adrian is rad

It’s been hot here. Hot like I remember from Boston, from Pittsburgh. Drenched with sweat and skin melting off your skeleton hot. But the heat wave broke the last couple days, particularly with the rain today.

Movies are <$4 is my local art house cinema (about a 5 minute walk) so I go see films sometimes. It reminds me of when I went to movies in Germany lots on Tuesdays because it was 4 Euro movie night.

Last week I saw Whatever Works, the latest Woody Allen film. It stars Larry David as a man who despises everyone and sees life in a very negative light. I laughed aloud a few times. Decent entertainment but not a great movie.

Today I saw Zombieland, a buddy road trip/ zombie comedy. I’m not a fan of zombie movies (despite the Pittsburgh tie) but this is really funny. I liked it a lot.

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I’m following along the Steelers game online. I hope they stop their recent slide here.

I watched last week’s game yesterday. They lost but I was pretty happy how our 3rd string QB played in his first start (and his first throw of the game was only his second NFL throw ever).

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There was a big party on Long St, about 10 minutes walk from my place, for the 2010 World Cup Draw which happened on Friday. It was packed but it was a good time.

In the draw, USA got England, Slovenia and Algeria. Not an amazingly tough group but there’ll be a couple competitive games in there.

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I head back to the States in a week and a half. I’m excited to see friends and family. I’m excited for some hat-and-gloves-and-seeing-your-breath weather.

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I have a bunch of things to do before I head back, probably the biggest of which is trying to find a car. I’m renting a car right now and I’m returning it right before I leave.

I’m thankful for my family, who is supportive even when I have funny ideas about what I should do with my life. I’m thankful for friends who repeatedly include me in things regardless if I’m 5, 3000 or 12000 miles away. I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve had. I’m thankful for the Pick N Pay that stocks good pecan pie when an expat is feeling a bit nostalgic. I’m thankful for music. I’m thankful for people who are nice or go out of their way to help even when they are hardly know me. I’m thankful for all the ways I can keep in touch with and keep up with friends from thousands of miles away.

1. A Friday in an empty apartment. Megan, P. David and I sitting on the floor having beer, talking about Pittsburgh, stories, friends, music and mostly avoiding where I was moving to in three days. I don’t know how long we sat there or what all ways said. For a couple hours there I forgot the echo.
2. A Sunday in a furnished apartment. The Reekies, Christine and I at a simple table with a simple meal and nice bottle of wine, talking about Taipei, cricket, football, and the state of the nation. We didn’t sit for too long but time hung with the laughter and chatter. For a couple hours there I forgot the echo.

I recently read a few interesting articles about football and I thought I’d share.

Chuck Klosterman writes about how football has succeeding by being the most liberal sport but winning over America by appearing to be conservative. I don’t know if he’s right but he is pretty entertaining.

My wife is awesome, but she hates football (as wives are wont to do). Every game seems the same to her. I will be watching a contest between Kent State and Eastern Michigan on a random Thursday night, and she will say, “Go ahead and watch that game. I will just sit here and read this magazine featuring a plus-sized black female TV personality from Chicago.” Two days later, Georgia will be playing LSU for the SEC championship. Now she will want to rent Scenes from a Marriage.

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Michael Lewis writes about how the place kicker has no upsides, with even one big miss ruining a career.

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The same author also writes about Coach Mike Leach and his crazy pass-heavy Texas Tech offense. Michael Lewis is the sort that likes finding people breaking the ‘rules’ and still winning and here’s another example.

To prepare his receivers’ ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers’ joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach’s tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.

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Finally, there’s an old Sports Illustrated article about a beareded, long-haired barefoot punter in the 1970s. It’s a pretty entertaining read just for the player talking about the Establishment, man.

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In other football news, the Steelers seem to have played a little better after starting out 1-2. They still don’t seem as solid as they did last year (particularly defensively), but I’m liking that the offensive line looks decent for once and that Mendenhall is getting some carries. I also like the irony that is our kick returner getting credited for tackles on opposing kick returners. That’s fun.

As interesting as the South African accent is to me, what’s more peculiar is the differences in cadence and intonation. At the ends of sentences when Americans–non-Valley Girl-influenced Americans, that is–drop their tone quite a bit, South Africans will often dip a little and then level off again. I spoke with an American who’s been here for a few years the other day and I didn’t realize for a few minutes that she was American because she’s taken on these intonation and cadence traits, though her accent is straight American.

Apparently, I have a thick accent. There are people who don’t always have an easy time understanding me here. That seems strange to me. I feel I speak rather plainly, though I do mumble sometimes.

They call traffic lights “robots” here, officially even; there are times when you’re approaching a light and the road is painted ‘ROBOT’.

The people I’m staying with have six cats. They also fill three bird feeders and spread more birdseed on the driveway daily. And somehow they’re dismayed when one of the cats goes after a bird.

The Gatsby, the Cape Town sandwich, has fries on it. See here for an example. Pittsburghers will know why I’m mentioning this.

The fruits and juices here are great, as are the chocolates and candies. The selection and quality of beer is lacking, but the hard cider is the best I’ve had.

People here refer to the “city bowl suburbs”. Those places are right in the city to me. It’s approximately equivalent to calling the Mission a suburb in SF or the Back Bay a suburb in Boston or Chelsea a suburb in NYC.

I’ve been up to everything and nothing over the past few days.

With opening a bank account last week, logistical issues haven’t been as much of a constant concern. There’s still plenty up in the air, to be sure.

Colorful houses in Bo Kaap

I’ve been trying to decide where in the city to live. I’ve taken to walking around all the different neighborhoods I was thinking of living in: Gardens, Tamboerskloof, Bo Kaap, De Waterkant, Green Point, Sea Point, Woodstock, Observatory. I’m mostly concentrating on Gardens, Tamboerskloof and Sea Point now, but I’ve been meaning to take another look at Woodstock. Here’s a map that shows the different areas of town, if you’re curious.

the Sea Point pool and Atlantic Ocean

Driving around has been a bit of a challenge. The left-hand driving isn’t hard, but the roads are narrow and winding and one-way streets abound. In perhaps the most extreme case of it since Pittsburgh, I think Cape Town is really a city you need to drive around a lot before you know how to get around. I know the arteries and areas so I can get close to where I want to go, but once I get close, wrong turns seem to have some odd attraction to me. The sign posting also leaves a lot to be desired.

Boats in Kalk Bay, False Bay

I spent a little bit of Friday and most of Saturday down on the False Bay side of things. The towns there have a lot of charm to them. Little fishing harbors, that despite expectations of being tourist traps are still genuine fishing harbors, and towns nestled between the mountains and the sea. Kalk Bay has quite of bit of charm to it and has at least a couple great restaurants. Saturday, I spent with a family friend down in Simon’s Town. Drinking rooibos on the porch overlooking the naval base and bay while the sunset was nice. So peaceful.

The naval shipyard in Simon’s Town

While down there, the friend also drove me around that end of the Cape Peninsula. We stopped at a place called Imhoff, which probably started as a trading post/ farm shop, but has since added camel rides, a nursery, a snake zoo, and recycling center. We went to the snake zoo–wow there were a lot of snakes there and plenty of them were highly venomous. Pretty cool, but every time you came across a cage without a snake, you sort of checked around your feet to make sure it hadn’t escaped. Imhoff reminded me of the places you find in the West of the US on secondary highways–tourist stops that keep added unrelated attractions and businesses to try to get people to stop.

I figured out how to turn on the radio in the old beast of a car I’ve been driving and I kind of like radio here. I’ll just turn the knob till I find something interesting. A couple days ago I listened to about fifteen minutes of Islamic sing-chanting, which is something I was introduced to in a world music class and have only really heard one other time, in Jakarta. I have a bit of a soft spot for the heavily Muslim Cape Malays, who were probably the target audience for this broadcast. Yesterday I listened to some Indian ragas on the radio. They were pretty traditional and wonderful and even included some shehnai or the South Indian equivalent.

Some people answer phones here funny, giving the phone number first. “Eight two four eight one six two, hello!” I haven’t noticed this widely but at least a few families do it. I suppose it helps let the caller know if they’ve dialed the wrong number immediately.

Three unrelated topics that are on my mind.

On race: I forgot how blunt people[1] can be about race in South Africa. Having lived in places where mentioning race is equated with racism, it’s a bit shocking. I wouldn’t say these people are racist just for being aware of race–it’s simply a nation that’s very conscious of race as it was a very prominent difference for many years. There’s still racism, of course, it’s just not always the same as the blunt language.

On baseball: I watched a baseball game this afternoon. ESPN World replayed last night’s BoSox vs. Tampa Bay game. I didn’t realize they aired baseball in this market–though I do remember them airing pennant-hunt and playoff games in Asia when I was there in the fall a couple years ago, but those markets are much more interested in baseball than this one. I also saw an ad for Sports Center, though it’s the world edition so we’ll see how it is. Maybe the top 10 plays will still be good.

On coincidental encounters: Yesterday at a small shopping center, I passed two American girls (judging by accents), one of whom was wearing a University of San Francisco sweatshirt. Not only is that that town I just came from, I was on the USF campus the day before I left. Not in South Africa, but there was nevertheless an odd coincidence on Tuesday. We ran into a friend of my aunt’s while out on a walk with her dog in a small town outside London and it turns out she’s about to go to San Francisco to visit her brother. Her brother lives in Noe Valley on 26th St., which is probably within five blocks of where I just lived in SF (also on 26th St.). And I’ve undoubtedly walked by his house as I used to walk up 26th when I needed some peace and quiet.

[1] By “people” I mostly mean people of my parents’ generation. I have had few lengthy conversations with people my age in South Africa and their attitudes are possibly/ probably different.

PCC #1711 in Allentown climbing Arlington Ave. Hill, 1967 by Edward A Wickson

I’ve been interested in PCCs recently. They’re a type of streetcar that was designed by the Presidents’ Conference Committee in the 1930s and were primarily used during through the 1960s. San Francisco’s F Market line runs a lot of these along with some mostly wooden antique and Milan cars.

I found recently that Pittsburgh had one of the largest PCC fleets in its heyday. There are a number of great photo galleries of old Pittsburgh PCCs in action.

Interestingly enough, Pittsburgh actually ran PCCs in a limited context until 1999 on the 47D Drake Loop line. Here’s a great page about that loop and here’s a photo gallery of the last days of that line. I believe some of the last PCCs were running along this line, though I’m not sure where I read that now. Apparently ridership dwindled to 50 passengers a day at the end.

Market Street Railway, the non-profit that restores PCCs for the F Market, bought two of the last three cars, though they need to converted to appropriate wheel gauge before they’re usable. I really hope they keep the 90s white-black-and-gold paint job you see below.

In one last PCC oddity, the Ashmont Mattapan line in Boston is the last non-historic use of PCCs in the US. The line also runs through a cemetery. I should ride it next time I’m in Boston.

At Fort Couch, inbound car 4004 emerges from the tunnel under Fort Couch Road, a busy four-lane highway by Jon Bell

It happened.

I had people over for the game. We had pierogies* and kielbasi from a Russian deli in the Outer Richmond and finished off with Klondike bars (originally from Islay’s). Good times.

*potato and cheddar–among the best pierogies I’ve had.

Fact #4: The Pirates’ front office actually knows what it’s doing.

No. Really. And trust me, that was a hard sentence for me to write. The Microsoft Word paper-clip guy even popped up and said, “You appear to be talking crazy. Need me to contact the psychiatric hospital?”

There are some other funny lines and there are even some insightful lines in this Page 2 article about the Pirates.

please please please please

yellowed page out of my circa 1992 Tim Wakefield scrapbook

Here’s some baseball stuff that I’ve seen recently.

Tim Wakefield, who, yes, I’ve followed since his Pirates days, had a no-hitter through 7 1/3 last week. He’s 45, has been in the majors 17 years and he’s never had a no-no, as they call them. Watch the highlights or read more.

A Ranger named Ian Kinsler had a 6 hit game including the cycle last week. Highlights. He has two singles, two doubles, a triple and a home run. How’s that for a good game?

Do you realize the Pirates are 0.600 and are a game out of first? Crazy. Can it last? We can—and should—hope.

