Blogging The FSF 2007

I'm typing this up on Sunday morning on the F train back to 7th Ave. after de-busing off the Lucky Star bus from Boston.

True to my word, I took the bus up to Brookline last night and stayed at Joel's. His new house is fucking huge, and, using some polite mathematical estimates, he got it for a steal -- I guess because it's a bit run down in some fairly significant ways. Whatever, man. It's got a fucking turret.

The bus ride was great until it got dark -- looking out the window of a moving vehicle is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, but when you can't see anything, you can get kind of button-holed by grim thoughts. I listened to a couple series of The Ricky Gervais show, which helped. After getting out at South Station, I hopped the Red line to Park St. and then got on the Green line, which I'd never ridden before. The trains are much shorter than the ones on the Red line, and the individual cars are tiny, too. And, for a Friday night on a train headed to the suburbs, it was fucking packed with -- from what I could tell -- drunk townies. Halfway along, these two pimply post-high-schoolers got on, each carrying a six-pack. One of them sort of punched me in the chest with his, kind of gripping it like brass knuckles. "Yo," I said. The other, noticing my leather jacket, I guess, asked, "Hey, do you listen to punk music?" "Yeah," I said. "What kind of punk music?" Because I'd been sort of blurting it all week, I came up with "POGUES!" "The Pogues?" said the first one. "Fuck yeah -- that's real fuckin' Irish music!" Did I mention these guys were Irish? They had, you know, real fuckin' Irish faces. Luckily, it was almost my stop, because I was sort of out of things to say. The two dudes, as I was getting off, turned to a couple of high school girls sitting next to me and opened with "Yo, what are you guys doin' tonight? Are you getting fucked up?"

The turret is actually the library room, complete with circular book cases and everything. There's also an outdoor jacuzzi and a fucking bar built into a wall in the basement. The room I was sleeping in had a "secret door" that they hadn't seen when the agent was showing them the place that led into a weird, practically windowless, toothpaste-green room with a bench with an air conditioner above it built into the wall. Joel and Liz surmised that this must have been some kind of rec room, but they really don't know for sure. Past that room was another huge, weird empty room, this one with stairs that led up to an enormous furnished attic whose interior measure was longer than its exterior measure. Also there was a black hole at its center and a howling ghost from another dimension that eats souls just kind of hanging out. Did anyone else read that book? Come on.

We drank wine until 4:00 AM and listened to the new Arcade Fire album. I woke up at 8:00, still kind of drunk, and called a cab to get to the stop for the Green line. I actually got to the meeting in the middle of the first speech this time instead of the fifth. This year it was held in a room at the back of Building 3, which is the one with the columns -- really beautiful.

(Does anyone remember a web site from around 2000 called geekporn.com? It's something else now, but at the time it was a kind of amateur porn site dreamed up some MIT kids that was supposed to feature pictures of men and women of the type you might see in your Computer Science class. Unfortunately, not to make a cliched joke here, that was the reason it didn't really catch on. But there was this really, really gorgeous girl in some of the pictures -- I mean, the rest of the people were, you know, perfectly adequate, but this girl was phenomenal -- and her thing was posing naked in front of Building 3 with a bunch of physics equations drawn all over her body in black marker. I know, you're rolling your eyes. But so now I've been there.)

Gerald Sussman gave the same talk he always gives, focusing on what he refers to as "robust systems" and "paranoid programming" -- pretty much, just that systems should be highly interoperable and flexible in terms of the input they accept and the output they produce. Eh, I think it's debatable. But the innovative thing he brought up this time around was some Scheme syntax he'd developed for writing expression-matching rules. Not just your standard string-matching regexp stuff: These rules performed higher-order speculative matches on Scheme expressions similar to the way ML matches function signatures -- the "/" rule, for example, might match a numerical sub-expression by factoring it. He also indulged in a brief digression based on a description of how a particular species of tropical frog goes through one of its life stages in a strikingly mammalian way (something about the way the way the developing tadpole is positioned relative to the egg) but is otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from other types of frogs. Frogness, Sussman explained, is not defined procedurally.

