constituents, points out how much is owed to "the kid who wears the fedora." These people, these party people -- they're all wearing fedoras, actual ones or no.

Also attended a Best of Animateka feature at BAM -- Animateka being an Eastern-European animation festival. The shorts were predictably gloomy, and some were downright terrifying, like this one, which apparently won a prize last year. (It doesn't look like much in the picture, but the whole thing kind of squiggles and groans at you in a most unappetizing way for like 10 minutes.) After the show, we poked around in some construction detritus that was sitting around in the lot behind the big Salvation Army offices on Hanson Pl. (The results are in my Flickr photostream.)

So that was all the weekend before last. Saturday night, a bunch of us (incl. Jegga and Sophie P. of HCHS fame) went down to Coney Island for the One Night of Fire party, the organizers of which promised a wild bonfire + bacchanale on the beach. It turned out to be a bit more subdued, with a higher percentage of. One thing that's remarkable about Coney Island, at least at night, is how much it seems like the end of the world out there, especially when you're out on the darker parts of boardwalk away from rides and arcades. We all ended up going on the Wonder Wheel -- Aanie and I in a normal car, everyone else in one of the slidy ones that careen up and down the spokes of the wheel. Fans of going to Coney Island with me may remember that I do not do very well on the Wonder Wheel (though not as badly as I do on the teacups; hurfff), and that night was no exception.

I'm seriously considering making the preparations to attend the Gütersloh bug-squashing party for Debian Etch. I've never been off the continent before. It'd be expensive and a little scary, and, like someone on #debian-bugs mentioned, 8000 miles is a long way to go to fix bugs, but I don't know... I think I should do it. Razor said he might like to go to Amsterdam. I'm fucking down, guy. Let's not let each other back out of this one.

Pretty Girls, Pretty Boys

So Ticketmaster was able to cancel my Buzzcocks tix and reissue them such that I could pick 'em up at the show, and so Nina and I went to Warsaw last Tuesday. I'd never been there before -- my understanding is that it used to be the site of a Polish National Home, but that it really isn't anymore? Not sure. They serve pierogies, though, and this sweetish Polish beer. The opening bands weren't listed, but the one directly before The 'Cocks was this L.A. band called The Adored. They were basically awful.

The Buzzcocks were every bit as gross and old as they look in the pictures I'd seen of them, particularly Pete Shelley, who, believe it or not, actually used to be pretty handsome, but they played a really tight set (though Pete Shelley couldn't quite seem to keep up vocally with certain songs) and played basically all of Singles Going Steady as an encore. The crowd was awesome -- a mix of hipsters and sort of middle-aged punks (and a set of fairly elderly ladies who really liked The Adored) but all very lively and dancing around, much to the irritation of the enormous Polish bouncer, who kept having to dive into the pit and pull some errant mosher out by his neck. I got hit in the face; I literally almost clocked this drunk blonde woman who wouldn't stop trying to pick a fight with Nina. Hormones and that.

It was my birthday on Saturday! Since, believe it or not, it was Sophie's on Sunday, we threw a joint birthday party in Prospect Park and invited all of our friends -- and they all came! (Well, with a few notable (and forgivable) exceptions.) It was kind of shockingly well-attended. But we planned ahead and bought like twenty lbs. of ground chuck and hauled that gross little hibachi grill out of my closet. I cooked hot dogs and hamburgers for all comers, and I don't think I gave anyone food poisoning. Thanks for coming, everyone! I have pictures somewhere -- p'raps I'll post them later. It's sort of hard to keep this thing updated. I feel like I'm always busy, even though I do practically nothing.

Loot-wise, I got really nice and thoughtful presents from everyone, including Tom who got me Red Roses for Me by The Pogues, which features my new favorite song, Transmetropolitan:

This town has done us dirty
This town has bled us dry
We've been here for a long time
And we'll be here til we die
So we'll finish off the leavings
Of blood and glue and beer
And burn this bloody city down
In the summer of the year

I went through a stretch in high school where I was telling everyone that I didn't think I'd make it to 25. It wasn't for any particular reason -- I didn't have any specific awful thing in mind, though I did want to kill myself pretty bad off and on for a stretch -- but nonetheless it's sort of a pleasant surprise to be here. Hi, everyone.

A Drunkard's Dream If I Ever Did See One

So I just got back from a really great weekend on Cape Cod at Katharine's dad's "cottage" in Wellfleet, untanned but mosquito-bitten as all get-out, certainly not quite ready to face the office. We (me, Nina, Katharine, and Ted) left Thursday night after an awful, hectic day, which I should probably say something about first:

I failed my road test.

I am willing to accept most of the blame for this -- the fault of mine in any endeavor that I'm most ready to acknowledge is that I'm pretty fucking careless. When something's not fun or exciting, I tend to just sort of slop through it, even when I'm really trying to pay attention and be careful. It's fucking pathological. So I'm pretty sure that's why I got the following marks on the test:

• Poor judgement in traffic
• Fails to anticipate the actions of: Other

...even though I have no fucking idea what either of those mean. But that stuff only came after I'd already failed (i.e., gotten more than 30 points) for the following reasons:

• Unable to park properly (I hit the curb)
• Fails to adequately observe / use caution (I didn't check my passenger-side mirror when pulling over for a three-point turn)

That last one, which cost me 15 points, I totally blame on Lester, who, I swear to Christ, never once fucking mentioned that fucking mirror to me. I was also in an unfamiliar (shitty) car, since I'd registered for the test through the DMV instead of through the school, and Lester wasn't available. Instead, I got Mr. Hester, who was basically a nice guy, if a bit taciturn. He seemed kind of surprised at how bad I was, and snorted derisively when I told him Lester'd never gone through that with me (which might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it is). "Lester!" he said. "Man, you got to check your mirrors!"

So I was pretty disconsolate after I finished my 10 minutes, not least of all because the inspector, who was a real nice guy, had reassured me at the beginning of the test, "Don't worry -- this test is really just for beginners, to make sure you are safe enough to be practicing on the road to be a better driver unsupervised." And the cost of scheduling 3 more 90-minute lessons didn't make me feel any better, either. But I didn't have time to fret over that too much, because I also had to run to Nina's place to help Aanie move some IKEA furniture that we'd purchased the week before over to her place and then head up to my shrink and then get back to Brooklyn to help Nina get stuff together for the trip. We just barely made the 7:38 train to New Haven (Nina used all of her powers of haste to get us from the Time Sq. shuttle to gate 107 at Grand Central in under 4 minutes) where Ted and Katharine met us with the car that they'd picked up from Ted's parents' place.

We stopped at a deserted 24-hour Stop & Shop that smelled like a rabbit cage and loaded up with supplies. Ted, rogue that he is, stole two barrel-like containers of Poland Spring.