The new Yankee stadium has overpriced seats and the four games in there are already empty seats.

I’m just remembering going to a Pirates game at the old Three Rivers Stadium with a friend of mine, Josh L. I think this was in 8th grade. I think I’d won tickets from somewhere and they were good, 10 or 15 rows up along the first base side. Up until that point they were the best seats I’d sat in.

We got there early and the players were still out doing warm-ups. One Pirate came up to the wall and started signing autographs. We rushed down; we wanted his autograph! While he was signing my program, I asked him a question.

“Do you like playing baseball?”

“Yeah, I do. Do you?”

“Yeah!” I lied. I didn’t play baseball anymore.

Afterward, we tried to figure out from the scratch of lines on the program who this player was. There was definitely an ‘X’ in there. I’m still not sure who he was.

My old friend* Christine has a new blog about quitting her job (in Mexico), driving back to Pittsburgh, then taking a one way ticket to Sweden.

It’s one of the best written blogs that I’ve read recently. Flowing prose and narrative arcs guide one through each long and detailed entry. I also love her footnote flashbacks that she sticks at the end of each entry.

Here’s a quick quote from the most recent entry:

Before we go anywhere, however, I have an appointment with Al Garcia. He’s the body shop manager at Varsity Ford on Highway 6, and he’s promised to jerry-rig the driver side door of my car – the one that’d been broken into just a few days before in Austin. If done properly, the job should take four to five business days, but I’ve got a plane to catch in Pittsburgh, so there’s no time for a proper repair.

Al tells us that it will be a few minutes while he and his crew perform this makeshift surgery. As we wait in the lobby entrance, I hear the body shop employees singing along with an all too familiar voice. It’s Chente, my 69-year-old Mexican Sinatra. Two workers simultaneously let out a melodious cry into the morning warmth. It’s a sad cry, like a Johnny Cash caw only more guttural. Mexicans remedy this call with a cold gulp of tequila chased by one long swallow of an icy beer. I know this music very well. It penetrates me, and once more I reach toward something familiar, toward the past four years, until Al Garcia pulls me back.

“Ms. Waller?” he leans his head and shoulders around the corner from inside the workroom. “Your car is ready.”

*She’s actually fairly young, but we’ve been friends for a while.

I have very little interest in basketball, but I found this article about Shane Battier (by Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball) long but fascinating. Battier doesn’t have good stats, in the traditional sense, but makes his team better when he plays. It makes me want to take an interest in basketball and start running some stats about it.

On the topic of stats, Nate Silver (of Baseball Prospectus, FiveThirtyEight.org) predicts the Oscars using stats. Interesting!

And, on the topic of Michael Lewis, his book The Blind Side, a book about football’s left tackle, was preceded by a NY Times Magazine article, Ballad of Big Mike. It’s more of a narrative than a stats-filled article, but it’s still pretty interesting.

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One for the polydactylic hand’s extra finger!!

People who know me may be wondering why I haven’t posted much about the Steelers, given that they’re in the big game.

Don’t worry: I’m excited plenty. I’m wearing my 86 jersey right now. I find it almost cruel that they’re making me wait two weeks between the AFC Championship and the Super Bowl.

In a related topic, Scott referred me to an interesting NY Times slideshow of alternate Superbowl 43 logos. I think I like two retro designs, this one and the one below, the best.

With the Steelers playing the Cardinals in the Superbowl, let us remember that they were, for a season, the same team.

(Let us forget, though, that they were horrible.)

View Larger Map

I did my first long bike ride in a while yesterday and certainly my first new route in a long time. It mostly hugged the water around the bay and coast of San Francisco. It was based on the SF Chronicle’s “Outer Limits” ride. It ended up being about 27 miles.

It was a gorgeous day yesterday. Warm, but not hot, clear, even out by Ocean Beach, and there were some gorgeous views throughout. I also went through a number of parts of San Francisco that I’ve never seen before: the Presidio, Seacliff, Land’s End, Lake Merced and parts of the Marina.

I also missed some turns, went the wrong way and blew a tire (while riding without a spare for the first time I can remember) and so I almost got stuck out on the Great Highway (among all those ghosts). It’ll be better next time.

I spent 48ish hours in Pittsburgh a little after Christmas. It was my first trip there in two years. I’ve already posted a couple from the trip, but here’s a bit more.

I love Pittsburgh. I’ve lived in something like nine places at this point, but the longest tenure and most formative years were spent in Western Pennsylvania. I didn’t really didn’t think much of it while I lived there, but in summers of college and afterward on visits, I realized how much I liked it. Let’s say that everyone I know who didn’t grow up there thinks I talk too much about Pittsburgh for their liking.

When Pittsburghers say “Pittsburgh” to non-natives, they often mean Western Pennsylvania. Culturally, linguistically and in landscape it is a region that is pretty unique region. And driving to Pittsburgh from Southeastern Virginia, I could tell when Western PA was getting near–Cumberland, MD seemed very familiar. A shrinking town in a hill with similar architecture. And maybe it’s selective memory mixed with nostalgia talking, but I think if you lean your head against a car window and look out, through the trees and at the sky, you can tell just from that when you hit Western Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh surprises me every time I go back, both by changing and by staying the same. I didn’t expect there to be cyclists on the road or to have the same experience at a number of places that I had 8 or 10 years ago. Coming from a place where bars and restaurants and people turn over every few years, it’s odd to be in a place where something is still pretty new if it was built five years ago and many people have spent their whole lives in the region.

One of my favorite traditions is late night pizza at Mineo’s. It’s cheap and good and the company is unbeatable.

A newish place to me is Pamela’s Diner. They have great food at reasonable prices, compared to what I’m used to. I’d been introduced to the original (in the Strip) a few years ago by a friend from out this way who’d moved to Pittsburgh. It’s still good.

I’d been to Jerry’s and to Paul’s CD but I’d never been to Dave’s Music Mine. I don’t know how that hadn’t happened before, but it’s a pretty cool place. It’s got a good used selection and their soul records are pretty good.

I had a couple pinball aficionado friends that lived in Pittsburgh for a bit. One introduced me to pinball at the Beehive. I liked the Spiderman one. It had plenty of action but it was still pretty straight forward.

I love walking around the South Side. There are such great buildings. Also, there’s a sweet Salvation Army Thrift Store. I bought a suit for New Year’s Eve for $6.50.

I went back to the Church Brewworks for the first time since 2000ish. It was still good and, hey, possibly even better now that I can/ like to drink beer.

I went to Gooski’s for the first time. We didn’t spend a lot of time there, but I can imagine spending a lot of time at a place that’s halfway between its hard scrabble Polish neighborhood and the hip and alternative side of the clientele. Next time I’ll have to have the pierogies.

Primantis is as good as I remember it, but I’m glad I have Giordano Brothers the rest of the year for my Pittsburgh-style sandwich cravings.

I rode the incline, had cheap draft beer at a dive bar, and watched a football game.

Oh and did I mention I got to have buckeyes for the first time in a while? They’re a Christmas tradition for me and the region for whatever reason.

Pittsburgh always seems to tease me when I’m leaving, as if to say, look, Pittsburgh can have enticing weather sometimes.

Finally, all my friends now seem to have GPSs in their car. These are pretty funny in Pittsburgh, with its convoluted roads, one way streets and difficult geography because the driver inevitably says/ yells: “Why does it want me to go that way?? No, no, no, this other way is much faster.”

Though I grew up <22 miles from Braddock (city website)–named after Edward whose grave is a bit east in Farmington–I’ve never been there. It’s got an interesting story though and the mayor and some others seem to be trying to make some changes.

In a way it seems to be a more extreme version of the Western Pennsylvania I know, towns in the decline since much of the steel industry shut down or left. Historic and classic buildings abandoned and left to degrade.

(As Mr. Schlachter would be sure to correctly pronounce, that’s said Ne-an-der-tal.)

Do you know what you do with your bottle or can when you finish your beverage in Dallas? You throw it out. In the trashcan.

I’m not judging (or not meaning to). Social conventions and practices are different in different parts of the country and all. But living where people give you guilt trips if you don’t compost, it’s a bit of a shock. I mean, even Pittsburgh recycles.

That’s the NFL distribution match for this Sunday’s late (4:15pm EST) FOX game (courtesy of the506.com). Blue is Seattle @ San Francisco and red is NY Giants @ Pittsburgh.

Regardless of other affiliations, I think we can all safely say that we all want to be in red states for this one.

There were at least two noteworthy David Lawrences: David H. Lawrence, the English writer of Sons and Lovers among other things–probably the better known of the two–and David L. Lawrence, the Pennsylvania Governor and Pittsburgh Mayor, for whom the convention center is named. Next time you’ll know that D.L. didn’t write Sons and Lovers and D.H. didn’t govern Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh-style sandwiches, #1: It was approximately birthday lunch time at work, so for Friday I chose one of my favorites: Giordano Brothers in North Beach (previously; previously). Their Primanti’s-style sandwiches always warm my heart [1] and grow my belly. Very delicious stuff and hits the line of nostalgia and delicious food just right. Outcome: I was a winner, 1-0.

Pirates at Giants: the Pirates were in town so I saw them at AT&T park. Zack Duke who has been good in the past but was 5-13, ~5.1 ERA before the game. He seemed to regain some of his past skill for this game, pitching a complete game shut out and getting out of a couple really tricky jams (like basses loaded, no outs). Outcome Pirates 7-0.

Texans at Steelers: For the season opener, Dug and I went to Shanghai Kelly’s again. It’s my favorite Steelers bar. What a bunch of crazy people, cheering, yelling and drinking as early as 9:30am on a Sunday. And coming back, there were some of the same people as last year and the year before, so I recognized them. I’ll acknowledge that my Steelers fandom is among the most ridiculous things I regularly participate in and I’m fine with that. Outcome: Steelers 38-17.

Pittsburgh-style sandwiches, #2 Near the end of the game Dug was lobbying for a Giordano Bros sandwich–he hadn’t been on Friday–and I acquiesced. After all, who’s to stop a man from having a sandwich with slaw and fries on it? It was delicious again.

[1] Well, by “warm”, I mean clog.

If you haven’t seen the result, it’s pretty spectacular.

You can watch the video highlights here.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Steelers may change or restructure their management. The Steelers website confirms some talk of restructuring, but nothing about an outside buyer.

Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney, the eldest of the brothers, wants to consolidate his control through a 10-year plan to buy out most of their shares, but a well-funded prospective buyer has emerged after some of Mr. Rooney’s brothers and their children raised questions about his offer.

Stanley Druckenmiller, billionaire chairman of Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Capital Management, has expressed interest in acquiring the Steelers, people briefed on the negotiations said.

This isn’t something I ever thought I’d see. Hopefully it’ll work out for the best.

I’ve been following the hockey playoffs and I’ve been pretty happy with how the Pens were doing, but I haven’t be particularly engaged by the proceedings. Well, until tonight. Tonight I got a lot of cardiovascular exercise just sitting around and it was an exciting one.

The Pens were ahead two goals only to fall behind one well into the third period. They pulled their goalie and tied it up with 34 seconds left!

Then it’s sudden death overtime. They played pretty poorly but the 23 year old goalie for the Pens was playing immaculately. It was amazing what this guy was stopping. He’s a Jedi.

Second overtime and the pens played better but it still ended tied. Everyone’s exhausted at this point. Players were being knocked over and then having a hard time just standing up again.

The game went into the third overtime and both teams are just playing all out with anything they have left. The game started almost five hours before. Finally there’s a power play for the Pens and the guy who’s injured and hasn’t played since the third period comes back out. A guy who called it–who pointed at himself and said he’d get a goal earlier in overtime–scores the goal to end the game.

Oh benny what an exciting game. Unbelievable.

CEOs for Cities has an interesting presentation (pdf) of the top 50 cities ranked by various metrics. For instance, Pittsburgh is 49th in the category of “ratio of people reporting attending a cultural event to the number of people subscribed to cable”. (The biggest loser in that category: Nashville.)

Boston and San Francisco both rank highly (#3 and #1, respectively) in the “ratio of ethnic restaurants to fast food restaurants” category.