RMS was in a much better mood this year than he was the previous two years, when he'd kind of slouched into the room and passed out on the table. This time around, he was wearing a button that said "Emacs Loves Every User" -- as opposed to organized religion, I think, don't remember his explanation. He gave a very articulate argument against software patents, bringing up the most convincing rationale I've yet heard, namely: Software source code is more or less acknowledged to be a type of speech and as such it's theoretically impossible and practically infeasible to enumerate the mathematical ideas -- the currency of software patents -- expressed by a program. He mentioned, anecdotally, a case in which the authors of XYWrite (the word processor I used to write practically all my papers in elementary school and junior high) had to send out a downgrade to their users to defuse a patent dispute over automatic word abbreviation -- the patent was later overturned based on prior art found in Emacs. "It's nice to know that I've had at least one patentable idea in my life," said RMS.

Eben Moglen was up next. He's kind of the reason that I've been going to these meetings -- he's an incredibly articulate and charismatic speaker who can go for hours, literally, without consulting any notes or saying "um." He was a bit more brusque than I remembered him being last year and didn't seem to be amused by RMS cheerfully interrupting him at times. As usual, the focus of his talk was on the obstacles facing the world of free software for the coming year -- last year it was patents, this year it's mainly DRM (but also patents) -- and, as usual, he was optimistic. "The breaking point of DRM is nearly upon us," he said. The two main proponents of DRM, he said, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have an uphill battle ahead of them in terms of making the case for their respective new platforms. Jobs, Moglen said, is hoping that the iPhone is so cool that it won't matter to users that it's completely crippled; Gates is hoping "that an operating system that can be subverted by a 12-year-old to allow him to control his own hardware and destroy everyone else's is a salable proposition."

He discussed at length the provisions in GPLv3 designed to combat DRM, in particular the current peculiar industry practice of selling hardware at a loss and recouping money on subscription-based access to restricted content. Companies like TiVo are going to suffer if and when people relicense under the GPLv3, and they've already attempted to bargain with the FSF -- to no avail -- by offering to remove the encryption on downloaded content as long as the connection to the TV guide service can remain protected. ("You are are under the mistaken impression," Moglen recounts telling them, "that my client is the Free Movie Foundation.") "The tide of DRM is going to turn this year," he said. "If I am standing here next year and it hasn't, you know what to throw at me." RMS piped up from the back of the room: "DVDs?"

As usual, he ended with some rousing bon mots: "You have to be bigger than about a hundred billion dollars a year these days before your CEO doesn't return our phone calls." Then, to the audience, he said, "I ask you to do a thing that has never been done before. I ask you to rearrange Microsoft's patent portfolio for them."

After Moglen's talk, there was a Q & A session with the FSF board members. Thankfully, this year featured fewer people trying to stump RMS with GPL loopholes, just general public flailing over ways of increasing acceptance of Free Software and punishing its detractors. Among the revelations: IBM has 6 full-time people tracking the revisions of GPLv3; there's a good chance Sun might be willing to release Solaris under some variant of the GPL (although Sussman was skeptical: "Humans are so complicated," he mused. "I prefer to deal with machines").

Mako Hill gave a short talk about his draft of a definition of what he calls "Free Culture." I tried to think of reasons I'm opposed to the idea but couldn't get anything articulate together. And that was it for the meeting!

As per tradition, a fair number of people went out to eat at The Middle East afterwards, and this year I joined them. At first I was a little shy, but I was sitting next to Brett Smith and Mako, neither of whom are shy themselves, so the chatter was pretty lively and I got sucked in. Most of the people who come to these meetings seem like they're actively involved in a bunch of pretty important projects -- Wikia, the Linux kernel, Gnome -- and kind of all know each other already, and I'm just this guy who writes a little Scheme and just shows up sometimes. I don't feel like anybody really knows who I am. Still, listening to people talk about all this stuff that we're all pretty passionate about put me in mind of time I spent in college feeling like all I really had to do to accomplish big things was put my shoulder to it and work. Like I said to Eve afterwards, "I want to run away and join the circus. But I think the circus is called MIT."