Day One: After blueberry pancakes, bacon, and eggs aux gruyere, we went to the beach at Newcomb Hollow. The water was too cold to swim in, though we waded a bit, and played with this brown seaweed that looked and felt disturbingly like hair. Nina and I took a walk and began a collection of pretty stones from along the shoreline that turned out to be kind of dull once they dried off. After that, we drove over to the bay and ate fried clams at the place we went last year that serves Moose Trax. Nobody ordered Moose Trax, but we all stuffed ourselves, and the place gave me a free iced tea by accident. A bit later, we made Ted-burgers -- well, Ted made them, and everyone else ate them.

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And then we got plastered listening to The Rocket and went for a walk, at substantially the same hour (late) and to the same location (Duck Pond) that everyone went last year, but it was about 40 degrees warmer this time. We sang along the way and brought a candle, which we planted in the sand by the pond and lit before going skinny-dipping, which is something I hadn't done since sprouting hair on my back. The water, or, at least, the sand, was surprisingly warm, and Ted and Katharine swam pretty far out -- halfway across to the pond towards this house with visibly lighted windows on the opposite shore. To my dismay, when I went to go join them I discovered that I'm not quite as strong a swimmer as I used to be. But there were tadpoles swimming around our thighs the whole time; pretty delightful. After a while, we headed back to the house and drank more, and everyone got sick but nobody threw up. The sun was way up by the time I fell asleep for real.

Day Two: In the morning, we swung by Gull Pond and rented a canoe for an hour, sufficiently overcoming our lingering nausea to make it around the perimeter of the two adjoining little ponds. Rowing is hard, and Katharine is fairly terrified of lilypads, it turns out.

In the evening, we headed down to Falmouth to see a reading of a new Adam Rapp play called "Essential Self-Defense" that Ted is trying to get produced by Edge. Paul Sparks and the two fat dudes from Living Room in Africa were in it, and everyone was pretty good, but the play itself was, I don't know, a little too silly? It was a lot of fun, though, and I think it'll be way more intelligible in its final staging.

At around 1:30 AM, we tried to hit up The Beachcomber (it would've been my first time), but even though it was packed with Massholes, the guy at the door said the place was closed. Oh, well.

Day Three: Went on a nature walk through this swamp next to an old Marconi telegraph station that's part of the National Seashore. The swamp itself was totally beautiful -- mossy lumps of earth rising out of this eerie red brine (colored by decaying leaves, we think?), and sporting strange, deciduous beach trees. About halfway in, though, I looked at Nina's back and realized she had, no kidding, about 10 mosquitos on her shirt attempting to drink her, and so did pretty much everyone else. I think we all kept admirably calm -- nobody (read: me) spazzed out -- but we were smacking ourselves and each other at regular intervals, leaving sheaves of dead and dying Culicidae in our wake.

After that, sadly, it was time to head home. We made a pit stop at Bruce & Betsy's to drop off the car when we got to Woodbridge, and they fed us homemade pork fajitas while we drank wine and clucked over their cat who'd lost a chunk of her face in a fight, and then got on the Metro-North back to ol' Jew Island. It was around midnight when I got home, cradling a carton of orange juice, my take from the spoils of uneaten food from the weekend.

Overall, a great vacation!

Got in to work Monday to find my desk covered with a fine dusting of copper and plaster. The orthodox jews who engineered the air conditioning system for our machine room are drilling and installing this water-cooling system right above my desk and Joel's.

Those Buzzcocks tickets I bought haven't come yet, or, more likely, they did come, in one of those shitty, nondescript Ticketmaster envelopes, and I or somebody else in the building threw them out / took 'em. I'm gonna go through my paper recycling this evening, but the show is tomorrow! Oh nos.

This morning Nina and I counted our respective mosquito bites: I've literally got about 50; she's got 25ish.

Woah-diddy, Woah-diddy Rocket

...I wanna be your sprocket

is how this Distillers song (found on their new website) goes. Don't think it's on any of their albums. It reminds me of that Nirvana song "No Recess," in a good way.

Nina got into Columbia!

The past few times I've gone running in the Park it's left me totally exhausted the next morning. But last night I saw the first (I think) fireflies of the season, and the whole park smelled like lavender and other nice things. Whenever I see fireflies it reminds me of this one particular time in high school that Asta and I went to Shakespeare In The Park, walking down this tree-lined path towards the Delacorte in Central Park, literally hundreds of fireflies winking on and off around us in the warm air. So that's nice. But Prospect Park has bunnies, too.

Does everyone know about Ted? Guy should be getting out of the hospital this morning after a 3-day bout with "spontaneous pneumothorax." Jesus -- just read the article on Wikipedia. Excerpt: "The flopping sound of the punctured lung is occasionally heard." So that's where I (and most of The Friends) were on Sunday; would've gone on Saturday, but it happened to be one of the few times ever that I let my phone completely die before recharging it. Anyway, though, Ted is fine, but I might not be -- according to the doctors he talked to, this is something that tends to "just happen" to young men who are tall and skinny. I'm drafting my will right now. (Just got a texto from him in the handicrapper: The tube is out.)

After visiting Ted, some of us went over to my parents' house for dinner. Tom, Emma, and Katharine got to meet mom and dad for the first time, practically. Predictably, the 'rents went a bit overboard -- my dad made this complicated mediterranean chicken thing and my mom bought three pies from Trader Joe's. But I think a good time was had by all.

Links:

• I know it's a little creepy of me, but I am totally into this video.
• Little bit too late to do this now; maybe next time
• Bugs.
• Literally a fairly awful tattoo.

Kind of heavily fucked on projects at work, but started working on the communications layer of my rewrite of gzochi again, after a few-week hiatus brought on by frustration with this one library I was using that wasn't giving me adequate debug information for a problem I was having. What snapped me out of it was giving up on that and just trying to figure things out from the top down -- turns out I'd made a really obvious mistake that only took a second to correct (and revealed more and juicier things to fix elsewhere).

Reading The Amber Spyglass. Considering buying tix to the Rancid show on Aug. 25th.

Elevator Action

I made roasted asparagus and baked beans tonight. They were pretty good! The Rase bought a whole bunch of episodes of Lost on iTunes. I think Hurley is pretty much my favorite character, even if he's forced to play the fatso minstrel when comic relief calls for it -- case in point, "These leaves ain't for eatin', man. Oooh, my stomach." [Diarrhea, stage left.]

Nina's been closing her magazine, which means she works really late every night. I stopped by to see her last week and we got coffee. The elevators in her office were all screwed up, and when we got back, one elevator had been shut down completely (with, she claimed, someone stuck inside waiting for the fire department to show up), and the other was racing between the first and the sixth floors at an alarming speed, totally on its own, making a buzzing noise that would get frighteningly loud whenever it came close. Nina took the stairs.

Finished the Nick Flynn, and ended up buying a copy of The Amber Spyglass, which Eve says is the best book in the series, because the library was giving me a hard time tracking it down. So we'll see.

One thing I've been digging on at work is listening to and sort of watching videos on YouTube, while I'm waiting for something to finish building or something. You guys remember the video for that Foo Fighters song Everlong? It's weird and cool. Also checking out episodes of what looks like a Tenacious D "show" on HBO, which is totally hilarious.