A lot of the page headings are confusing or misleading but the actual ratio that they are measuring is also listed on the page and I find those are much clearer.

(via the best non-blog out there Scott)

It’s a sad day. Every Pittsburgher knows exactly what Myron Cope meant to the city and to the Steelers.

Number of days: 112

Number of days or parts thereof spent traveling: 47 (3 to/ from, 7 intra-Taiwan (3 Kaohsiung, 2 Taroko, 2 Kinmen), 37 intra-Asia (7 Indonesia, 5 Thailand; 15 Hong Kong, Macau, China; 10 Japan)

Number of countries visited (since moving): 6 (Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, U.S.) + 2 special administrative regions with separate border controls (Hong Kong, Macau)

Number of countries visited (year to date): 8 (above + South Africa, Swaziland) + 2 S.A.R.s

Number of flights (since moving): 14 (SFO-> TPE-> CKG-> DPS-> CKG-> TPE-> BKK-> TPE-> HKG-> TPE-> NRT-> TPE, TSA-> KNH-> TSA, TPE-> SFO)

Number of flights (2007): 31 (SFO-> CVG-> IAD-> JNB, DUR-> CPT-> JNB-> JFK, BOS-> JFK-> SFO-> BOS-> DFW-> SFO-> HNL-> LIH-> HNL-> SFO + above + SFO-> CLT-> DCA)

Miles flown (since moving): 27,406 miles (44,106 km)

Miles flown (2007): 63,569 miles (102,304 km)

Number of high speed train journeys: 4 (Taipei->Kaohsiung->Taipei, Tokyo->Kyoto->Tokyo)

Number of train journeys: 6 (above + Taipei->Hualien->Taipei)

Approximate number of km ridden on scooters: 225

Best hotel (overall): Kamandalu Resort, Ubud, Bali. A connection to the cousin of the owner opened the door for staying in this swanky place. Gorgeous surroundings and really nice rooms. Private verandas looking over rice paddies. The service was also excellent. We went out riding bikes around the rice paddies one day and came back sweating. Pretty soon after we entered the lobby we had cool moist towels to wipe our faces with. Perhaps the only nicer place I’ve stayed is the ridiculous Schlosshotel Veir Jahrezeiten (Four Seasons Palace Hotel) in Berlin. (They had a Ferrari convention while we were there and it didn’t seem out of place.)

Best hotel (value): Hirano Guesthouse, Kyoto. 3500 yen a night in Kyoto is very cheap and besides a nice place to stay, the owner was very friendly, helpful and accommodating, making us tea when we came home for a break in the afternoons. She also made us breakfast every morning, let us use her bicycles and computer/ internet. Oh and there was a candy bowl and after we ate an unreasonable amount of it, she didn’t complain, she just refilled it.

Number of American chain stores patronized (not counting convenience stores, exact): 3 (2 Subways-Taipei, 1 Denny’s-Kyoto)

Number of American chain stores patronized (counting convenience stores[1], approximate): 22.2 (the above + Circle K’s in Taiwan, Bali, Thailand, ampm’s in Japan, plus 0.2 for a Mister Donut in Japan[2])

Oddest food obsession: Harbo’s Happy Cola gummy candies

Most common food eaten: rice (~ >1.5 servings a day)

Most common food product eaten: Kinder Chocolate (~ 0.6 a day)

Most “exotic” foods eaten: crickets, silk worms, frog

Number of Dr. Peppers consumed: 2 (one in Japan, one in Thailand)

Foods most missed: good bread, good cheese, Dr. Pepper, good beef, shelled shrimp, deboned fish.

Number of Hello Kitty products seen: in the thousands

Number of Hello Kitty products purchased: 1 (alarm clock, convenience store, Japan)

America: so quiet, so dark, so many English speakers, so many whites/ latinos/as, blacks. big supermarkets. low population density.

Least useful piece of clothing: dress shirt (the greenish one, never worn, given away at the end)

Most useful piece of clothing: shoes (the brown Adidas, nearly daily)

Most useful piece of clothing out of its original purpose (and new use): board shorts-style swimsuit (exercise shorts)

Piece of clothing I most immediately realized I’d forgotten: navy blue cotton boxers (that I use as warm weather pajama bottoms)

Number of books read: 5.75 (2nd 0.5 of Slow Man by Coeztee, Love is a Mixtape by Sheffield, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a Story of the Hip Hop Generation by Chang, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Klosterman, Born on a Blue Day By Tammet, You Don’t Love Me Yet by Lethem, first 0.25 of About a Boy by Hornsby)

Number of concerts attended: 3 (Emily the Band @ Underworld, Apples in Stereo @ the Wall, Sugar Plum Ferry @ the Wall)

Number of CDs purchased: 19 (5 in Hong Kong (Monitor), 5 @ WWR (1st trip), 5 @ WWR (2nd trip), 2 @ IMPO, 1 @ FINAC, 1 @ Roses(?))

Number of pieces of mail received: 6 (3 packages of promo CD(s); 1 each from Ian, Lauren, Gumbeaux)

[1] This is tricky because things are confusing. 7-11 is Japanese for instance.

[2] Mr. Donut is an American brand but the Asian stores are run by Duskin Co out of Japan under a licensing agreement.

the Polamalu throwback jersey

or

the Hines Ward throwback jersey?

Polamalu is probably the player I’m most impressed with in terms of playing ability–he plays like a wild man–but I like the longevity and single-teamedness (10 years on the Steelers, stopped a contract stand-still by telling his agent that he wanted to retire with the Steelers) and constant smile of Ward.

life is so hard!

I will talk about things that are Japan-related and things that are not Japan related. I had dreams of more well organized posts with photos and everything, but I’ll post now with possibly expanding on some of these topics later.

My ear is feeling (ie hearing) a bit better. I’ve started listening to ear buds again in limited (very quiet) contexts. First song back: “King of Pain”.

The rest of the Japan trip was pretty good.

I mean, it was great. It’s a crazy place. One coworker said something like it’s a very odd combination of a repressed/ conservative culture and a wild/ unashamed culture. Very strange.

Some of the stranger places included the hot bath that had a mildly electrified pool, the sushi place that required you to eat at least 7 dishes (of 2 pieces a piece) of mostly sushimi in less than 20 minutes, the Diago-ji temple that had a painting that I thought was a garden; either that, or it had a garden that was completely unreal in how beautiful and archetypal it was. They were also chanting in the part of the temple that’s at the top of the hill when we got there and I could hear it from maybe half a mile off. A strange beacon.

I’m not missing Thanksgiving. I mean, I’m not attending Thanksgiving and thus am missing it but Thanksgiving is such a non-event here that the only time I even think about it is when I talk to people in America. Also, I knew from May that I wouldn’t be doing Thanksgiving this year. I love Thanksgiving, but I’m prepared.

(Did you miss the Moon Festival this year? I didn’t; I participated.)

On the other hand, the prevalence of Christmas decorations, music and colder weather in Japan made it feel like mid-December, much close to when I would be leaving for the U.S. That caused many more pangs of homesickness.

During bouts of longing for America, it seems that any culture representing that will do, possibly with even the less sophisticated being better. No, I’m not talking about fast food; I’m talking about movies. Last night, I watched Must Love Dogs without shame; tonight may be 40 Days and 40 Nights. In Germany, I remember watching (possibly multiple) Freddie Prinze Jr movies. It’s crap.

I finished Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a Story of the Hip Hop Generation last week. I’m not sure, but I think it’s racist. The book draws some distinction in various situations between pro-black and anti-white, but I think this book was possibly anti-white. For instance, the nomenclature was: Black, Latino, Asian, Korean (etc etc) and white.

Now I’m on to Chuck Klosterman’s Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, which is a book of Klosterman’s ridiculous pronouncements about culture, on everything from internet pornography to NBA basketball to Billy Joel. It’s entertaining, but I think I prefer his travel narrative, Killing Yourself to Live.

Sufjan’s having a contest in which you can win rights to one if his songs if you write the best original christmas song (which he then gets the rights to). I am thinking of something along the lines of a response song to a classic 1963 Christmas song. We’ll see if I can churn something out–I need to figure out how to do the instrumentation on this–maybe FruityLoops or something. My guitar through a built-in mic isn’t going to cut it.

The Steelers loss today was almost funny. It’s almost expected, the way the Steelers manage to botch the “easy” games. None of their three losses is even marginally excusable and if some columnist says otherwise, question his ability to analyze their games. On the other hand, they’ve been great in pretty much the rest of their games.

There is a baby crying down the hall. I hope this doesn’t continue. I don’t like crying babies.

On strange candies and confectionaries. Good: the two different Chocolate Pocky’s and Men’s Pocky, those weird mushroom-shaped chocolates that are sort of like Pocky, some Mentos (Fuji Apple, particularly and the Berry Blast and Sour mixes), mint Kit Kats, all Kinder chocolates. Interesting, but not great: Green Tea Meltykiss, those white + green tea chocolates, that incompressible Mentos that might have been cherry and also the strawberry and green apple ones, the mini-hamburger chocolates. Bad: apple Kit Kats.

Steelers beat the Ravens 38-7.

Roethlisberg had 5 touch downs…in the first half and ended up 13/16 for 209 yards, 5 TDs and no interceptions. That’s gotta do a lot for your quarterback rating…

Harrison seemed perhaps more impressive: 3.5 sacks, 2 force fumbles and 1 interception. Basically the defense was awesome overall–104 net yards was all they allowed. That’s pretty much amazing.

The running game had a hard time, it seems. Willie had a hard time (23 carries for 42 yards–this must be the first time in a long time that the team’s won without Willie getting a 100 yard game, right?), so they put in the bigger Najeh (11 caries for 34 yards) and also big Carey Davis (3 for 14 yards). Almost 100 yards in total.

Also not great was Ben getting injured. I don’t quite know what the deal is other than he came back and then left the game again, but hopefully he’s not injured longer-term.

Go Stillers. Hopefully they can figure out how to run against hard defenses and Ben’s okay.

Wulai. (”ooh-lai”) I spent yesterday in Wulai, which is known for their hot springs and one of the highest water falls in Taiwan. The hot springs were excruciatingly hot. If I hadn’t seen other people in there, I would have doubted that a human could sit in there. I got in and it was nice. But the advice of a fellow bather provied useful: “don’t move”. I think it worked similar to the recommended advice for falling into cold water: if you don’t move the water directly around the body get closer to the temperature of the body and acts as a protective barrier.

I walked to the waterfalls, about 1.5km. There’s a miniature railroad along this route. The cars are about 10 feet long and the tracks are maybe 2 feet apart. It’s really cute and I wanted to ride it but I decided that I’d do so on the way back, only to find I’m misread the hours and I’d missed it! Disaster. I really like riding odd rail and cable transportation[1], especially funiculars (being a son of Pittsburgh [2]) but others as well.

The falls were nice. Nothing like Victoria Falls or Niagara, but something nice to look at for a few minutes. From there I started walking toward Doll Valley, which the guidebook listed as about an hour away. As I walked away from Wulai, the scenery became lusher in the valley I was walking in and the cars and whatnot became sparser. Eventually I turned onto a foot path and saw a few people and a number of smaller waterfalls. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get back by sunset if I went to Doll Valley which I deemed a Bad Thing (TM) so I turned back but the hike was nice.

Sometimes it’s good for the head as well as the body, you know?

Wedding. Today I went to a wedding. Correction, I didn’t go to the wedding, which was held in the family’s home and wasn’t attended by many; I went to the wedding “party” (as they called it) or “reception” (as the Americans might call it). It was pretty interesting. For instance, the couple entered along with lasers and fog machines. The bride changed dresses twice (three dresses total) and the couple would reenter to much fanfare each time. As I understand is the case with many Asian cultures, the wedding presents were actually envelopes of cash. The food was largely really good: about 20 dishes (in 7 or so courses). It was way too much food, but I gave it my best effort.

This is a wedding, not a night club?

No one was drinking the bottle of scotch set aside for my table so I was given it to take home. Now it’s just time to see if I still don’t like scotch and if so see if I can change that.

Lugo’s catch (available here). Perfect. Perfectly timed in both execution and in shutting down a rally by the Rockies.