Drawings Of Running And Jumping Men

The weather is finally acceptable. I feel practically optimistic! But not quite.

I'm headed up to Cambridge tomorrow for the annual FSF meeting. Usually I wake up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning and high-tail it over to East Broadway to hop on Fung-Wah, but this time around, I thought I'd be smart and get there on time. I'm gonna head up after work tomorrow and spend the night at Joel's new house in Boston.

Last night I felt like going for a run -- anxious, depressed, in need of endorphins -- but Eve had called and had offered to cook food for me, so I was faced with a dilemma. In a slightly unorthodox move, I decided to jog over to her house instead of around the park. It turned out to be just the right idea -- I haven't gone running in over six months, and the 11 horizontal blocks and 3 long vertical blocks to Eve's place were practically too much for me. I'd brought a change of underclothes and took a quick shower once I'd gotten there. Her shower is more of a powerful misting than it is a shower, but it gets you clean nonetheless. In return for the delicious tofu stir-fry she'd cooked for me and her roommate, Susan, I popped in a new wireless router for her and set it up to replace one that'd died last week.

This evening I swung by The Annex to see Contramano on a tip from flavorpill. The band that opened for them was mopey and shitty, but Contramano themselves were pretty badass. The lead singer is, apparently, a classically-trained cellist from Brazil, and for many of the songs he plays what appears to be some kind of modified cello with no body, only the neck and some pickups. (Update: Squick tells me this is what electric cellos look like.) For other songs, he ditched an instrument entirely and just kind of roamed around the audience dancing with the girls and singing into a wireless mic. The lyrics were not, you know, Yeats or some shit, but he had a nicely plaintive delivery and the playing by all the members was vigorous. They were playing over a fucking backing track, though -- one that had drums, even. What the shit is up with people doing that these days? I feel like a lot of people are doing that these days.

The bartender comped me a second Jameson's and ginger ale for some reason and made it very strong. Usually that's a real pick-me-up, but tonight it just kind of made me sulkier. I was still feeling really drunk when I got home, hours after slurping it down. It's been a drinky week, what with Emma getting unfairly sacked by the Voice. Everyone's been getting loaded.

Some Kind Of Punk Rock Satyr From Under The Bog

Pogues at Roseland; St. Patrick's Day! I'd been in kind of a bad mood all day, but not really for any good reason. I guess I was a little disappointed because some people I'd had extra tickets for had canceled on me, including my dad and Joel and Liz, the three of whom'd been sort of central to my idea of how the night was supposed to go. I suppose it was to be expected -- after all, I had eight tickets, not counting the ones for me and Nina. Why so many, you ask? Well, when it came to my attention that tickets for this show were available, I thought I might snag maybe four. But the page where you say how many you want had two drop-down menus: One for tickets and one, as it turned out, for tickets plus donations to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund. For some reason, this was hard for me to figure out, and, being a generous soul, I ended up getting four regular tickets and four Katrina tickets. (In my defense, I'm a software author, not a software user.) The roster, by showtime:

• Nina and I
• Eve
• Squick
• Katharine and her dude
• Tom
• Tom's friends Eric and Sarah

We'd all agreed to meet at O'Connor's, but by the time people started showing up, the place was unbearably packed, so we headed across the street to The Black Sheep and drank whiskey and Guinness until around 8:00. The drinking picked me right up.

The Pogues were already on stage by the time Squick and Katharine and Nina and Eve and I got there -- strains of what I think was A Pair of Brown Eyes were wafting through the lobby. The ballroom itself was huge, and complete packed with people, most of them big and fat and Irish. (As per my usual insecure macho boyfriend bullshit, I tried to suss out whose ass I could kick if it "came down to it" -- I estimated no one's.) We got to a place under one of the balconies where we could sort of see the stage and started insinuating ourselves into the crowd. Shane was in a wheelchair -- probably because of the ligaments in his knee that he'd torn a few nights earlier, but maybe, you know, just because -- and he presided over the pit in front of the stage like some kind of dyspeptic, half-comatose monarch. Everyone else on stage looked about twenty years younger than him, except for the roadie who wheeled him, presumably, back and forth from the bathroom / bar ("It's a long way to Tipperary," explained Jem Finer at one point, "but it's an even longer way to the toilets"). I couldn't understand most of what he said besides the names of the songs that he called out, and I think I did better than most people. The songs, from what I can remember, in no particular order:

• A Pair of Brown Eyes
• A Rainy Night In Soho (dedicated to Victoria)
• The Repeal of the Licensing Laws
• The Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn
• Poor Paddy
• The Irish Rover
• The Auld Triangle
• Streams of Whiskey
• Sally MacLenanne
• The Old Main Drag
• Dirty Old Town
• Bottle of Smoke
• Thousands Are Sailing
• Fiesta
• The Broad Majestic Shannon
• The Body of an American

The downsides: We missed Turkish Song of the Damned, quite possibly the best song ever; nor was there any Fairytale, but I can understand if they've gotten right sick of that one; Shane didn't do his own "Yearggghs!" On the plus side, Spider brought out a tin baking tray and bashed himself over the head with it in time to several of the songs, just like in the video for Waxie's Dargle.

I guess what appeals to me about the Pogues is that their aesthetic -- the implication that they're a bunch of sleazy, itinerant pub types whose drummer just happened to start playing in double time without taking the cigarette out of his mouth -- suggests that punk rock is a potential branch in the evolution of every musical genre, instead of something that Malcolm McLaren and a bunch of art school dropouts actively cooked up in a clothing store in King's Cross. That is to say, the same way The Ramones are 50s pop "infected" by the punk bug, queered and twisted and made dark, The Pogues are Irish folk "punked," Irish culture itself being maybe a punk version of England's, Shane MacGowan some kind of red-headed Tony Blair rotted out and jagged around the edges. Unfortunately, seeing one of these bands in their twilight years (cf. The Buzzcocks) kind of kills this line of reasoning, because all the dudes in the band are into wearing comfortable clothes and the idea of "putting on a good show" for the "fans." I'm not complaining, really. This is the only way I get to see them.

I should point out that the title of this post refers not to Shane, although it could, but to a dude that Nina and I were standing behind at the show, this weird white-dude-with-dreads guy who was wearing a stitched-together leather jerkin. Nina coined said phrase and also observed that he looked "very Renn faire." So.

I think I'm gonna clean the toilet tonight. Not sure; I'm psyching myself up for it, drinking a too-strong Jameson's and ginger ale.

You guys remember the scary janitor on The Office -- the one who was played by Stephen Merchant's dad? I saw a guy on the subway on the way home who looked like a droopier, crazier version of Ron Merchant. He was kind of rifling through a pile of old newspapers that he was holding between his legs. The papers kept slipping off his lap and the seat next to him where he'd piled them and onto the floor. He leaned forwards to grab them. "Oh, no," he'd say. "Oh, God!"

In Like A Lion

It's March! And it's freezing. The weather's all over the place. It's snowing right now.

On Saturday, though, it was kind of nice in the earlier part of the day, and Nina and I took a walk out to Bay Ridge by way of the Brooklyn Army Terminal docks where the Water Taxi stops. The light was really great and we took a lot of pictures; you can see the evidence in my photostream. That whole area is kind of dilapidated -- suffused with the slightly foul smell of the water, which reminded me of people (and me) productively fishing on the docks down on Casey Key; but beautiful, full of warehouse buildings with broken blue glass in their windows. The Water Taxi itself -- or a boat with the Water Taxi logo on it -- was moored at one of the piers, abandoned and bobbing gently in the wine-dark river. It looked different than it does in the advertising materials I've seen -- more like some kind of luxury yacht. From there we headed up into Bay Ridge proper and had a really nice dinner at an Indian place called Taj Mahal. I'd forgotten how good mango lassis are: They're so good you practically don't want to drink them because then they'll be gone.