The Starry Machinery

Everyone's finishing videogames, it sounds like. Inspired by the fact that I never fucking finish any but the easiest of games (and that Nina's beaten The Warriors, past level 11 of which I cannot seem to get), I sucked it up last night and kicked the shit out of the four fiends (and their dumb boss, Garland) in the Temple of Elemental Chaos in Final Fantasy I from the FF:Origins collection. I sort of remember the ending from watching my friend Jay beat the game in elementary school, but I didn't remember this cute little section of text that scrolls up the screen:

The Warrior who broke the 2000 year Time-Loop is truly a LIGHT WARRIOR -- That warrior was YOU!

May the ORBS always shine!!

You betcha.

The Buzzcocks are playing Warsaw On July 11th, and I've got tickets! They also have a new album out called Flat-Pack Philosophy. All the critics are kind of ho-hum on it, but I really like (what I think is) the single off of it, "Wish I Never Loved You." You can hear it on their MySpace page.

Everything Old Is New Again

Rancid is touring again, with dates listed on their site that are bringing them propitiously close to New York. The Distillers' site, if not yet the band, is working again. So things might be kind of looking up, yeah?

Nina and I went to see Joan Jett at Southpaw on Tuesday. I'd never been there; the place has sort of a novel layout -- a sizeable stage and "pit" area with a low balcony thing at a small remove, which is ideal for short people and their chaperones. I had a great time, but I guess I'd forgotten (or had willfully never noticed) that Joan Jett just doesn't really... rock, you know? Somehow she's gotten herself crowned "the queen of punk," without actually having written any punk songs (except for "Bad Reputation," maybe). The stuff from the new album she was promoting was okay, but her band is stocked with douchebags and it's not clear why she needs a second guitarist and a keyboard player. Final complaint: She was real keen on the audience "having a good time," and kept checking in with us to make sure we were "ready to rock." Ugh. It's kind of a pet peeve of mine -- nothing inspires contempt in me for a band I'm going to see like them not having contempt for me.

Been going to BBQs are little parties and things on the weekends -- just the way summer should be, really. I caught the season premiere of Deadwood at Joel's place last night, in addition to the last episode from Season 2, Boy-The-Earth-Talks-To. I know a lot of you haven't seen Season 2, so I won't spoil anything, but, man... great writing in the scene between Hearst and Wolcott; great staging, great writing when Hearst is talking to Tolliver in the ruined, lamplit hotel room.

Just came down from the roof. It was mercifully light out when I got home at work, so I bought a six-pack of Yuengling Lite (which is actually kind of good) and went up there to do some reading and writing. It was pretty blissful and nicely productive.

Finished the second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. I'm taking a break before finishing it up with third (in which some kids with a computer and a really sharp knife fucking kill God) by reading Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, which Eve lent me. Very much enjoying it; an excerpt:

The night he showed us his photo album, after the house went quiet, I crept into the kitchen for a glass of water, the sink still full of sea clams, forgotten. Under the fluorescent hum they'd opened their shells and were waving their feet, each as think and long as my forearm. A box of snakes, some draped onto the countertop, some trying to pull themselves out.

That, I think, might be worth the price of admission alone.

Tentatively, I think I'm ready for some adventure. It's been a long time since I've been able to say that.

My Dark Materials

Should I have made plans for Memorial Day? To tell you the truth, I hadn't even realized it was coming until Friday, basically. Trying to make the best of it, though -- yesterday morning, Nina and I bought food from Matamoros, the cheapest, best Mexican food in Sunset Park, and then took it to eat in, well, Sunset Park. I'd never been there before. There's a great view of Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan from the summit, though it was so hazy that you couldn't really see much except for a row of perfectly-aligned water towers. In the evening, we managed to Tom-Sawyer Mario into hosting a barbecue that Eve and some people from work showed up to. We made vegetable kebabs, burgers, and lamb stew meat, all of which ended up being pretty great. I know it's not the conventional or polite way to plan activities, but I love it when a five-minutes-before-the-fact thing comes together. We drank a bottle of Jameson that Nina and I'd bought at Brooklyn Liquors: CostCo for Alcoholics!

But, yeah, the weather just shockingly warm, right? Don't know whether it's time to start using the air conditioner or not. I was sweating when I drove around with Lester today -- every time I go driving, a few more pieces to the puzzle that is Lester fall into place, some of them bloggable, some of them not. A month or so ago, he'd told me that he had a "girl on the side" in Sunset Park, and I was sort of at a loss for words: Had he taken me into his confidence and just revealed his marital infidelity to me? It turns out, no, his wife's been dead for 20 years. His girlfriend is a "Pakistanian" heart surgeon with a very conservative family. He showed me some sort-of-racy pictures of her that he had to grab out of the trunk while we were waiting at a light.

I scheduled a driving test for July 6th (something I should've done through the school, Lester says). Last year, what was I doing? Maybe by the end of the summer I'll be able to rent cars and drive people places!

Right now I'm eating some frozen pizza from last Sunday, from when Tom and Tedders came over and we baked cookies and watched local news. I just got back from watching X-Men 3 with The Rase. Spoiler alert: It suhcks.

Dirty Heroin

This is my heart
This is my arm
This is my heart

I think I've finally managed to lose my glasses. Nina and I went for a walk in Roosevelt Park on Friday, after eating eel dumplings at this place called XO in Chinatown with an overwhelming menu and getting some pretty great ice cream at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. It sort of boggles my mind the extent to which she knows the Avenues & Alleyways of this town far better than I do. We stopped at this playground where I think we both used to play as kids, and spent a while screwing around with this sort of bicycle-operated carousel. I'm pretty sure this guy walking past winged a rock at my head; it only hit me on the arm; a sour thing nonetheless. Then we headed over to the Irish Hunger Memorial, an actual, transplanted Irish homestead with a series of plaques with quotes about the potato murrain. Unfortunately, it was closed, but as we stood there peeking into the entrance, we realized that the huge iron gate that bars the door doesn't have a lock -- it just slides open. There is a locked door that protects the stone homestead part of the memorial, but we were able to clamber up the stones and over one of the walls onto the top of the whole thing, where you get a pretty great view of the Hudson River. I put my glasses on the wall up there for a few minutes and didn't pick them up when we left. They were gone on Sunday when I went to go look for them, so I think that might be it.

Flash ActionScript has got to be one of the worst "languages" on the scene, I swear. Or maybe it's just that the Flash authoring environment is beyond piss-poor. I'm trying to help Tom put together what we have been referring to between the two of us as "Golden Girls: The Game." Play as one of three of the four Golden Girls (that short one won't be playable, I don't think) or as an as-yet unspecified fourth character -- we're thinking either Snaggletooth or Barney Rubble. Your mission: thwart Peter Stormare's attempts to build a basketball stadium over the Golden Girls railyards (and commit rape).

I'm reading the first book in that Philip Pullman trilogy; everyone else has already read that stuff, right? I haven't.