The Red Sox are highly paid but I’d like to note that they’re getting a lot out of players that aren’t very highly paid at all: Papelbon, Pedroia, Ellsbury, and Youkilis are all low paid players.

It made me really happy that Dice-K that got a two run single.

Couch. After two months, I may have found the only marginally comfortable position on my couch. That is a remarkably uncomfortable couch for sitting, lounging or anything else. Despite being aware of the recommendations I am using my bed to sit and lounge with my laptop or book when I get tired of the chair.

Arnold. They seriously show my governor’s movies all the time here. All…the…time. By the way, TV programmers: they’re mostly not very good, those movies.

[1] The best yet is Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn. If you’re anywhere near Wuppertal, it’s worth a trip just to ride that.

[2] at one point I dated a daugther of the American Revolution. she was really into that.

Snow cancelled plenty of days when I was young (though 2 hour delays were the best because you didn’t have to make those yo) but natural conditions haven’t canceled much more feel in the last 8 years. MIT just wouldn’t cancel classes…except for that one record-breaking snow fall. Otherwise, you’re already in hell, what’s walking a mile in 8 inches of freezing slush?

Well that’s all changing for me because tomorrow’s TYPHOON DAY. No school, no work across the region.

My mom was telling me this weekend that my parents’ new house is quiet. This astounds me because this is compared to Candlewood[1]. I can’t imagine a quieter place. I remember going into the basement during a break from college and my ears and head hurt it was so quiet. I was so used to four or six or eight computers humming in any room, people yelling, laughing, chatting, arguing, snoring in deep sleep, the belabored breathing of a cold that just won’t go away, the music playing, someone drumming or singing or playing guitar, the street cleaners slowly making their way up the street, the shovels of the snowplows scraping along the street in winter, the garbage trucks coming to empty the dumpster, the cars whizzing past or honking if they weren’t, the drunken college kids yelling or laughing on their walk home from whatever bar or pub, the planes making their way out of Logan. I was so used to a constant din, a background of noise that this silence was shocking.

If Double Eagle[2] is quieter than that, I may have a hard time. I’ll be sure to bring my laptop and music to play.

[1],[2] Through lots of moving, business relationships, and a spread out set of relations, my family has need to refer to a number of different houses. We invariably choose the street name. “Which house was that?” “Smits Road”. “Where was it that Wolfgang visited?” “General Allen Lane”. An odd case of synecdoche. The Candlewood house was always just the “house” but now that my parents have moved away, it’s taking on ‘Candlewood”.

Our cars also had an odd nomenclature: their color. “We’ll take the green car.” “Which car can I take to Andy’s house?” “Take the red car. Mom needs the blue car.” Somehow every car we’ve purchased since the late 80s has been a mutually exclusive color to all that came before. My family is rife with synecdoche.

I just deleted the “Bischoff” phone number on my phone as my parents moved out of my childhood home yesterday. Goodbye, Pittsburgh. It’s been good.

Mister Rogers was pretty incredible.

In high school, I remembering visiting a friend, Waller, who was doing a week-long camp/ program at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, where Mister Rogers did his theological studies. Mister Rogers had stopped by the previous night. Waller was so excited about that; it had made her week. At the time I thought it was a sort of nostalgia-based, ironic excitement but now I realize it was probably authentic.

Dave and Tina were in town yesterday, so I headed up to SF to hang out with them in the afternoon and evening.

We walked from Ghirardelli Sq, down Columbus to Giordano Brothers, a restaurant that serves “Pittsburgh-style” (aka Primanti’s) sandwiches. I love this place. They do this style of sandwiches well and it always helps/ calms my nostalgia needs. There’s also some good people watching in the area.

We then walked down Columbus (past the transamerica building) and then down to the Embarcadero. From there we made our way down past all the piers (picking up a much needed Slurpee near the end) before going to Musee Mechanique. It’s on Pier 45, right at the end of all those piers by Fishermen’s Wharf.

Musee Mechanique is a collection of coin-operated devices: penny arcade games, photo booths, flip-card movie machines (“Mutoscopes”), fortune tellers, moving dioramas and music boxes and other music machines. The collection has items from the late 1800s up until probably the 1990s, but most of them probably come from the first half of the 20th century.

It’s an amazing collection. More importantly, it’s a lot of a fun. I’m a big mechanical geek so the intricate mechanical ones are really cool to me. It’s pretty cheap: free admission and the games are 25 or 50 cents each for the most part, so for $5 or $10 you can play a lot of them.

An ancient and gorgeous sounding disc-based music box

After that we headed over the Mission to eat at Walzwerk, the always-delicious East German restaurant. Good food, good beer, not too pretentious. Winners!

Mel’s Bowl rounded out the night. It was really quiet, save a bunch of Warriors fans in the bar. We were one of two groups bowling. There was this really cute old couple next to us. The wife was asleep while he bowled. He was slower but was obviously good in his day. He had a lot of finesse still and was pretty good (he could easily beat me). I was cheering him on the whole time.

I bowled pretty badly with a 113 and 115, but I still beat out Dave to be the absolute champion.

more photos after the jump (way below)

(more…)

To some people, “Pittsburgh sound” might conjure up Don Caballero and other math rock groups. Other might think of Girl Talk. Now people might think of Wiz Khalifa. He’s a young Pittsburgh MC (a senior at Allderdice, in fact) with a song out by that name.

Rolling Stone has a write-up about him. Ed Masley at the Post Gazette talks much more about Pittsburgh.

I like the video because it shows a number of familiar sites. As for the music, it’s competent and listenable, but not great. I’ll give it time.

You can find out/ hear more at his his myspace page.

I scanned and uploaded a bunch of black and white photos to my picasa thing.

Galleries include Pittsburgh over Christmas, my first try at fisheye, the Oakland A’s last game of their sweep of the Twins in the playoffs, Jose Gonzalez @ Stanford, and John Vanderslice @ Stanford.

nor can it be. NYC is out of luck as well.

At least according to this essay about what it takes to be Silicon Valley.

Apparently the Steelers will name Mike Tomlin their new head coach. Who’s this Tomlin guy?

Is this a good or bad choice over Grimm? (The Whiz is going to Arizona).

Also, go Bears?

Everyone knows that Cowher retired (or stepped down or whatever), but no one seems to have noticed that Dick Hoak retired a few days earlier.

Dick Hoak was the Steelers’ running backs coach for 45 35 years, going back to 1972. Pittsburgh has been a running team all of those years and Dick Hoak was the reason that usually worked. Franco Harris was coached by Hoak. Barry Foster had 12 100 yard games in a season under Hoak. Jerome Bettis was transformed from a good, but faltering running back to a Hall-of-Fame runner under Hoak. Willie Parker had two 200 yard games this season (the record for a career is six) under Hoak. I wonder how Parker will continue to develop without him.

Here’s a bio and nice article about him from 2004.

I took a number of photos in Pittsburgh (including this one) and put them online.

I managed to see the three Pittsburgh sports teams a total of five times this year.

Due to some fortuitous scheduling, I saw all of them in the Bay Area (in three different cities):

• June 11 Pirates @ Giants. 7-5 Pirates
• October 29 Steelers @ Raiders 20-13 Raiders
• November 4 Penguins @ Sharks 3-2 Sharks

I saw two of the three in Pittsburgh:

• August 5 Braves @ Pirates 3-2 Pirates
• December 27 Thrashers @ Penguins 4-2 Thrashers

Today when I was sorting through my desk drawers, I found this receipt from Beluga Records:

[they said to save the receipt and I did]

Colin had told me that this band, the Coctails, had musical saw because he knew I was interested in it, so I decided to order The Coctails’ Peel. I’d also heard him talking about bands like Superchunk and Sebadoh, many of whom appeared on the Lounge Ax Relocation and Defense Fund CD.

I ordered those CDs and I believe they were my first indie rock CDs. I possibly bought Sebadoh’s Free Weed before that, but I’m not completely sure. July 1997 would place me at the end of my sophomore year of high school, about to enter my junior year.

Andy said that yesterday: “I had embarrassing teen years.” He was going through some boxes of stuff that his parents wanted to get rid of to make space. I laughed at him. I’m not embarrassed by my teen years, I thought. I did alright with them.

Here’s one gem Andy found yesterday:

[yeah, I should crop this and make it a smaller file.]

It’s the original lyric sheet to the Where’s Luke theme song. This was when we were preparing for the coffee house that they hosted at Westminster Presbyterian. I think we might have just been asking Colin if he’d be our drummer.

Tonight I went through my drawers in my desk tonight. I was laughing again, this time at myself. Despite myself I did have an embarrassing adolescence. I found all sorts of ridiculous things that I saved. The pot of gold at the end of the embarrassment rainbow was the half-drawer full of love notes, poems and drawings from a high school girlfriend. I was smiling so much at the ridicilousness of it that I almost cried.

I was delayed there a bit, but here’s the December mix tape. Hopefully there’s enough time for you to download it and get it on to your favorite digital audio player for your holiday travels. Play it while sitting around the Christmas tree with your family.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list. you should now have the 2006december playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. It’s a mix of normal indie fare along with indie and oldies/ Motown Christmas songs.

Adrian’s December 2006 mix tape [zip file]

This’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week) before being moved to a password protected folder.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

Enjoy and have a happy Christmas or other winter solstice-timed religious, ethnic or other holiday.

In the middle of a stream of bittersweet nostalgia, I took a bunch of photos this weekend.

They’re here.

I did a bunch of fun stuff, today, some of which I may write about later, but, for now, it’s all about Paul’s Compact Discs in Bloomfield. Dave and I made the trek over to Bloomfield after a Primanti’s sandwhich this afternoon.

It’s a smallish record store, not giant by any means, but also not shoebox and very navigable. The way it’s laid out and the way things are organized made it easy to look through things. They had a good selection among indie music, including the classic stuff (they had 3 of the 4 Seam albums in stock). They also have a good vinyl (7″ and LPs) selection. Their used CD selection is small and flat-priced (all $8) so that’s not the greatest. The people behind seemed knowledgable (one geeky clerk informed me of a Girl Talk show tonight after I bought the album).

I’d say it’s perhaps on par with Aquarius or slightly lower on my list for small record stores, but that’s saying a lot: Aquarius is pretty amazing and I like Paul’s a lot too.

I got:

• Girl Talk Night Ripper
• Ida Will You Find Me [used]
• Sigur Ros Saeglopur

I was familiar with the Ida and the Sigur Ros sounds good from first listen. I had heard little snippets of the Girl Talk and had read the rave reviews and I figured I should buy it in Pittsburgh if I was going to buy it, given that he’s a Pittsburgh local. I listened to it in the car a few times while driving around today and, I must say, I’m impressed. He takes tiny samples of pop songs, often dozens for each song of his and mashes them together (quite different from a “mash up” in most ways) to make another song. The samples he mixes and the smothness with which he does it, for the most part, are pretty amazing. It’s good music and it’s fun to try to pick out the samples he’s using. Today I definitely heard, among others, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Pixies, Verve (itself a sample), Kanye West, Gwen Stefani, and Elton John. No one’s sacred.

I also found out today that Unwed Sailor has cancelled their tour, including tomorrow night’s stop at the Brillobox, so that’s sad. I was looking forward to that. If I’d know that it was cancelled (I just found out), I would probably have made more of an effort to catch Girl Talk tonight at Belvedere’s. Oh well.

I’m back in Pittsburgh for the Thanksgiving holiday. Today I went up to New Brighton in Beaver County to grab lunch with my friend Chris Atwell. He’s been working at his uncle’s business, Ceramic Color and Chemical Manufacturing Co. They take metals (inorganic chemicals), grind them and combine them in various ways to make pigments, which are largely used in tiles and other ceramics. He gave me a tour of the plant, which is mostly within a very cool 200 year old building and it was a bunch of industrial equipment. Man, I love factory tours. Giant mechanical equipment is my thing.

(Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to take any photos of the giant mechanical equipment inside.)

I also think it’s cool that they’re doing what they’re doing: growing slowly, competing on the global market with a family business using local labor. That seems increasingly rare these days.