Sunday was cold, cold. I picked up Eve at her house on the way home from Nina's, and we swung by Steve's C-Town to do my weekly shopping and to pick up materials for cooking dinner before the Thermals show (which Nina, knee-deep in Latin American Politics, had to cancel on): We settled on hamburgers with portobello mushrooms, and Eve snagged a six-pack of Kozy Shack chocolate pudding from the dairy aisle, citing an impromptu craving for the stuff. Indeed, she downed three of them while we baked and marinated the mushrooms in preparation for their use on the burgers I sauteed in my wonderful big frying pan. Their combination, along with baby spinach in place of lettuce, was pretty great -- I recommend it if you've got the wherewithal. I had a chocolate pudding myself, finding it kind of uck.

We met up with my friend Squick from work and got into The Bowery Ballroom around 9:30, just in time to hear the last opening act, The Big Sleep. They were no good -- potentially catchy, mostly instrumental pieces, but the band had about zero energy and stage presence. I'm all for nerds on stage, but you can't be shy, guys. Jump around. That's not the real story, though: Eve'd developed a bit of a stomach complaint on the way there, and by the time we'd brandished our tickets and made it to the lounge, she was right nauseated. She took a trip to the bathroom before we headed up to the stage area, and apparently up came the pudding, the burger, etc. Nonetheless, Eve is a total champ, and she stuck it out for the entire goddamn show, retreating to the ladies room to do number two or number... three periodically.

The Thermals were fucking amazing, the epitome of, I don't know, "showmanship", vivacious and unabashedly shrill. I have no idea how they got their set so tight, but everyone in the band seemed to know exactly when to start every song: Hutch Harris would be tuning and muttering something to the audience and then suddenly, without even a gesture on his part to the drummer, the entire band would launch into a song, playing in perfect synchronization, Kathy Foster's hair bouncing in time to the music. The crowd, which had been kind of lukewarm in their reception to the 'Sleep, went nuts. When the band did Pillar of Salt, the entire room, I shit you not, was, as I call it, dancin' around. My regret, other than the fact that Eve was clearly miserable, was that I couldn't really follow suit -- I'd like to think that my laborious digestion of the raw onions we'd mixed into the hamburger had taken the wind out of my sails, but I might just be getting too old to mosh at a show on a Sunday night. Incredible band, though: After they finished their encore and started packing up, we realized that the rhythm guitar player had sprained his ankle or sommat -- he was walking around on crutches -- but he'd been leaping and running around on stage the whole time. Solidarity with Eve, who'd accrued five upchucks over the course of the night. Good thing, as she noted, that the sound in the BB bathrooms is good.

Monday night I watched Out of the Past, another recommendation from Emma, which, I have to say, I liked a whole lot more than Laura. The lighting and the shooting locations in this one were really beautiful, and the whole thing was a bit more interesting, structurally and plot-wise. It didn't hurt that Jane Greer is hot and nasty. I don't get why they cast Kirk Douglas as the scary gangster, though, or why anyone's ever described him as being hard-boiled. He's always seemed a little fey to me.

Spent last night trying to put together some software releases and watching NYCTV (Channel 76 for me), which is actually pretty great. I caught Cool in Your Code, an exploration of the city zip code-by-zip code, and $9.99, a guide to doing stuff on the cheap. Which is, you know, how I roll.

Brooklend Update

Katina's is closed for renovation. The 12th St. Deli is also closed, also for renovation. Also, The Comanches are gone and the outlaw is gone.

Last Saturday, Eve and Nina and Nina's friend Randy and Randy's little brother and I went up to Union Square for the pillow fight organized by Newmindspace. I was sort of unenthused initially -- I figured it was gonna be the same type of weird, regressive pederasts who go to those "cuddle parties" that are (supposedly) grope-free. And, you know, it kind of was those people. But Nina had an extra pillow, and like ten minutes into it I sucked it up and waded in and it was sort of a good time. Observations: Some pillows hurt when people hit you with them! A lot of people had either very firm, heavy pillows or pillows that weren't terribly cohesive and would bunch themselves up into a heavy mass at one end of the pillowcase. The little kids were the worst offenders when it came to swinging hard. Towards the end of the fight, I ended up squaring off near the outskirts of the fray against four pre-teens and their older brothers, and got pretty well pounded. According to Eve, I had a cheering section chanting "Ghost Rider! Ghost Rider!" in support. I assume that was 'cuz I was wearing the old leather jacket, but Eve thought it might have been because I'm a whitey -- you know, like Ghostface Killah. That's cool, too, I guess.