Tom and I watched three versions of this short film, about a strange kid in Montana who does terrible impressions at a high school talent show, including, horrifyingly, Olivia Newton John. The movie's called The Beaver Kid, and the first version is a documentary -- the second two are somewhat exploitative dramatizations of the first, starring, respectively, Sean Penn and Crispin Hellion Glover. Has anyone else heard of this? Konrath lent it to me, and I've been trying to puzzle out the directorial intent for a while.

Went to a Yankees-Red Sox game with Emma and Joel, my boss, last Wednesday at Yankee Stadium -- it was going to be just me and Emma, but I accidentally bought three tickets while trying to follow this scheme that Wass-man described to me for buying sets of contiguous seats from the MLB website. But yeah, it was wild! Yankee Stadium looks dizzyingly huge, particularly from the box where we were sitting, and the field is strikingly green. Nothing exceptional about the game itself, really, although the Yankees had Mariano Rivera close, scaring the hell out of a bunch of awful Red Sox batters with a run of 15 perfect 100+ MPH pitches. They were jumping away from the plate! Emma was right: Yankee Stadium hot dogs are totally delicious, and there were a surprising number of fistfights in the stands. Over in our area, a guy sitting behind us took every jeer-worthy error by Boston as an opportunity to yell at Joel about his Mark Bellhorn jersey. "Bellhorn sucks!" he'd holler. "Take off the jersey! He doesn't even play for them any more!" He kept it up for like 3 hours, no joke.

Are we already half of the way through May? I feel like this year is sort of slipping through my fingers. What do I have to show for all this time? The trees outside my bedroom window are bright, bright green. I guess that's something. I just kind of boxed Kitty's ears for tearing open a bag of baking chocolate in the kitchen; she acted quite offended for a few minutes, but now she's back, milk-kneading the comforter where she thinks my legs are. They always come back!

Crazy-Head: The Survey

I was having dinner with my old Time-Life latchkey-kid friend Eva last night at the venerable Pizza Box, and we somehow made the discovery that we both suffer from the same strange, intermittent sleep disorder. We'll be sleeping and dreaming about some kind of rote, stressful problem that can't be solved -- for me, it's usually a programming thing; for her, she said it was stuff like arranging the bottles behind the bar where she works -- and then we wake up and this awful cycle of thoughts won't stop. Like, I keep thinking about and trying to solve whatever problem it is that I was stuck on after I'm awake, but the entire... vocabulary of my mind is kind of devoted to thinking about this one thing. It's very disorienting and scary. Eventually you either go back to sleep or become more fully awake and it goes away. Eva calls it "crazy-head." I'd actually come up with a name for it myself, "rigid thinking," which I thought sounded pleasingly like a spell you might cast in first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I like hers better -- it's descriptive and simple. Anyhow, she'd asked her boyfriend whether he ever got crazy-head, and apparently he was like, "No, never." She thought she was the only one until we talked about it. So I pose the question to you, the Internet: You guys ever get this? Leave a comment.

Reading a book of Nick Tosches essays that Nina lent me: I don't think I've ever really had fun in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually capable of it. Oh well, software to write.

What The Fuck, Kitty?

Home from work today -- the "markets" are closed, so so is DSI.

I went to The Gaping Abyss show at Lit Lounge last night -- it was no good! Not because the guys (and Gabi) weren't good, but because the club fucked up the schedule and the Abyss only got to play four (4) songs. Everyone was pissed, not least of all Razor, but the booker felt bad and gave out extra drink tickets. Bill gave his to me and I ordered a gin and tonic, for which I had to venture outside the VIP room through a shoulder-to-shoulder zoo of awful, grinding NYU hipsters. Ugh. There was a sign above the bar that said, "Waitress Service Only," which is dumb to begin with, but the club was so packed that the one wairtress was just standing right by the bar. You had to give your order to her, and she'd take your money and repeat the order to the bartender, who'd make the drink, give it to her, and she'd give it to you.

A guy from one of the other bands found Sarah's wallet, which had fallen out of her purse (or had been stolen) right by the door. Thankfully all the money was there, though the Metrocard was missing. Sarah said, "Oh, thank you so much! How can I ever repay you?" The guy from the band said, "Well, you could give me a kiss," and leaned in to kiss her -- she ducked away, and Billy sort of rolled up as politely as possible, receiving a kiss himself in the bargain. So everybody basically saved face. But that kind of thing always fills me with white-hot rage -- especially when someone hits on a girl I'm, you know, with, but with female friends, too. I've tried to introspect a bit to see why it makes me so mad; I don't know if it's that I think people shouldn't act like that, period, or if it's that I'm jealous and ashamed of being an impotent homonculus.

On the way down from Sarah's church where we dropped off the instruments, we stopped in at Sip, where The Jarch tends bar, and she happened to be there: bit of a coincedence, since it turned out that she only works the night shift that one night of the week. Razor left to hit the sack, but I ended up staying until she closed up. It was really nice talking to her again, even though watching her serve food and alcohol to a bunch of moony-looking losers making slurry attempts at conversation with her was sort of unpleasant. I don't know, it's not like I wasn't doing the same thing, but as I mentioned to her, her job is like teaching a pre-school class where all the toddlers want to marry you.

I got home at 5:00 AM. Christ.

Kitty started up the breakfast yowling at 10:00 AM; I held out, falling in and out of sleep, until 11:30, at which point I flung wide the bedroom door and chased her around the house for a few minutes growling at her and trying to smack her. I did capitulate and feed her, of course -- I even gave her some of the dry food that she really likes -- but the excitement may have been too much for her: I dropped by Reel Life for a couple of hours and hung out with Luisa -- she let me sit up at the desk and showed me how the little library computer program they use works. Eventually Joe Martin, the guy who runs the place, started getting kind of weird and huffy, and Luisa agreed that I should skedaddle. But when I got home, I found that Kitty had puked all over Sophie's laptop keyboard, and then, again, on part of the air conditioner and behind the radiator. What the fuck, right? Jesus. I pulled out the affected keys and washed them and then sort of scrubbed out the keyboard stuff underneath. Heres hoping it worked. I'm headed off to Eve's seder, now. I stood around and watched her mom make the gefilte fish yesterday evening, which was sort of fascinating, although having seen how it's made, I want to eat it even less.

Tim Hopper the electrician came by to fix the intercom, which no longer buzzes when people press the button. I asked if he could fix the button up here that lets people in the front door, but he said the building's not set up for that. Mystery solved.

Blogging the FSF

I woke up at 6:00 AM on Saturday the 1st, still sort of drunk and sick from Williamsburg Porkapalooza 2006, and hauled myself to East Broadway, where I was the last person to get on the 7:00 AM Lucky Star bus to Boston. This is distinctly similar to what happened last year. But, yeah, I spent the day at MIT listening to the presentations at the Free Software Foundation's annual members meeting.