We ended up grabbing lunch at the Backdoor Tavern up there. (I must admit, I winced after I hit enter in google with the search terms ‘backdoor’ and ‘beaver’ (it’s in Beaver county) thinking I’d get a bunch of dirty results but I was actually able to find the place I wanted.) I got a really solid meatball sandwhich and a Penn Pilsner. The total for the two? $7. In Palo Alto, I might get a mediocre sandwhich for seven bucks…

After lunch, the following sign caught my eye and I had to check out the Rosalind Candy Castle:

That 3ft tall chocolate Santa was like a little person but jolly and made of chocolate. mmmmmm three foot tall chocolate Santa…. (give me a minute here.) I ended up getting a Santa chocolate lollipop and some dark chocolate covered pretzels which my family agreed were excellent when we had them for dessert tonight.

Then I walked through downtown Beaver before coming home.

I put more photos from today online

(How is something so simple like going to the same place and getting a pizza so awesome? Wish you were there, Andy.)

There are a couple entertaining videos that I found or ran across in the recent times:

Aries Spears impressions while freestyling. This is a guy doing impressions of LL Cool J, Snoop Dog, DMX and Jay Z while freestyling. It’s pretty dang impressive, though I’m not familiar with DMX at all and only somewhat familiar with the other three. I’m still very impressed. (A couple things of note: a) that’s Live 105, in SF and that’s the same studio where I did the college dj of the week thing and 2) it appears Woody, one of the hosts, is a Steelers fan as he’s sporting a hat and a Willy Parker jersey). (via stereogum)

Peyton Manning Mastercard Priceless Ad. I can see how you might not like Peyton Manning, but man, I love this commercial which started running last year. They have a second, similar one this season but it’s not as good. I laugh every time I see this one.

[Update:] Oh man, I found another Peyton priceless commercial and it’s hilarious too. Also, there’s a blooper commercial from the first Peyton video and the making of (including the actual commercial at the end) a third in the series.

Amazingly the Steelers pulled off another win. Roethlisberger threw for 224 yards in the fourth quarter (out of 272 yards total); he was intercepted 3 times in the first half. I have an idea, Ben: throw well the whole game! I know it’s crazy; just crazy enough that it might work.

You can check out the video highlights (check out the end to see the crappy-but-somehow-it-worked go-ahead shovel pass), the post game quotes, or the rather pathetic game stats.

Last night I saw the Penguins play the Sharks. They lost in a close and well-played game. It was a fun game to watch. The new young players (by which I mean Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby, Jordan Staal, and Marc-Andre Fleury) are really good, by the way. And if you haven’t seen, the Penguins are actually doing well so far this season.

The Steelers lost again today. They actually seemed to make a game of it until the end there. But in the end, the result is the same: disappointment. The culprit was turnovers again. Blah. Also: post game quotes.

wow. that was just embarrassing. 4 interceptions! Two for TDs? Come on, Ben~

good thing I paid way too much for tickets to be there!

(Out of ~63K people there, I’d say 5-10K were baseball fans though.)

After a few weeks of disappointments, I’m happy the Steelers can still beat a crappy team. Their domination of the game encourages me that this might not just be a one-week-against-a-crappy-team spurt. As always, the post game quotes are somewhat interesting.

The steelers alternated being dominant and sucking badly in today’s 28-20 loss against the Bengals. When dug came over at the end of the first quarter, I told him the Steelers were dominating, at which point they started sucking. In the 3rd quarter they were dominating again, and then sucking in the 4th until it was do or die and they almost did.

The AP write up and the post-game quotes.

There was some stat that all x points were scored with the wind. Heinz Field is basically a nasty wind funnel on some days. I don’t know if the stat held all the way through the game, but at least the first 34 points were scored with the wind.

Willie Parker and the offensive line played really well all day and that made me pretty happy because they didn’t play great in either previous game.

I finally scanned in some photos of Jeff and Debi’s Wedding.

I also added a few of Colin to the Pgh 2006 directory. They’re from Colin’s first of two (or three?) trips to Eat N Park that day.

Yeah, I’m a few days late on this, but on Thursday I watched the Steelers win at Zack’s in Millbrae with Mike and Dug.

Charlie Batch did pretty well. Willie Parker looked great on a few runs and the handful of screen play passes he caught.

Polamalu continues to look better and better each game he plays. This guy is incredible. His interception was really skillful, as was Porter’s. Porter kissed Cowher after that and Cowher was fine with it.

Heath Miller’s 87 yard TD reception interception was sort of funny. There was this guy at the bar that had high-fived everyone before Heath had passed the 50. Cowher thought he was fast, but it took pretty long for him to get anywhere. I mean, he had time check the jumbotron to see if the defense was gaining on him.

If I were a Dolphins fan, I might be pissed about the missed challenge on the Heath Miller touchdown, but it’s sort of laughable that the coach waited that long (~1 minute) when he was obviously out and then did a dainty underhand toss right before the snap and then just sort of pointed to it when no one saw it.

Here’s a slide show from the Post Gazette and their write up.

With my dad working for a coal company, I grew up around talk of mining coal veins and the like, but I was a little surprised to see this in an article about Centro-matic:

Centro-matic’s dynamic is intelligent, emotional American rock that mines some of the same veins as My Morning Jacket, Son Volt and the Drive-By Truckers.

How about that? Is that a common expression? Does your average San Jose (or other major city resident) know that coal (and other fossil remnants) is located in veins?

I always have moments like these because the linguistic hodge-podge that’s in my head: South African English, Pittsburghese, south-eastern PA dialect, geek slang. I know that 98% of what I say is understandable by the listener; it’s that last 2% that I’m never sure if it’s some specific or specialized term, phrase or way of talking that I’m not sure is in the common lexicon.

As has been mentioned, I saw Jens Lekman in a pizza parlor in Brooklyn before he played at Sound Fix. And there’s photographic evidence.

I also scanned some more pictures tonight of NYC (color, b&w) and Pgh.

Part of Jeff’s bachelor party was going to the Pirates game on Thursday. It was a close game and a good one, with the Pirates winning in the end.

Here’s a a good recap of the game.

Also PNC Park is awesome. They even have Primanti’s and a pierogi race. It’d be a truly sad moment if the team moved.

I was entertained in NYC.

Rye Playland. I went to one of two parks listed in the National Registry of Historic Places on Tuesday. It’s a great old park. It has a few newer rides including one of those vomit-inducing spin-you-around-while-already-spinning you-around-in-a-different-axis rides (I believe my quote to my ride companion liz was “it’ll be a bonding moment when we puke on each other”—yeah, I’m gross), but most of the rides are classic older ones, including the Whip, the Swing, the (Mind) Scrambler, the Derby Racer (wow! 25mph on a carousel-like ride) and a great old carousel. It’s pretty similar to Kennywood in a lot of ways, but smaller. It’s an extremely photogenic park, with a main promenade and a common color scheme throughout. I hope some of my photos from the park turn out. I recommend this park if you’re into classic amusement parks.

Conan O’Brien taping. Despite waiting in lines for approximately the same amount of time that the show filmed, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I laughed a bunch (a chunk of which was during the audience warm up by Brian McCann). The theater is a lot smaller than I thought it’d be. As has been observed by others, seeing a taping does ruin a little bit of magic, though for years I’ve realized that the interview portion of the show had prompted questions and Conan doesn’t do a great job of hiding it. It was still funny and fun to watch.

Jens Lekman at Soundfix Records. We headed off to hipster-central, Williamsburg, Brooklyn to see Jens Lekman play an in-store at Soundfix Records. We had some pizza at a place down the street from Soundfix which was mostly not noteworthy except for Jens Lekman sitting in the catty-corner booth. I wished him a good show as he was leaving. The show space was in a separate room from the actual store part of Soundfix and when we got there it was packed and really hot. This was during the heat wave so the outside temperature was probably still in the 90s and the temperature in the room was probably between 115 and 125. It was like a (swedish) sauna. I wasn’t surprised that it was packed—it was a hipster band in a hipster locale; only later I realized that the last NYC Sleater Kinney show (and the fourth-to-last S-K show ever) was the same night; that’s why brooklynvegan, hipster extraordinaire didn’t fill us in with pictures from Jens, I guess. After we realized that one could stand outside, in the relatively cool air, and still hear the show fine, it was a pretty enjoyable, but rather short, show. I like Jens a lot. Afterwards I bought a couple CDs at Sounfix (the Wrens, Kelley Stoltz, Masters of the Autoharp) and we headed back.

Claude Debussey?

Isn’t that some relation to Jerome Bettis?

harharharharharharharharharharh

Man, who invented open cell polyurethane foam? All the best souvenirs are made of it.

For instance: I got a foam Statue of Liberty crown after I went there on Monday:

And I got a sweet foam finger at the Pirates game the other day:

These are all the souvenirs I got for a three city east coast tour:

The other day I finished King Dork by Frank Portman, (former) front man of the band, The Mr. T Experience who I remember coming through Pittsburgh a few times in my youth.

It’s a “young adult” novel, which is a genre that I don’t delve into often*. Tom Henderson is the main character. He’s a dork, surprise, who is well outside of the “normal” clique in his high school. He has one friend, Sam Hellerman, who he’s friends with largely becauses of alphabetical ordering. They’re in a band together. In fact, they’re in many bands together. Tom maps out his school year so far, in fact, by what their band was named at the time. They have lots of trouble finding a drummer (which I might relate to—my high school band, Where’s Luke?, got its name from our missing drummer). Tom gets harassed daily by the alpha males of the school. He has a bit of a disfunctional family, with a step-father that he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with, a mother that’s still disturbed by Tom’s father’s death some six years in the past. The book finds him struggling with the bullies at the school, his family, Sam’s new friends, his first experiences with girls, and mysterious notes left in some of his father’s books from his childhood.

It was a quick read and I liked it a lot. I related to Tom in some ways. I liked that it was sort of like taking an normal YA novel and jamming in a little bit of music geekery. And it was a good and interesting story. I found myself wanting to find out what happened next. It’s nothing groundbreaking but it was worthwhile.

* The last YA novel that I read was The Perks of Being a Wallflower (in a day back in the spring of 2003) which was written by a guy that went to my high school. I related to it for my similarities to the main character but also because of the connection to my high school, which was pretty subtle, small references to teachers I had and phrases we used. One of the acknowledgements at the beginnig of the book was of a person I used to play ultimate with. The main characters of King and Perks come down on polar opposite sites of whether Catcher in the Rye is a good book or not.

nice!

I was thinking of ordering a bunch of black hoodies and hand silk-screen YINZER in block letters across the front, probably in a collegiate sort of font, in gold.

I was thinking of making these so they’d be ready in time for the start of the Steeler’s season. Good idea? Would you buy one? They’d probably be ~$20 each and I’d want a few people to commit before I ordered any sweat shirts and make the silk screen.

The other day I was surprised to find out that no only has Rick Sebak put some of his programs on DVD, but that Netflix carries some of them. Rick has made documentaries for many years. Originally they were all for WQED, one of Pittsburgh’s PBS affiliates (now it’s only PBS affiliate) and they were about Pittsburgh. A program about downtown Pittsburgh; another about the churches and places of worship in Pittsburgh (just about always shown on Christmas and Easter), another about the renowned Kennywood; a couple about things that used to be around and one specifically about things that are still there. I watched all of them, taped most of them off of TV during one of their pledge drives. When I first moved to the city they were a way to get into the culture pretty quickly. Later I just loved watching them. I remember when I first heard that he was going to do national programs and I was happy. Now I pop on the TV occasionally to see “Sandwhiches that you will Love” or the one about roadside attractions. They’re infectious. I want to go to the places that Rick shows and talk to the people he talks to.

I haven’t seen some of the newer programs, both the national ones and the Pittsburgh ones. I put Things We’ve Made into my queue and watched it on Friday.

This movie is probably mostly of interest to Pittsburghers or ex-Pittsburghs, but there is quite a lot of manufacturing processes shown, so geeky mechanical engineers or the like might also like it. One of the coolest parts is when they’re showing the Glenshaw Glass Company plant in which they made millions (billions) of beer bottles and how the machines cut up the molten glass into measured blobs and then pushed it into molds and out popped a bottle.