I was also struck by how many people were taking pictures of the event. It seemed like about a quarter of the participants were armed with cameras instead of pillows. They stood at the periphery -- someone, I think, snapped a photo of me and Nina taking a breather and having a smooch. There're practically 2500 photos on Flickr with the pillowfightnyc tag! Check out the pictures. There really were feathers everywhere.

That evening, after some reading at Tea Lounge, we took a car over to Williamsburg to this rock show at a literal hole in the wall -- utterly unmarked on the outside -- called b.p.m. The band we wanted to see was a New York-based punk trio with a couple of Japanese dudes (and a grating gaijin drummer who wouldn't stop braying into the drum mics) in it called The Spunks, but the evening seemed to be a kind of showcase of a bunch of Japanese bands who were all pretty good and played loud, short sets. The venue was a kind of cave of painted, exposed brick that you had to go through a tunnel to get to, and the room with the stage had real high ceilings that got crowded with the helium balloons that this chick was handing out -- it was Hajime's birthday. The Spunks themselves were pretty good, thought a bit louder and sloppier than on the songs of theirs I'd listened to on the web. At one point, the bass player climbed up on one of the amp stacks at one point, and, while playing, did a kind of twelve-foot swan dive onto the stage. He seemed more or less okay, too. They are all ninjas, it turns out. "I love you!" Haji'd yell between songs. "I don't want to fight any more! Do you love me?!"

We hopped a Northside car to get back to Park Slope, and a funny thing happened. It was around 3:00 AM, and, shortly after we got off the BQE, our driver pulled ahead of another car in that slightly aggressive way that car service drivers do. The other driver seemed pretty ticked off, though, as he pulled right back ahead of us in the middle of a narrow street and then just stopped with us behind him, both cars idling, for about a minute and a half. Our driver was kind of flummoxed, but we couldn't really back out because another car showed up. The angry guy ahead of us, perhaps spurred on by the honking of the car waiting behind us, started to inch slowly up the street, at which point our driver decided to make a break for it and gunned it, pulling around the dude and then trying to lose him on 5th Ave. The guy started chasing us, pulling up alongside and yelling at our terrified driver whenever we had to stop for a light. Our driver kept shouting that he was going to call the cops and eventually did pull out his phone and do it. Seeing this, the other driver got spooked and finally drove off. We got a good look at him, though -- bald, chubby, wearing some kind of college athletic sweatsuit -- and I gave the car service guy my best recollection of the license plate number of his car. I was too tired to be really scared, but I was making contingency plans the whole time in case the guy pulled a gun.

Right now I'm at home, exhausted from work, drinking a whiskey and watching Laura on Emma's long-ago recommendation. I feel like I might look a bit like young Vincent Price. Also, some dialogue:

Waldo: "Have you ever been in love?"
McPherson: "A dame up in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me once."

What a tough dude. I ate a veggie burger with a fried egg on it. Kitty puked up her dinner but I'm hoping she'll get hungry and eat the puke. This often works.

The Zombies Win

I'm at home. Nina's studying for midterms.

I Netflix'd Zombie (aka "Zombi 2"), because it seemed like it's at the head of this pantheon of European horror movies I haven't seen. You know that YouTube video of the zombie fighting the shark? This is the movie it's from! In terms of the hipster vote, that scene is actually even cooler than the clip lets on, since it starts with a topless scuba diving woman fleeing from the shark into the arms of the zombie, who goes for the shark after his attempts to fuck / eat the woman are thwarted by her fins and a handful of coral.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn't quite... I don't know. It's always hard to peg what's wrong with films like this. Zombie movie fans strike me as a rather predictable bunch -- from what I can tell by the IMDb comments, we require that the mechanics of the movie world be laid out just so, and the movie is a success to the extent that it presents a series of novel scenarios in which the zombies triumph over the humans and ultimately win. For my money there's gotta be a better way to make a movie, especially with what seems like such a compelling premise: zombies. This one was kind of head-and-shoulders above the rest in some ways -- it makes pretty thorough use of a tropical setting for the predetermined zombie apocalypse and it's about as lovingly shot, lighting- and angles-wise, as a zombie movie could be. But the acting's terrible, the cultural details of the shooting location and the voodoo aesthetic that necessitates it are kind of... overlooked -- and it just ain't scary.