I'd assumed that the meeting would be in the same room -- Stata Center 155 -- as it was last year, but when I got inside, there appeared to be some sort of Women-in-Computing seminar going on; the ladies at the desk were nice enough ("Free Software Foundation? Cool!"), but had no idea where I belonged. After some unsuccessful wandering around, I actually called my mom on my cell phone and she looked up the room number for me on their web site. It was Building 34, room 101. Unfortunately, Building 34 turned out to be pretty impossible to find. While I was wandering around hopelessly, though, I ran into none other than Eben Moglen, who was looking for the building himself and had also gotten fairly lost. I tagged around after him as he kind of huffed and puffed up and down a few flights of stairs, but we were pretty ready to admit defeat after about 15 minutes of following promising signs into dead ends. By a stroke of luck, just as we were about to give up we ran into Gerald Sussman, who was going to pick up a projector from his office. He walked us through some dark and austere corridors that we would never have found on our own and eventually we made it to the meeting.

As we were walking, they discussed the difficulty of finding RMS accomodations that would be provably free of smoke (I think). Eben said something like, "At least he's complaining about himself so much right now that he can't complain about how unhappy the state of the world makes him."

I got in in the middle of Geoffrey Knauth's speech -- he's one of the more economics-minded people on the board. He was talking about whether exporting Free Software to the developing world was hurting job prospects in the first world, and I was hoping to pick up some good talking points, not least of all to convince myself, since I'm not clear on a lot of the macro parts of these issues. His argument, though was basically that the first world is still producing the most software expertise and thus exporting the highest quality of Free Software, and that we'll know when the recipients of this expertise stand a chance to move in on our job market when we start seeing high quality Free Software coming out of the developing world. I don't know if I buy this, necessarily. Kind of anthropic.

Afterwards, I bought a neat little lapel pin from someone at the merch table who looked a little bit like RMS's girlfriend, Tania; in retrospect, it wasn't her at all.

Sussman gave what I thought was pretty much the same talk as he gave last year on the importance of interchangeable, standardized components. He did make the interesting point that robustness in biological systems is deeply related to diversity; we need support linguistic diversity in programming languages for the same reasons. He also discussed what he referred to as "paranoid programming," the idea that no input can be trusted, nor can the output of any interchangeable parts that are used by the program; data needs to be annotated with some representation of its "source," so that problems with calculations can be isolated and resolved after the fact. Somehow we got to self-organizing systems -- I guess he was making the point that a satisficing algorithm does not always behave deterministically, or even in a way we might expect. Vein structures in the human hand, for example, differ from person to person because the mechanism for laying out veins is organized around covering an oxygen topology, and the availability of oxygen during vein development is dependent on environment.

After that, we broke for lunch -- they had substantially the same fare as last year, which, you know, was good. I was feeling pretty hung over from Katharine's party, and when I got up from the steps I'd been sitting on while eating, I noticed I'd left a big gross ass-sweat mark. So I went to the men's room and tried to take a crap, but people kept coming in, including a guy who was taking a piss but must have had prostate problems or something, because he could only piss in these weird short little bursts that seemed to require significant abdominal effort on his part -- so much so that he let out this tremendous fart at one point. I made a coughing noise to remind him he wasn't alone, but I don't think he was concerned.

Eben Moglen, who was next, opened his talk with, "Vista will be late, Office will be late, Virtual Server will be late, but the GPLv3 will be on time. Free Software is better." This met with a good deal of appreciative noise from the audience. The brunt of his talk, though was on how GNU/Linux -- and Free Software in general -- are set to make enormous gains in the embedded market because of the economics inherent in that sector. What he said, semi-verbatim, is that if you're Nokia or Siemens or Sony, say, and you've got a set of diverse hardware that you need to sell to consumers, you need to have a software platform that is robust, very well-understood, fully debugged, and absolutely secure. And it needs to be 100% free, financially, because otherwise the guy who makes it is going to eat your lunch. And what meets that need is Free Software -- it's become an essential raw material in consumer electronics manufacturing, and it's not replaceable. However, the move towards "Trusted Computing" has thrown up some stumbling blocks for Free Software, because TC methodologies rely heavily on non-Free cryptographic interfaces to hardware. The GPLv3 will do a lot of work towards making TC and thus DRM irrelevant, but he made the point that the industry's idea of a "trusted" kernel that meets their robustness requirements is basically a pipe dream, given that kernels are, by nature, too big and too volatile to be constantly re-assessed for "trustworthiness." As such, engineers worried about "trust" are moving more towards thin virtualization layers or application-layer DRM, both of which make conflicts with Free Software people less intense.

Winning the war on restrictive hardware, he said, is a conservative activity (I think he really meant "conservationist") -- we need to constantly emphasize the consumer demand for general-purpose computing hardware. But organizing consumers is always difficult.

He also said that the FSF has been watching major technology players get on board with TC and DRM for a long time and warning them that it was dangerous, and then "we made some very reasonable remarks about DRM in the GPLv3 and everyone went nuts. That's really what happened -- they went nuts. And I'm not talking about Linus. Linus did not go nuts by any means."

Ultimately, though, he thinks, The Time Is Right to push on industry.

When he opened the floor to questions, I asked him if he thought the state of mounting software patent aggression had changed since last year, and he gave a very long and interesting answer to the effect that it hadn't changed drastically, but that there'd been some high-profile legal skirmishes that have made a number of big players wary of participating in patent-hoarding. He also mentioned PubPat, which I hadn't known existed, and discussed some cases they'd been involved with.

RMS was up next, and, like last year, he gave a rather poor showing -- a short (16 minutes), rambling talk about the dangers of DRM. I asked him afterwards if he'd changed his position on the necessity for Free licenses for non-software creative works given the argument he'd had with Larry Lessig at last year's meeting, and he vehemently denied getting into an argument with Larry at all -- he claimed I must have read an article that misreported the event, and I was like, well, you know, okay, fine. But he did say that he'd come to believe that Free licenses should be encouraged for certain types of creative work, although he didn't really get too deep into discussing that. I was pleased that fewer people in the audience seemed to be interested in baiting him, though that didn't seem to make him any less ill-tempered.

Henri Poole had somehow wound up with the unpleasant task of soliciting suggestions from the members -- his presentation was called The Member Forum, and was basically all about organizing people into geographic delegations and soliciting suggestions for activism from them. He's sort of the most friendly-looking member of the board, but he also always looks like he's got this secret pain, like he's been gut-shot and is trying to hide it from everyone. I was actually a little bit psyched to meet the NYC / Brooklyn contingent, but it turned out they were all complete douchebags! The two ugliest and dumbest guys there had both been former employees of the FSF and began practically every sentence with, "When I was at the FSF..." And, you know, that wouldn't be a problem if they had anything smart to say, but neither they nor really anyone else there seemed to Get It when it came to what the FSF needs to do to leverage public support. These guys were really hung up on the sort of "reach one person" style of activism, where you give really breathy, earnest, personal speeches about stuff to roomfuls of senior citizens and people with weird and unpleasant disabilities who don't have anywhere else to be in the middle of the day. Look, I don't have any activism experience myself, but it seems to me that what the FSF needs is more public visibility-focused initiatives, like the Firefox full-page ad in the NYTimes. The FSF needs to get on peoples' voting radar, and once they've done that they can focus on handing out free OpenOffice CD-ROMs at the veterans' center. That's a luxury activity. What the FSF does not need is to recruit more pushy, wall-eyed people with acne scars who insist on saying "Treacherous Computing" when they're having a conversation with you; that tack is right for writing a letter to the editor, not for talking to Real Live Humans.