There’s still steel made in the Pittsburgh area—they visited the Clairton US Steel plant. I’d love to go there and take photographs. There’s this one shot in the movie where they’re in a semi-open area and there are these two giant cauldrons of molten steel being poured out and in the background there are the machine operators and a sign saying “House of Pain.” My goodness that could be an amazing photograph.

There were also quirky little things in there, like when they’re talking about All-Clad which is made in Canonsburg, really close to where I grew up and they’re talking about taking some of the new products to this restaurant and this chef to test. Well, that place, the Classroom in McMurray, is where I took my first girlfriend before the Homecoming dance and where my family at dinner on New Year’s Eve, 1999. I realize it’s just a local Pittsburgh movie, but given that it’s a movie out on DVD and that I got from Netflix it has enough separation that it seems weird to see this place on the screen.

I went to the Pirates at Giants game this afternoon with dug.

We got tickets in the Arcade section (147 to be specific) which is an odd section in front of the pathway out in right field that’s only a few rows (4-7) rows deep. We were in row four which put us pretty close to the field. It was Moises Alou Bobblehead Night and I was looking forward to having a bobblehead to put in my space at work.

The Pirates squeezed out a couple of runs and were ahead 2-1 until the Giants took the lead in the 6th. In the top of the 8th when they loaded the bases. A hit to the 2nd baseman followed by a where-do-I-throw-this bit of confusion lead to the bases still being loaded and another run in. Then Bautista, who had doubled earlier in the game, came up and hit a grandslam on a 1-1 pitch. Final score: 7-5.

Here’s a decent recap.

I found this a bit interesting.

I’m going to Philly then NYC and then Pittsburgh late July, early August. I booked a ticket into PHL and a ticket out of PIT (separately, on two different airlines).

Originally I was going to rent a car on Sunday night or Monday morning, drive to NYC (google says 2hr 19 min) and then drive to Pittsburgh on Thursday (google says 7hr 47 min). Then I investigated options:

1. Renting a car for the four days: $264, travel time close to 10 hours.
2. Train to NYC: $42, travel time 1.5 hours; rent a car on Thursday to drive to Pittsburgh: $105, travel time 7.75 hr.
3. Train to NYC: $42, travel time 1.5 hours; fly to Pittsburgh: $84, travel and wait time at the airport: 3.5 hours-ish.

Option 3 is half as long and $138 less than option 1. Neat!

I’m going to one or two Pirates games a year so I figured I should be able to outfit myself for the event. I was looking at getting the old 70s Pirates high top hat (below) but found a bunch of great throwback caps. I particularly like 1901-06, 1915-19, 1940-41, 1947, and the 70s high top. I think the winner may be the 1940-41. It’s just so classy.

Update: 1940-41 Road Cap ordered. I’ll consider picking up the 70s high top cap in Pittsburgh on the cheap.

I’ve been pretty slow on the posts recently, large because I’ve been busy doing stuff that is sort of not-interesting-in-the-blog-way.

So I decided I’d turn all this stuff into a post.

One time things and whatnot:

• Nedelle’s pretty rad. She’s going to be playing on my radio show this Wednesday at about 10:15pm PDT. I’m pretty excited. I’ll see if I can get a copy of the show up for you east coast people to listen to.
• I’m getting ready for the Tahoe Century ride in about a month. I’ve been trying to ride a lot in preparation. I rode today and yesterday, but I’ve also been having problems with getting an inordinate number of flats, so I need to resolve that. But my goal over the next three weeks is 3 rides/ week: 2 x 30 miles and 1 x 15 miles, including at least one trip up Old La Honda or King’s Mountain per week. At this point, I alternatingly feel I’m screwed and that I’m doing fine.
• I’m going to be in Philadelphia/ DC, NYC and Pittsburgh for about 10 days total in late July for a couple weddings. It’s pretty exciting. I’m thinking about Rye Playland and Kennywood among so many other things. I might also try to catch a taping of Conan, try to catch a Buc’s game and, of course, see some fantastic friends and take lots of pictures with too many cameras.
• I just now found a weird and kind of interesting acoustic cover of Sigur Ros. I never considered that someone could cover Sigur Ros. They’re no Sigur Ros, but it’s cool.
• I’m going to South Africa again next February. February 2007, that is for my mom’s birthday. I’m going to spend a week in Cape Town, but I’m also going to try to spend 1-2 weeks on the road driving around South Africa. I’m looking forward to going back to South Africa.
• It looks like my laptop (Proud Owner of Brand New Canada) is near its end. Unless something changes about the situation, I’ll probably be getting a new one in the next few weeks/ couple of months.

Everyday stuff:

• I’m still taking spanish at the Palo Alto Adult School. It’s about 2 hours a week and the pace is slow, but I’m learning stuff so, yeah, it’s good.
• Lots of KZSU stuff. I’m doing my indie show. I’m not longer hosting the the Lunch Special but I’m still acting as the producer. Lots of interesting guests bringing their music. A schedule is on that page I linked up there. I’m also the Promotions Director, so I try to organize tickets for concerts for on-air giveaways. As the promotions guy, I’m also writing a custom PHP web app. This stuff is not obvious and not easy, at least not for me, the mech e. I’m getting the hang of it, but I’m also pretty much sick of writing this app.
• I’ve been challenged by lawn bowling and recently applied for membership at the place I’ve been bowling, the Palo Alto Lawn Bowling Club. The green is closed until the end of May, though, so no bowling for now.
• The BoSox are tied for lead in their division. The Pirates are a couple steps away from the bottom of the league. The Steelers got what look like a couple good WRs in the draft.

My dad’s retiring at the end of May, which is a bit of a shock. Not because he’s not “of retirement age”—I’m sure he doesn’t mind me saying he’s 61, as long as I add that he looks at least 10 years younger. He’s always invested himself in his work, so it seems odd that he’ll be done with that. I’m sure he’ll enjoy relaxing…for a few months. Then he’ll get antsy, I’m sure.

The earlier indicators also seem to say that he’ll be less frugal in his retirement—there’s been talk of a fancy car, which my real dad (before the alien imposter took over his body) would never think of buying. Hard-working and frugal, that’s my dad…for another month or so.

I guess it also seems strange because of the implications, if he’s retiring, if he’s 61, that means, I’m old, at least in my mind. He met my mom when he was about my age; my mom was younger than I am now when they got married. I guess I have no reason to feel or think I’m getting old; afterall, I have plenty of time. But, yes, it is strange; at some point, I became an adult and no one told me. I work and save money (for retirement no less!) and pay bills and pay rent and do my taxes. When’d that happen? It’s all been quite sneaky.

In any case, he’s retiring, and so I ordered him this (don’t click that link, dad, if you’re reading! it’ll ruin the surprise!). It’s pretty appropriate, given that it was his industry for the last 17 years or so. He’ll probably thank me; and then as politely as possible, ask how I thought of getting him such a thing. He won’t like it or put it to much use, I don’t think.

In the last week I finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon and In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper.

Michael Chabon has become famous for books since Mysteries of Pittsburgh, most notably Wonder Boys and the Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. It’s a story about a kid’s post-college summer, his gangster father, his gay friend and his retro-loving girlfriend. It also takes place, in part, in Junction Hollow, the “Lost Neighborhood”, an odd place in a ravine beneath CMU that one can end up accidentally, but rarely on purpose.

It’s a well-written book, interesting and engaging. It’s bittersweet; not too bitter, not too sweet. It’s like an indie movie.

Then I read In the Aeroplane over the Sea about about the best album of the last decade. It’s a small book, barely hand-sized and only a little over a hundred pages long, so you can really gun through this. But then again, it’s sort of like extensive liner notes and how many liner notes do you know that are a hundred pages long? The book goes through the history of the band and the Elephant 6 collective, and the events leading up to the recording of the album. If you are obsessed with this album, I’d recommend this book.

Next up: Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane.

I just got back from my company’s trip to near Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I got to hang out with Mr. Jon “j-dawg” Werberg.

Recap:

• highlights: Chichen Itza, cenotes, a bar with swings instead of stools, hanging out with coworkers, and hanging out with Jon
• donations: giant backgammon board, to jon; glasses, to the Caribbean, initiating the longest (non-sleeping) period without vision correction since probabaly 1993. This reminded me of a thing Caglar used to say while walking around without his glasses on: why see reality clearly when reality is blurred? I thought it was crap at the time. Maybe it’s not. It was an interesting twelve hours, through airports and customs and whatnot. Once I reached our office, I had to use my perscription swim goggles to drive home, leading to a situation frighteningly similar to Hugh Grant in Notting Hill:
  
• new items: steelers super bowl champions glass mug, old steelers tape with fight song, steelers key blank, “4 D” triceritops puzzle, all from jon
• my spanish: it still sucks, but I understand more
• injuries: cut on my knee, from a questionably useful wind surfing training tool; nicks on my knuckles, from sharp rocks in a cenote
• read: How We are Hungry by Dave Eggers. A pretty fantastic book of short stories, many of them about, seemingly appropriately, traveling to 3rd world countries.
• first world countries: can I learn anything from being a tourist in first world countries?
• weight: no better way to gain five pounds than a few days in an all-inclusive resort

My friends in the Night Rally will be in Pittsburgh March 6 at the Garfield Artworks with the Triggers, Luke Doucet and My Sexiest Mistake. It’s $6, so you should consider going if you’re around the area. You can check out mp3s of Night Rally. Anyone know the other bands?

I’ll even pick out an mp3:
Night Rally – Humor is Non Sequitur

Here are other tour dates for those of you in other parts of the world:

03.07.06 in Bloomington, IN TBA

03.08.06 in Philadelphia, PA @ The Manhattan Room

03.09.06 in Boston, MA @ Bill’s Bar

03.25.06 in New York, NY @ Sin-e

03.27.06 in Cambridge, MA @ The Middle East (Upstairs)

These guys play good music and (as of last time I saw them at least) sport some serious and enviable facial hair. My friend Farhad, aka Yahktoe, is a fantastic drummer and producer (just check out his production on the hip hop album, Onomatopoeia on which I played trumpet on a couple tracks) and now plays some fantastic bass on the Night Rally stuff. Devin and Luke are the other two. Fantastic people. Devin and sometimes Luke would cohost my show back on WMBR a few times way into the early hours of the morning.

A NY Times op-ed piece about Pittsburgh, its relationship to the Steelers, and its low opinion of itself.

Sports Illustrated has some Super Bowl photo galleries up.

What are people getting as far as Super Bowl champions gear? hats? shirts?

Chicago Tribune has an interesting article about people listening to their ipods at work. I listen to mine (or my laptop) constantly. I assume everyone does. Do you?

It was a quiet sort of celebration. I gave a quick hug to my fellow former Pittsburgh resident, dug, leaned against the wall for a minute, did a quick run up and down the street shouting a little bit. And that was that.

A call to pat confirmed what I expected. Pittsburgh is going nuts. I’m happy it is.

After the AFC championship game, I figured the Steelers would win today. Not because if they can beat the Bronco’s, surely they can beat the Seahawks. My reasoning was actually completely different. It was the same as my assumption that the RedSox would crush Cardinals in the World Series after that amazing ALCS against the Yankees back in ‘04. After having to win each game for seven straight games to get to the Super Bowl, while making history (like the BoSox did to get to the World Series), to get to Bettis to the Big Game in his hometown, after coming so close last year with what seemed like the perfect team, they had to win the Super Bowl this year because it’s a good story. That’s how the story’s supposed to end. Funny enough, it did.

It wasn’t the prettiest of games. Honestly Ben was all nerves for the first bit and a lot of parts of the game didn’t seem to click like they did in the past two to three games.

I’m happy that we won by 11 points because after the “questionable” calls of Ben’s rushing touchdown and the Seattle touchdown taken back on offensive pass interference, I didn’t want the game to be won by three points.

The two main offensive plays of the game were both absolute beauties. Willy Parker. Fast Willy Parker. One of Seattles corners has an obvious chance to catch him, but doesn’t because this undrafted back is just really, really fast. Fantastic play by the offensive line to open up that hole, but congrats and most of the credit goes to Willy on setting the record on that one.