I often wonder what it would take to make a zombie movie that was scary, and I think it's gonna come down to directors actually thinking about what's scary about zombies: it's not their potential to chomp and bite and eat your brains; it's the prospect of an entirely zombified world, a silent world absent of the texture of human intelligence.

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that culminates in a convergence of a whole bunch of starships Enterprise from parallel universes. Captain Picard (or someone) devises a way to send them all back to their respective M-branes, but some of them aren't eager to go -- an alternate-universe Riker helming a smoldering NCC-1701 protests "We won't go back! You don't know what it's like in our universe - the Federation's gone, the Borg are everywhere!" That line's consistently given me chills.

No zombie movie I've ever seen -- and I've seen a few -- has ever really explored the implications of that line satisfactorily. My friend Pete directed me in his senior thesis film, "The Zombies Win," at Wesleyan, in which the main character courts a lone, aloof human female lost in a world of the undead. Pete said it was based on a summer he spent in Paris; I feel like he was making a glib joke about the French, but I've never been to France so I can't really say that makes any sense to me. We had to put in these one-size-fits-all white contacts; my friends Paul and Dave had to hold me down and stuff them in my eyes.

I've lost track of what I saying.

Speaking of zombies, The Pogues are playing Roseland on St. Patrick's day, and this guy's got tickets! Tom anticipates another "stomach complaint," but I'm optimistic. Hell, even my dad's on board -- are you?

Kicked Out Of The Bowery Ballroom

Nina and I managed to slip into the Andrew Bird show at the Bowery Ballroom last night, despite the fact that we showed up and hadn't bought any tickets. The BB's calendar had marked the show as being sold out, but we'd swung by after drinking whiskey with Aanie at Double Happiness in the hopes that there'd be people outside who'd had friends cancel on them and needed to get rid of a few extra tickets. When we got there, though, it was pretty clear that no one was selling. The only other person on the scene who didn't head straight into the club was a young man in a long beige wool coat, who seemed to be waiting for the bouncer to acknowledge him. While we smoked and adjusted our plans for the evening, we overheard the following exchange between the bouncer and the guy in the coat:

"I can't let you in, but I can take your ID in and check it out."
"You're not just going to take my license and keep it, are you?"
"Nah, man -- I wouldn't do that. If I was gonna do that, I'd'a done it already."

The guy gave the bouncer his ID and went back to waiting, digging his hands into the pockets of his coat and rocking on his heels. After a few minutes, the bouncer came back out.

"Sorry, man -- I showed her. She says it's you."
"What? What does she say I did?"
"She says that you, uh, fondled her."
"What?! That's crazy! I didn't do anything!"

At this point, the head bouncer came out and asked if we were looking for tickets. "We were hoping someone outside would be selling them," I said.

"Eh, just go in, buy a drink, and a tip your bartender," he said, and ushered us inside. So that was nice.

The show was about half over by the time we got there. Look, I'm gonna level with you: Andrew Bird isn't really my kind of thing, but the show wasn't boring. The guy himself plays three different instruments (that I could see), plus he's a really precise whistler (almost uncannily so -- I've got a loose suspicion that he's gotta be, uh, whistle-synching or something). Although Nina commented that this was the type of show that girls got their boyfriends to take them to, most of the audience was dudes -- oddly sour-faced twenty-somethings who seemed incapable of growing beards evenly. I feel like these twee dudes who listen to... well, whatever passes for rock music these days are the discontents of real rock. So maybe Andrew Bird fans are themselves the discontents of the New Rock? It was a nerdy crowd, to be sure.