The capstone on the dumbass member forum was the chubby, smug former-FSF beardo saying that having members give speeches at public functions is infeasible because public speaking is so difficult. "We'd basically have to send everyone to Toastmasters," he said. "That's where Richard learned to be such a great public speaker." RMS is probably one of the worst public speakers I've ever seen. I mean, I'm completely devoted to his movement, but he's a surly, slouchy, mumbly piece of crap in front of a microphone. Get off his jock.

So that part of the meeting put me in kind of a bad mood, but then on the way back home on the bus, Maggie talked to me for two hours on my cell phone, which was delightful. Plus I am never going to get sick of riding around in cars and buses in New England looking out the window. I'm sure it's just that I've got so many happy memories of things that happened in Massachussetts (trips with my family and my other family), but I swear that state is the most beautiful in the Union. The flora, the fauna, the sights, the sounds, the smells. I love it.

Don't Give A Fuck About Shitaly

...is a line from a newish Headliners song (i.e., one with which I am not involved at all) called "Bike Tour." Apparenty this version of the line beat out "don't give a shit about Fuckaly."

On Sunday, I had a much better lesson with Lester than the last one, even managing to extract some praise from him regarding the smoothness of my parallel parks.

Last night Nina and I had planned to meet up at that place Chickpea at St. Marks Place to go to Continental to see the band of a guy who we'd gone to high school with way back when. I was waiting outside for her when I ran into Perri, a dude I'd gone to Wesleyan with and with whom I'd appeared in a mime show called The Dumb Show (I was the upright bass player in the "mime band"). Embarrassingly, his name escaped me for minutes on end and by the grace of God popped into my head as I was taking down his cell number. He and a few other Wesleyan friends were hanging out in the back room of Chickpea eating falafel, and I sat down at caught up with them for a while. There was this elderly Jewish guy sitting by himself one table over who would occasionally say something out loud in response to something in our conversation, but we ignored him. I kept worrying that Nina wasn't going to be able to find me in the back, so finally I got up to back outside, but the Jewish guy called out to me on my way out and asked me to sit down for a second.

He clearly didn't have any teeth -- he had ordered some kind of pita and egg concoction that he was gumming messily, spraying egg whites at me after separating them from the yolk with a plastic spoon. The first things he told me were that he had learned to chew better without the teeth than with them (but that he had a set of $3000 dentures somewhere that he just didn't like to take out to dinner with him) and that he could do more to a woman with just his tongue than other men could do with their entire bodies. Then he asked if I'd like to hear the rap / reggae song he'd composed -- the words, spoken, were as follows:

The truth comes from the Torah
Not Sodom and Gomorrah

I'll make you queen of the 'hood
If you love me good

I'll make you queen of the night
If you fuck and suck me right

Immediately after repeating the last couplet, he addressed the ceiling and said, "I'm sorry; I know I'm supposed to be humble. But sometimes it's hard to be humble." He explained that he'd had five Cokes to drink already that night and that they made him feel crazy. Almost without stopping for breath, he started telling me about growing up in Brooklyn as the son of a guy named Bullet Joe, whom he claimed was a prominent figure in the Jewish mafia in the 40s. "Ask me why they called him Bullet Joe," he said.

"Why did they call him Bullet Joe?"

"Because he only ever needed one bullet. He'd always carry around one bullet. And a lot of ammunition."

"Wait, I thought he only needed one bullet."

"One bullet per guy. There might be more than one guy, though."

Nina showed up soon after -- she'd had train trouble and we were now too late to see the show, so she sat down in time to hear Ellie, which was the guy's name, talk about how he'd been on the run for the past six months from members of his father's old gangs, having to duck in and out of hospitals where'd he'd seek treatment for "physical conditions" only to be confined for psychiatric counseling by doctors he referred to as "Jew Nazis." He'd been followed by mafiosi as he hid out at synagogues and friends' houses, as far as Stamford, CT -- "I look out the window," he said, "and see them circling the block" -- to the extent that he'd decided that day that he could never return to Brooklyn. "It's Manhattan and Israel only, now," he said. I can't remember the order of the points he hit on in the extended lecture he gave us, but the following is, hopefully, a representative survey:

• "There's a war going on in Brooklyn right now between the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, and the niggers. You see the movie Munich? I didn't see it, I bought a bootleg from the Latin guy who sells movies, but there's a line in it: 'The only fucking blood I care about is Jewish blood.' That's how I feel."
• Despite the above, he would like to make pornographic films with Guyanese women. "Nobody gets hurt to make a film."
• He's had six heart attacks since 1990, but is getting his cholesterol and arterial plaque under control. Nemacor and Zocor should be avoided; they are shit.
• As a teenager, he'd dated a hot girl named Barbara Ann Chertman. After a memorable evening on the beach under a blanket, she told him she wanted to see other guys. Months later he got a letter from her saying, "I missed you more than I thought I would." They trysted in a motel room on an uncomfortable bed. Now she's married. She'd said it was a marriage of convenience, and that she'd like to see him again. After several unreturned phone calls and letters, you know what he thinks? "Barbara Ann, you can suck my fucking dick."
• Would I like to see how strong he is, even at 60? He had me shake his hand with my strongest grip. He did have a strong hand for an old guy, but he wasn't killing me or anything. "Had enough?" he asked? "I'm getting there," I said. "No, you've had enough. You should give up now."
• After my friend Perri left the restaurant, Ellie informed me he was a member of the gang that was gunning for him and which was waiting outside Chickpea. "You wanna take me tonight, Perri, you scum? Go right ahead. But I'll be in Heaven. You'll be burning in Hell with my father and his boys. I'll be watching you burn in Hell."

He'd taken a real creepy shine to Nina from the get-go and at some point asked her for a piece of blank paper. She offered him a relatively empty page from the Harper's she was carrying, and he took out a ball-point pen and scribbled the following across the page:

Dearest Ninotchka,

May you always know and enjoy the happiness and beauty the mirror reflects and...

It took him fucking forever to do this, because he insisted on holding the pen like a knife and going over each huge letter several times ("I like to go hard and deep"). He wouldn't let Nina read it at all, and he wouldn't let me read the last line, which is why I don't know how it ends -- she got a call from her mother and had to escape Ellie's attempts to physically wrest the phone from her by retreating towards the entrance. After a few minutes alone with him, I realized she'd left and went outside to find her; we decided to ditch the Harper's and just skedaddle.

Holy Fucking Ow

What are some things that have happened to me?