And the gadget play. We all knew it’d happen, right? I sometimes think Cowher is a bit silly with his gadget plays, but he (and Whisenhurst) have been really smart with them this post season. So let’s see: a hand-off to Parker. Okay. Oh wait, it’s a reverse to Randel El. Sweet. He’ll get a few yards. And then what has to be the most beautiful pass thrown in the Super Bowl by a non-quarterback ever. Perfect arc, right smack-dab on target. Absolutely gorgeous. And he didn’t even set his feet, just sort of threw it off of his right foot. It made me just jump out of my seat.

The MVP pick was a hard one. There weren’t any stand-out players besides Hasselback, who played really solid ball until the last couple drives. To give it to Bettis would have been nice, but wrong. Randel El or Parker were both somewhat reasonable picks, Randel El more than Parker. Hines Ward is one of my favorites. I like his attitude and his loyalty to the team, to Pittsburgh and to Bettis. That doesn’t warrent an MVP trophy, but those things make me happy that he got it. He’s also underrecognized around the league and it gave him some good exposure.

Author Chuck Klosterman is writing a Super Bowl Week blog for EPSN: Page 2. It’s pretty interesting. It’s not about the specific game, coming up, but rather about the athletes and the general view of these athletes as we approach the game. It’s pretty amusing at times. I’d start with Tuesday’s entries.

Regret the Error is a blog that collects errata and corrections from newspapers around the world. They are often funny.

Example:

In an interview with Jodie Marsh (I could’ve been a lawyer, page 12, G2, January 25) we referred to the silicon-enhanced charms of her rival, Jordan. Silicon is a non-metallic element, as in silicon chip. Silicone is the polymer used in breast implants. This has been corrected on five previous occasions: February 29 2000; June 20 2000; May 31 2001; November 10 2004; October 21 2005

Also, on a completely unrelated note, a one-liner in an email from my mom that I thought was pretty great:

The frenzy builds in Pittsburgh. Can anyone survive?

As a bearded man, I appreciate this analysis of the beards of Roethlisberger and Plummer and their effect on the outcome of the AFC championship game.

Steelers won another one on the road, this time to get to the Superbowl.

I watched the game at Shanghai Kelly’s again. By game time they were turning people away—dug almost couldn’t get in until I said he was with me (and I was inside already). I’d guess somewhere between eighty and a hundred people in there.

After last game, it was nice to see a game more in control this week. The Steelers looked really good out there. I’m pretty happy with our* chances out there against either of the teams that may be representing the NFC (it looks like it’ll be Seatle at this stage).

*I acknowledge that it’s a bit stupid to use the first person possessive when talking about teams that one supports, but I like it anyway.

A post script of sorts: Two funny stories from half-time. I went out to a store to grab a sandwhich because Shanghai Kelly’s doesn’t serve food. 1) a Bronco’s fan was in the store. I didn’t say anything (though it was 24-3 by that stage) because I thought I’d be nice. To my Bettis jersey, he said “I hope Bettis dies.” Wow. 2) The bagger was talking to the cashier while I was in line. “It’s possible to be a sports fan and not be a total douche. I don’t think people realize that,” to which I said “I try [not to be a total douche].”

Wow, what an game.

Dug and I went down to watch it at Shanghai Kelly’s, which must be one of the most crazy Steeler bars outside of Pittsburgh. It’s a relatively small neighborhood bar in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Pretty unsassuming really, but when I arrive half an hour before game time, all the seats were filled with people donning Steelers gear and there were a number of people standing already. Beers were being consumed (keep in mind, this was 9:30am PST). By the start of the game, it seemed like everyone had one under their belt already and the place was packed—maybe 60 people there. Some were old timers, undoubtedly fans from the 70s dynasty era and others were younger, raised on Jerome Bettis and Cowher football.

It was really funny, I met people from Peters Township, Mt. Lebanon (the neighboring towns) and Upper St. Clair (my alma mater) there. It was a boisterous and fun place to watch a game. People were cheering at every chance they got and on the big plays, I was high-fiving and hugging people I didn’t know.

I sort of poke fun at people in Pittsburgh for living and dying with this team, but I have to admit I was bouyed by this game and experience.

I saw the first part of Country Boys on PBS last night. It’s a documentary mini-series following two boys growing up in Floyd County, Kentucky, a very poor area of the Appalachians. Chris lives in a trailer in a “holler” and has trouble getting his work done at school, often missing school to take care of his alcoholic father. Cody is in a Christian metal band and has a girlfriend he talks about marrying.

I found it really interesting. It’s easy for people to make fun of people like this, but this is life. This is how a lot of people live their lives. Growing up in probably the biggest city in the Appalachians, I wasn’t far from people who lived in similar situations, but we still made fun of people from West Viriginia. I think in some ways these people are more America than a big city like San Francisco.

The challenge of watching a program like this is not simply not passing judgement, but trying to understand them. Or you could just say they’re a Red Stater, that they should be kept in the mountains or made a separate country called “Jesusland,” laugh your cynical laugh and go on feeling superior. Wait, which group is supposed to be the “open-minded” ones?

You can watch the first episode online and the next two episodes are tonight and tomorrow, I believe.

Something I’ve noticed about football, or people talking about football recently is that games are often talked about as, for instance, “Pittsburgh vs. Cincinatti.” In reality, of course, Pittsburgh is not playing Cincinatti; it is simply the team in that city versus the team that resides in the other city. This is a very common occurance in football (except for two team cities like New York, with the Giants and Jets), more so than other sports. I don’t remember people talking much about “Toronto playing Boston”—it was usually “the Blue Jays vs. the [Red]Sox.” People don’t call the Pirates “Pittsburgh.”

In poetry or literature they call a part representing a whole a synecdoche.

I’m wondering if this ties in to the attachment and involvement cities feel for their teams and visa versa. Pittsburgh may be a fringe example, but I know the city lives and dies with the Steelers and the team is exceptionally devoted to the fans and the city, in a way they’re not devoted to the Pirates or the Penguins. It could be that Pittsburgh is a “football” town and similar devote occurs elsewhere for other sports (Boston to the Red Sox comes to mind).

The steelers pulled it off and will be in the playoffs. Way to go, boys.

I’m happy the Bus got 3 TDs in what will likely be his final game in Pittsburgh. Let’s hope they can get to the Superbowl for him and for all of Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, I haven’t been posting a ton and I probably won’t be posting much as mmt and mim are in town for the rest of the week.

Watching the Penguins the other night, Mike pointed out that Ryan Malone (USC HS, class of ‘98) plays for them now.

It got me thinking. Ryan was on my school bus for many years. Coming back from elementary school, we (the boys, at least) would sing on the bus every afternoon. We only sang two songs: “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” (Righteous Brothers) and “Barbara Ann” (Beach Boys).

I was trying to find examples of South Africans talking to play for a coworker and I discovered the International Dialects of English Archive, which has an Accents of South Africa page.

This “heavy accent” sounds like a lot of Afrikaaner women I’ve met or talked to, including the proprieter of The African Hut.

This one is probably my favorite. It’s by an older man who pops his r’s, which I like a lot. I think my granny did that. (The woman in this one practically rolls her r’s. That’s so fun!)

My parents have a fairly weak accent, closest to this one probably, among all of the ones listed.

There are, of course, many recordings from other parts of the world, including many in America. Disappointingly, there aren’t any good recordings of a solid Pittsburgh accent!

You can hear Germans and Irish and English and many other accents (in English) if you click around. It’s pretty interesting stuff.

A desperate Steelers team got back to basics and won against the Bears, who were on an 8 game winning streak. Some strange stuff, like Jerome Bettis, who’s ancient by this point, having a 100 yard running and the Steelers had 190 yards rushing against the best ranked defense in the league.

That was all pretty exciting, but a couple almost freakish outcomes created a nice situation. The Dolphins stopping a last minute Chargers touchdown and the Cowboys getting a last minute touchdown puts the Steelers back in the last playoff birth. I think my understanding of the tie-break procedures is correct and this means the Steelers are back in control of their destiny; that is to say, if the Steelers win their last three games of the season they will in playoffs no matter what the other teams do.

38-31 against the Bungles of all teams. That was disappointing. Upside, Ben can throw for Manning-like yards with a hurt thumb. Downside: he can throw for Maddox-like interceptions.

I’m nervous for the rest of the season.

In Pittsburgh, Eat ‘n Park is a family restaurant chain. They have and are well-known for their Smiley Cookies. These things have been around for years and years. People will quite often buy them to go or get one after they finish their meal.

My friend Dave was at another Pittsburgh family restaurant chain, King’s and he tells me they’ve introduced the Frownie which you may guess is a brownie with a frowning face on it.

He also tells me that they have Frownie shirts for sale. I am definitely going to have to pick one of those up while I’m in Pittsburgh because that item is so very Pittsburgh it’s rediculous. People are going to ask what the shirt is about and it’s going to take 10 minutes for me to explain!

Steelers lost to the 2-7 Ravens to drop to 7-3 (which is still tied for lead in their division).

Interestingly, all of their losses have come in overtime.

Maddox, their 3rd string QB, actually did okay—for a while there he seemed to missing every receiver he threw to, but he and the team seemed to refocus in the 4th quarter to tie the game.

I have a little bit of a pit in my stomach when I think about the Colts (10-0) game next week on Monday Night Football. The Steelers haven’t really come up big in the tough games since last year’s regular season victory over the Patriots.

Charlie Batch, the Steeler’s 3rd string quarterback, was 9/16 for 65 yards. Brett Favre was 20/35 for 214 yards. The Steelers won.

Oh snap, Brett Favre!

I was in the City yesterday hanging with Gumbeaux near the Haight so I went to Amoeba and got a few CDs:

• Iron & Wine and Calexico In the Reins
• Stubbs the Zombie [Soundtrack] bunch of indie and mainstream bands doing covers of 50s songs for a video game soundtrack
• Low and the Dirty Three In the Fishtank
• Sigur Ros Takk
• Matt Pond PA Several Arrows Later

I should probably not buy any more CDs for a while…

I’m a bit sick. Both of my roommates were sick last week and now I am. I thought I could squeeze by without getting what they had but the late night/ early morning today was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m going to go to sleep in a minute here.

The Steelers just squeeked out a win over the Ravens. They really need to stop taking these games to the final minute/ seconds like that. It’s not good for my heart.

I went to two concerts this weekend: Jens Lekman at the Rickshaw Stop on Saturday and the American Analog Set at Bottom of the Hill. Both really quite good shows. I’m going to write a post about them when I don’t really need to get some sleep and get not-sick.

You may leave your comments proclaiming your undying love for me. Also (if you’re female) you may leave your email address or other contact information. (If you’re male) you may leave contact information of available female friends.

Strangely, I’ve bought lots of things in the last 24 hours. First I got a call from African Hut to say that the goods I had ordered in mid-August had come in and they were sending them. Then, later in the day I decided to pick up that Mark Kozelek/ Sun Kil Moon Modest Mouse covers record from Insound at which point I found that you could answer a stupid quiz and get 25% off your whole order, so I got a few things there. Then, this morning, I read that there’s a new 7″ Half-Handed Cloud/ Sufjan Stevens EP out today so I decided to pick that up and noticed something else while I was at the Asthmatic Kitty website.

So, the full haul:

• a case of Savanna Dry Cider, originally meant to be consumed with Jon Werberg, but that will do just fine now.
• 1/2 lb of biltong
• 1 can of guava halfs (or as I call it, 1 can of pure heaven)
• If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian. I’m finally picking up a CD copy of this. ($8.99 minus 25%!) I now have all the B&S albums on CD.
• The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore by Saxon Shore. I liked their previous album and decided to give this one a try.
• Summer in the Southeast by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. The first time I heard Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in any form was live at Club Laga. I’ve wanted a live recording ever since and now he’s coming out with one. Pre-order for November 15.
• Bodies and Minds by Great Lake Swimmers. I liked GLS’s debut when it came through the station. This effort is apparently good, so I thought I’d pick it up. (What was I thinking last night? I never buy this many “gamble” albums at one time.)
• Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon. Aforementioned Modest Mouse covers album. Pre-order for Nov. 1 though I think I’ve heard they’ve started shipping them.
• What’s the Remedy by Half Handed Cloud. Aforementioned collaborative effort with Sufjan Stevens. Vinyl 7″.
• Sufjan Stevens Illinois shirt. They didn’t have them when the concert tour came through here in July but they wore them on stage and boy were they hot.