After the show, we stuck around and had a few more drinks, partly on account of the fact that the line for the coat check was insanely long. Andrew Bird came over and ordered a drink next to us. I nudged Nina in the ribs to get her attention -- she didn't get what I was trying to tell her at first and looked past him down the bar, noticing someone who looked a startling amount like Monica Lewinsky. The more we looked, the surer we were that it was her, and so was Nina's friend Nikhil who happened to be there. But I just googled some pictures of her and now I'm not so sure.

Happy 2007

Okay, so I know I haven't been very good about writing in this thing, and it's mostly because I've been doing life things, but I thought I'd start off the new year with something fun for all of my real friends who read this web-log all the time to read.

I shat myself tonight. Not in the sense that I've been using that phrase recently -- "I had to run to the bathroom to shit myself" -- but in the sense that stuff came out of my ass and went into my pants. It happened on 74th St. and 1st Ave., outside the Jan Hus Church where the Balkan Golden Festival was being held. I rode the 6 all the way down to Broadway-Lafayette and went up to my office and threw out my underwear.

This isn't the first time this has happened. 5 or 6 years ago, walking back from Thanksgiving dinner at Sharon and Neil's with my sister, I felt something uncomfortable coming on and I tried to relieve some pressure in my abdomen by letting it out. Seconds later, the seat of my pants was cold and wet. I was lucky -- we were on our home block. I discovered, in my parents' bathroom, that my boxers had been soaked with what Razor had described years previously (on our beloved Delivery Head) when this'd happened to him on the job at Credit Suisse as "some kind of horrible water from the ass." "Gross," said my sister when I told her what had happened. At the time I blamed lamb with mint jelly.

Nina is kind of in love with the Balkans. She did a stint of reporting in Bosnia, personally commissioned by Lewis Lapham, commemorating the anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica, in 2003. So I was sure she'd want to go to the evening of Balkan folk dancing that we got notified about by Jeff Stark's Cool List. And she did! But first she had to have dinner with her mom and pick up a microwave that she bought off of craigslist.

I decided to head up there myself -- I had to go to the upper-ish East anyhow to pick up the tickets I'd bought for a live-action production of David Rees' Get Your War On. The theater was at 59 East 59th St., which is probably why I texted Nina and believed myself that the Jan Hus Church was on 79th St. instead of 74th St. I ate dinner at Neil's Coffee Shop up by Hunter College -- she and I had passed it a few months ago walking around up there and both thought it looked like a good place to eat. And it was -- cozy and nice, with a kind of salty wait staff. I read the Times and homphed a really greasy reuben sandwich.

And then I hiked up to 79th St. and started looking around for the church. I walked from 2nd to 1st to York and back to 2nd again. I found the Albanian embassy, but I didn't find anything that said "Jan Hus." I started to get discouraged and left several petulant voicemails on Nina's phone before hunting down a Starbuck's on 75th and 1st and hunkering down with my laptop and a huge cup of coffee. I was into some deep Scheme when I realized that there were unsecured wireless networks in range. That's how I found the right address for the church.

It was 9:00 when I got there, but the dancing were in full effect, the dancers trotting in concentric circles, hands joined, led by a man waving a white scarf. They were in the middle of the nave, and there were tables of food off to one side. I tried to keep near the entrance in case Nina showed up, and I just kind of watched the proceedings. Everyone was very casually dressed, and the girls were very pale and pretty and had uniformly thick, dark eyebrows. About 45 minutes in, I started getting some bad stomach cramps. The church had a bathroom, but I knew that what I had to do couldn't be done within close aural / olfactory range of the festivities. So I left. And then I shat my pants by accident in the cold on the way to the train. And I shat more, revoltingly, in the bathroom at work in my silent office with all the lights out except for one. Nina, over the phone, offered to bring me a replacement pair of boxers from a set her brother had just purchased.

It wasn't so bad. But I think I drink too much coffee.

On the toilet I read an editorial in the Post in which the author called Barbara Boxer an "appalling scold."

Guitar Hero update: I've managed to get five stars on every song in the Easy and Medium modes. I'm about 14 songs into Hard right now. I haven't gotten anything higher than a three on anything besides Strutter so far, which, I'm ashamed to admit, I kind of like, song-wise.

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!