A few Sundays ago I was eatin' pizza and watchin' the Oscars and my cheek and gums over on the upper righthand side of my mouth started hurting fairly badly. At first I assumed it was another motherfucker of a canker sore like the one I got last year around this time, but then my cheek swelled up and by Wednesday I couldn't really eat at all. So I called Dr. Dorato on Thursday and he prescribed me some Amoxicillin, which I have been taking assiduously, even though the capsules it comes in are fucking huge. My fucking mouth is still sore as shit, but at least I can basically talk and eat again.

I've been going to a lot of shows, lately -- dragged Alana to Billy's show at CGBG, going to Previn's show at The Delancey tonight.

Things to look forward to:

• FSF meeting on April 1st
• Yankees / Red Sox game with Emma on May 10th

Yesterday I had a driving lesson with Lester that I totally blew because I'd been up late the night before. My hands were shaking the whole time, and Lester got pretty mad at me. At one point he had me pull over and he actually got out and got into the driver's seat and showed me how to do something; he'd never done that before. It was kind of scary -- he's an extremely fast and precise driver, sort of like when Atticus Finch shoots the rabid dog. On the curb we found a few scattered plastic garbage bag ties and collected them so we could re-attach the vanity mirror in the car, which had basically fallen off.

I'm still really tired; time for bed.

Direct From Hollywood Cemetery

Yeah, so I'm going to start writing in this thing again, I think. I just had to take a breather for a while. You don't want anyone to watch you try to swallow a pill that is far too large to swallow.

On Thursday Nina and Eve and I went to the Ted Leo show at The Hook, which is a rock club in Red Hook. The show was great, but the audience was probably one of the worst I've ever seen -- no one was dancing around, and it was all sort of mild-looking chubby dudes with huge beards wearing flannel shirts, and then these tiny little girls wearing fancy-looking clothes and hats. Look, it's been a while since I considered myself "up" on rock music, but The Pharmacists are basically a punk band, right? And if you're standing like 2 feet from the stage at a show, it's okay to dance around a little bit, right? I started shoving Eve and Nina around, but these girls standing next to me said, "Stop it." Christ.

Ted Leo says "thanks" when the audience applauds after every song. This would be pretty lame, except that he says it in a kind of snotty way that reminds me of Leonard Graves Phillips.

The two opening bands were Direct From Hollywood Cemetery, which I liked, even if no one else did, and Les Aus, which I hated, even if no one else did. Call me a contrarian; I can take it.

I just got back from my first driving lesson in about a year -- I'd tried to schedule something before today, but Lester's a real popular teacher and then I had to postpone a lesson I'd scheduled for the blizzard. Lester's as good a teacher as I remember, and within half an hour I felt pretty confident behind the wheel again. And, as usual, there was some excitement: We were practicing parallel parking near the Red Hook Project in Red Hook when we heard people shouting over at this bus shelter. When we got closer, we saw two girls kicking another girl who they'd knocked down. After a few seconds they ran off into the projects. Lester grabbed the wheel with one hand, heading us into the project parking lot ("Give gas," he said), and started dialing 911 on his cell with the other. We turned around a bend into this sort of cul-de-sac where we found a police cruiser just kind of sitting there. Lester jumped out and ran over to them, pointing at the fleeing girls, who were running in the opposite direction. The cruiser took off, but they didn't seem like they were in a particular hurry, and the girls got away, much to Lester's chagrin. He had me circle around the block several times, muttering all the while about the brazenness of a daylight mugging at a bus stop. And then he had me parallel park practically every car on the next two blocks.

Right now FOX 5 is showing this frustrating, moody Hal Hartley movie called No Such Thing. Do they know who watches TV on a Saturday afternoon? Okay, I guess they're right; it's me.

I'm feeding the cat of one of the IT guys at work, and as payment he is allowing me to host a karaoke party at his house using his Time Warner On-Demand Karaoke Channel. So far the response to my invitations has been... lukewarm. But we'll see what happens.

Spit Stix Las Vegas

I don't really have anything to say about Las Vegas, except to avoid the shrimp cocktail at the Golden Gate -- especially during the muscular dystrophy telethon. I'm sure you all can read about it our trip in other people's blogs.

In place of all that, here's a recipe for the drink I've been drinking this week -- just like granddad used to make:

5 parts bourbon
2 parts sweet vermouth
Bitters
A cherry

It's a Manhattan! Welcome home, everyone.

The Mantii Are My Only Friends

Today's Times has an article about the differences (shock: they are significant) between Howard Stern and David Lee Roth, who is replacing him in certain markets after his move to Sirius. The article includes one of the more accurate characterizations I've read of what it is the Howard Stern Show is all about:

Mr. Stern, as his fans know, is born for radio: his on-air character is an unwashed basement figure, best kept out of sight -- a haggard masturbator and morbid misanthrope who must hang out with deformed and desperate men because he can hardly perform with women. The fact that the pinup girls who come on his show now seem to want to have sex with him is, in his telling, evidence only of the women's ambition and depravity.

The Stern character simply hates his guests and co-hosts as he hates himself; he's a mean little pornography-addicted freak whose self-loathing reverses itself only in fits of equally grotesque narcissism, as when he flashes his listeners with a dirty raincoat by disclosing disgusting secrets about himself. But his relentlessly loser style makes him seem honest, and wins him a privileged relationship with the truth; fans believe what he says -- about everything from politics to back pain to etiquette. He has hewn his character brilliantly.

This is a bit florid, but, yeah, that's why I used to listen (I tuned out after he went through a pretty creepy period right after September 11th, 2001). I've always felt there are two groups of Stern fans -- there are the "desperate men" types who listen for the chance to hear some stripper's measurements described, and then there are guys like me and Razor who (correct me if I'm wrong, Bill) get off on the "character" described above because it's sort of an acknowledgment or expiation of the things we most dislike about ourselves. I don't think it's a more intellectual way of appreciating the show -- the urge towards self-effacement is about as visceral as the desire to hear about titties on the radio. At least, it is for me.

I'm not gonna pay 13 bucks a month for it, though.

Oh, Berlin

...your heart has been / drawn and quartered again.

At the behest of Jeremy, I went to go see my old summer camp / high school friend Alana's band Cherryfix play tonight at the Mercury Lounge. She and the lovely Serena used to be in an outfit called Contraband, whose patch I still have on my "punk" sweatshirt that my dad got me from the Gap. This new band has a very different sound -- it's kind of a not-so-hard hard rock thing. Which is not to say it's not good; they're certainly a lot better than I remember from listening to the MP3s on their web site. Those readers who are up on their Juliology may remember that the Headliners had a song about her called I Wanna Be Alana's Boyfriend (MP3 no longer available, sadly, from Hey Suburbia), that went a little like this:

Last time I saw her, she was lyin' on the street
Kids were all dancin' to that punk rock beat
Took her for a ride on the ferris wheel
But she'll never know just how I feel

I wanna be Alana's boyfriend
I wanna hold her so tight
I wanna be Alana's boyfriend... tonight...

I tell you, I still kind of want to be Alana's boyfriend. I really really wanted it on the bus to summer camp in Long Island when I was 12 years old. And her band covered "Heart Shaped Box" last night. So they've got my vote, Mr. A & R man.

In preparation for Vegas, I've been watching gambling movies this week. Last night I watched Rounders with Tom, who claims, inexplicably, that Matt Damon is a better actor than Ed Norton (I mean, I'm not a guy who likes either of those creeps that much, but Matt is obviously Bigger Scumbag). That movie is not so good -- like Sophie said, it's not a movie that presents poker as a metaphor for human interaction or anything, it's just a movie that's literally about poker. And it doesn't really even involve Vegas, which made me feel foolish after I figured that out. Tonight I rented The Cooler, which is an extremely dopey movie, even though everyone in it is sort of working really hard to make sure you don't find out. Alec Baldwin's quite good, though, and so is Maria Bello. This sounds like a movie review... I'm just talking about some movies that I watched, man.

What else, what else. Tom and I hung out with Eve at O'Connor's on Monday night and stuffed ourselves on these delicious cookies that she baked. I'd never been to that place before -- it's nice and quiet (at least on a Monday) and it's got a good jukebox. And you can't beat $2.50 gin-and-tonics, even though they're so weak you gotta drink like 10 of them to get effed up. Eve: What a gal.

Listening to the fucking Strokes album non-stop at work. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Reminder: Change the cat litter before getting on that fucking plane!

Crying In The Handicapped Bathroom

Honest to God, I hadn't seen the movie The Squid and the Whale when I posted that picture last time, and I didn't, for some reason, even think I wanted to go see it, but Emma wanted to go on Monday night, so I tagged along, and it was really, really great. All of the actors are fantastic, particularly the two kids. Not that my parents got divorced or anything, nor is my dad quite as pompous as Jeff Daniels' character, but as Emma pointed out, there's a lot to identify with in there. I was a weird little kid, too, not unlike the younger brother character, though somewhat less perverse. I guess the one problem with the movie is that, like Wes Anderson, who I think was producer on this one, this Baumbach guy doesn't really make any effort to explain (or doesn't understand) what motivates any of his female characters. They're like some kind of religious mystery. I don't know. I don't get it, either, though, so...

I bought the new Strokes album yesterday (along with a repurchase of Dawn of the Dickies, which I'd lost, and Rancid's Life Won't Wait -- which is supposed to be their smartest and best album, but is, predictably, kind of unlistenable, or at least about 0% catchy), and it's actually pretty good. It's certainly got more good material than the second one. I was getting annoyed the other day about how pathetic the "new rock" sound was the last time I checked in on it, but I don't know why I like The Strokes but hate, say, The Postal Service and The Killers and every other sort of folky-sounding piece of limp garbage. Maybe it's the "neat" production. Or that the guy's name is Julian. So far my favorite songs are "Heart In A Cage," "On The Other Side," and "Vision Of Division."

Every year this science "zine" called Edge publishes an article called The Question, in which they ask a bunch of famous scientists and sciencey-types a sort of thought-question. This is a great way to kill literally an hour or two of your work-day because there are a lot of responses and they are pretty long. Last year the question was "What do you believe that you cannot prove?" This year it's "What is your most dangerous idea?" I feel like a lot of the people who answered didn't really understand it, because most of them described an idea that they hoped wasn't true but probably was, like that global warming is pretty much unstoppable at this point. I was surprised to see that a lot of the responses were like... materialist explanations for consciousness, and the idea that "this is all there is" -- I thought that shit was pretty well-accepted at this point, particularly among scientists. Here are some of the ones I thought were interesting:

Jeremy Bernstein:

The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is.

Scott Sampson:

The purpose of life is to disperse energy.

Haim Harari:

Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).

I'm finally getting back to doing some writing, after, gee... about four years, roughly. Isn't it funny how time can just pass like that?

Hatriotism

Happy New Year, everyone. 2005 was not the best year ever, let's just say, for many different reasons. I'm a complainer, I admit it, but there was some stuff I didn't even complain about that was bad, and, you know... But I think this new year can really be a good one -- I mean, by the law of Star Trek movie sequels, it practically has to be -- and I wish all of you, really all of you, a really great one. I really mean it. This is my little prayer for everyone. There it is, done. Happy New Year! Resolutions:

• Deal with my anxiety problems... maybe
• Drink more. Literally! Time to stop being such a baby on this one
  • Be able to drink shots without sipping and spluttering like a cat taking a pill
• Get my Driver's License
• Keep working on various computer projects, etc.

Just checked the archives, and it looks like I didn't write any resolutions down last year, but I think they were to become vegetarian (did it for about 6 months) and to run more (did it!).

So tuffytuffins turned out to be Maggie, somewhat predictably, though I admit I was sort of stumped for a long time. I've given her enough of a hard time in person, so I won't go into it further here, but suffice it to say that a stuffed animal roughly meeting her description arrived in the mail, causing a bit of consternation in our household. But how can anyone stay mad at Maggie when she gives such nice Christmas presents:

Compton; Compton; Apple Bottom

I think the presents I gave worked out well, except that I gave KT something Katharine had been talking about. That was embarrassing. Really wonderful holiday parties, pretty much. Razor and Chris even came to the big New Year's party at Tom's place. I was sort of preoccupied; I don't know if they had a good time.

Katharine and Emma and I made plans to go to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks for Maggie's birthday. I've never been there before, period, so I think that'll be very exciting, plus maybe I can use it to somehow recoup the two weeks I'm just coming off of where I just sat around here and sulked the whole time. Reading the ineffable Jon Konrath's Dealer Wins as preparation. What am I doing?

I'd thought I'd be at work today six months ago when I made the dentist's appointment I just got back from, but I'm not, so I just had to get up and go into Manhattan just for that this morning. Good news is I've got clean teeth; the bad news is that the x-rays they took today show that the wisdom teeth I've got that haven't come in yet aren't moving, which apparently means that they might have to come out? They weren't super clear on that point. I guess it's not an issue until I'm in excruciating pain. Not looking forward to that, though.

Super-depressing encounter on the way home: This enormous man-child -- think Lenny from Of Mice And Men -- had sort of button-holed what I think was a poor young Yeshiva student by the window seat. This guy was enormous, had long stringy hair and a brutal face covered in what looked like scars from a car accident, but he had the voice and mannerisms of a petulant child. He was very much concerned with his eternal salvation -- particularly, it seemed, as to whether hedging his bets when it came to believing in both Judaism and Christianity would get him into "heaven."

"Do you people think that this... this earth is the same thing as hell?"

"Well..." said the Jew.

"You know, some people think that, you know, the train is evil, because it's moving around in this dark tunnel all the time. What do you guys think about that?"

He also said, pricelessly, "My name is Leonard [something], and, you know, Leonard has L-O-R-D in it. My father was an atheist when he gave me that name, so I guess that name actually came from God. It's a very precious name."

Am I a mean guy? I think about that sometimes. My deeply-held suspicion is that, despite what they might say, everyone likes to be excited a little bit by nastiness. I'm not an angry person, though. I'm not like the squid, nor am I like the whale. I'm just a guy, you know?

All teeth and suckers