So yeah, that’s me going crazy. I’ll be getting piles of stuff over the next few weeks though!

Patbird just changed domains on his blog and even though he didn’t take any of my suggestions for a blog name, (what’s wrong with nastydonkeyporn.com I ask you??), he’s got a new domain name. Nevermind that I didn’t know of his blog before, but, I present to you urbansaddle.com. Patbird is really rockin’ out over there. I read just about all of the posts so far last night.

Here are my favorites:

• In this post a link to a set of two TV commercials, both in their original versions and their redone-Pittsburgh-backyard-camcorder versions. Very funny stuff.
• Andy went to the Mountain Goats at the Warhol Museum on Friday. Pat couldn’t go to his first Mountain Goats show there because it was sold out, but he went to the Uptown Theater in Little Washinton and writes about it here.
• Pat writes about running into and talking to a Pittsburgh mayoral candidate on the street.

I’ll be keeping an eye on your blog there, Pat. I’ll also put it on my blogroll over on the right side there at some point.

Another thing that I’ve been meaning to add to the links on the right is largeheartedboy.com. He writes a lot about music and books. His daily “shorties” are just links to about 10-15 articles or blog posts. I usually find a couple interesting articles in there everyday. Some of his longer articles are pretty good too.

As a bit of warning: I’m trading my radio show this week on the KZSU. I’ll be on Thursday 9pm-midnight for the indie rocking. To fit in the format of the normal show that’s there, Lick My Moody Guitar, I will be playing guitar-based music only. Lots of mogwai and indie rock! here we go!

In my place on Thursday (6-9am) Red West will be doing my show. (Red West doesn’t host Lick My Moody Guitar show; this is a three-way trade that would make major league baseball teams jealous.) He’s going to have a guest host from Pittsburgh (that’s good), doing some 80s indie rock (that’s good) and some obscure gothy stuff (not so good). Should still be a decent show if you want to tune in.

Part of the reason I switched is that I found out that I could get a staff ticket to see Iron & Wine and Calexico at the Warfield on Wednesday night. I don’t want to be super tired on Thursday after staying late-ish for the show on Wednesday.

Red Sox are out of the playoffs in a sweep. I mean, come on guys. At least go down 3-2 in the ALDS!

Yankees are tied up in their series. I’m hoping the Angels will win tonight at 8pm, in the only major league game today.

A punter, Michael Koenen kicked a 58 yard field goal (after a “practice try” of sorts, caused by the opposing team calling time-out). Who would think of putting in a punter to try for a really long field goal? I guess he did kick field goals in college. What’s the league record longest field goal? Something like 63 yards, right?

Steelers play the Chargers tonight on Monday Night Football. I’ll be watching. Chargers beat the Patriots last week and the Patriots beat the Steelers the week before so if the Steelers win tonight, they’re—what?—better than themselves?

Most question marks in one of my posts ever. I don’t know if that’s actually true.

And by films I mean that in the literal sense, of captured, originally, on film.

And by documentary, I mean documenting real events.

I saw three recently:

1. NFL Film’s History of the Steelers NFL Films used to have a weekly show called “This is the NFL” and I would watch it many weeks, even before I was much of a football fan, just because they had beautiful footage and the sound, especially of the impacts, was incredible. There’s something about watching football on film that’s great. I liked this DVD a lot. I learned a bunch about the pre-70s Steelers and there were many interesting interviews with former players and coaches and whatnot. I also saw that there is quite a symbiotic relationship and feelings of duty and mutual respect between the Rooneys (the family that owns the Steelers) and the Team, the Team and the Fans, the Fans and the Rooneys. My one sort of complaint about the film was that it glossed over the big losses. An intricate part of the story of the Steelers, at least over the last decade, has been some big losses, I feel. Definitely worth watching if you’re a Steelers fan or a fan of football in general.
2. Low in Europe Dave gave this to me for my birthday. This shows some great footage and interviews of the band on a tour of Europe following the release of Trust. Maybe I just haven’t looked for many interviews of Low, but it seems that they haven’t been interviewed much, so it’s nice to see some more in depth coverage of their lives in this movie. There’s also some great footage of the band playing live; one of my favorites is a couple acoustic songs at a radio station in Frankfurt. The film ends with them playing at the Union Chapel in London, which no longer hosts shows, but while it did was a fantastic place to see a band like Low, as Andy or I can attest to. Worth watching for fans of Low or if you’re interested in becoming one.
3. Drive Well, Sleep Carefully The Death Cab for Cutie tour documentary. This close to 90 minutes of interviews and performances from a tour last year. The interviews seemed a bit lacking and single-tracked, but there’s pretty good pacing and editting between the interview portions and the song portions. The individual performances of the songs vary in how good they are. It’s worth watching if you’re a fan or are just an OC watching hipster.

Dug and I went to see the Giants at SBC Park today. I’d managed to get some basically field-level seats (section 104, row 24, if you want to look it up) off of craigslist for below face value.

It ended up being a pretty exciting game even though neither of us were really rooting for either team. Something like five home runs were hit, the last being No. 705 by Barry Bonds, his second of the season after being out recovering from knee surgery for most of the season. I’d seen Bonds play in his Pirates years and probably saw many home runs by him. Someone’s career home runs 134 and 162 are not noteworthy. One thing you don’t notice from the highlight reels of someone who’s always swinging for the fences like Bonds [note: he's not always swinging for the fences—he hit a on-the-ground single earlier in the game] is what he looks like when he misses. He missed (or foul-tipped) two times in the at bat where he finally hit a home run and it looked like his arms were going to rip out he was swinging so hard. When he finally did connect solidly, the ball had no chance of staying in the park; a quick kayaker in China Basin is now the proud owner of the Bonds Home Run Ball No. 705.

(Wow, I just realized that I’ve seen 8 (Red Sox, A’s, Giants, Pirates, Blue Jays, Nationals, Phillies, Dodgers) teams play at four stadiums (Coliseum, Fenway, RFK, SBC) this year.)

In other sporting news, the Steelers won pretty handily (again) and I happened to notice another team lost today. It’ll be interesting when they face off next week.

So I’m thinking about starting an mp3 blog. Maybe brandnewcanada.com. I think it’s be fun. I don’t currently have the bandwidth, I don’t think. If you happen to be overflowing with bandwidth and wouldn’t mind hosting a blog and the mp3s, then let me know. Or maybe I’ll set up freshmaker as a server again.

Meanwhile, here’s a good mp3. It’s a Portland, OR band called Jaime and Becky (though I think they’re originally from Minnesota). We got their CD at the station. This is a standout track. Nice arpegiatted guitar, great vocal melodies and harmonies (and blending of the two voices and the whatnot). Some totally kickin’ cello and glockenspiel parts during the chorus. The chorus is really really good. I don’t usually like female fronted bands (with a few exceptions, e.g. Cat Power), and two female vocalists seemed like it’d be too much, but these two pull it off really well.

“Midwest” by Jaime and Becky.

You can also listen to this song (and a couple more) at their myspace site.

I’d like to write such a song for western PA.

Myron Cope has retired. What will a Sunday game be without him?

Dave Franusich, Andy Chadwick and myself, the members of the seminal Upper St. Clair indie folk band Where’s Luke? have started a new competition. It’s called the covers competition. It is a weekly competition and this week is the first week.

The idea of the project is this:

• Andy, Dave or I are the lead for the week. The lead picks the song to be covered. He posts the original. The song will be announced each Tuesday and linked here.
• We* each do cover versions of this song by the following Monday and post them online as mp3s.
• You, the readership, listens and votes (either by email or on another webpage with little buttons). Voting categories will probably be Best and Most Original.
• Lead rotates to the next person and he picks a new song.

*I’m thinking about opening up submissions to any one that wants to do a version…The lead would still be one of us three, though.

This week’s song has been picked.
Covers Contest #1
Song: “Neverending Math Equation”
Original Artist: Modest Mouse.

the original

Dave already has his version done (that’s actually what sort of sparked the idea). Usually the versions will be posted simultaneously.

There is now a Cape Town Craigslist, the first one in all of Africa. Good work, Craig. Cape Town is where it’s at!

There are currently about 100 posts on the entire site. That’s sort of like the Pittsburgh CL. ha!

I finally got back and scanned some of my photos from my company’s trip to Cabo San Lucas in February. Here’s where you can find them.

I also scanned in some pictures of Pittsburgh mostly of friends, but some are of Pittsburgh and the AFC championship game.

I went to the Pirates @ Giants game last night with Quincy and, what do you know, they won 5-2.

I have to admit, I’m not a great fan, in the classic sense. My teams are not infallible and in the case of the current Pirates, I didn’t go to the game expecting them to win.

They got off to a slow start and were down 2-0 when Jason Bay smashed a ball into left center for a 3 run home run. Things looked up from then on out. There was a ton of good fielding (on both, teams, actually) and a couple more solo homers from the Pirates. Let’s go Bucs!

Quincy bought the tickets Monday afternoon and we got seats in the front row on the first base line. The (non-enclosed) Pirates bullpen was about 10 feet away. Apparently I got on TV too! Mike Bokoch, fellow Pittsburgh-Peninsula transplant, watched the game and saw me. I was right in front of a kid that got a ball from a ball boy. According to Mike, the shot stayed on us for about 30 seconds! I’m famous!

In other strange news, I ran into Balaji Sarpeshkar, someone I knew from high school (USC Class of ‘99 rules!) at the Caltrain station after the game. I don’t think he recognized me and I didn’t give him much chance to figure it out; I shook his hand and told him my name (because it seemed he didn’t recognize me) then bumbled for a couple seconds about how it was weird to run into him and then said I had to make sure I caught the next train and then did so. Maybe he’ll google for his name (everyone does it. it’s natural) and figure out who I am and whatnot.

Considering where I’m from, this is not a blog, but a blogh!

hyuk hyuk!

Here’s another sufjan song for yunz. It’s one of my favorites off of the yet-to-be-released Illinois. So delicate. So well orchestrated. Such a sweet guitar part.

The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! by Mr. Sufjan Stevens. (He’s so dreamy!)

There’s a sort of breakdown part where most of the instrumentation pulls back about 3:47 in that reminds me a whole lot of another song. I could figure it out for the longest time.

The answer is somewhat embarrassing and I think it may be one of those things that if you know to look for it (ie if you don’t notice it but I tell you) it’ll be all that you notice, so I’ll put it behind the screen, so to speak, in case you don’t want to know.

(more…)

Andyl the other day: “You must think your friends from high school are awesome… because they’re from Pittsburgh. “

I’m back from London. Did you miss me?

The reason for visit was my cousin’s wedding, but I got to hang out a couple days in the city as well.

London sites:

• Tate Modern Second time I’ve been there. Still a great collection of modern art. There’s quite a lot I like and quite a lot I don’t and quite a lot that I just don’t get.
• British Museum Greek columns? blah. Roman statues, blah. Easter Island statue, pretty cool. History of clocks with running clocks througout? sweet.
• Design Museum I liked this place a lot. I didn’t quite know what to expect because design covers everything from graphic design to product design to industrial design. It ended up being a lot of graphic design and some of the other stuff. An entire exhibit on various ways people get across lots of information in a compact and understandable way.
• London Eye An engineering marvel and a pretty interesting view of London. Go up on a clear day and you’ll see for miles.
• Natural History Museum—Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibit Some really spectacular photographs here. I bought the book with all the photos in it, so I can show you some time. The photos also had all the technical info and descriptions by the photographers as well. The descriptions ranged from “this was my fourth day waiting for this photograph” to “I just turned and there it was.”

Shows:

• National Anthems Three American actors (Kevin Spacey, Steven Webber (I remember him from the show “Wings”) and Mary Stuart Masterson) in an American play about a tremendously American topic on the London stage. I’m not surprised that it wasn’t a full house there. It’s a story about a recently fired firefighter (Spacey) meeting and spending the evening with the new neighbors on the block (Webber and Masterson), who are materialistic keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ sort of people. It all takes place in a suburb of Detroit but there are also many references to Pittsburgh, where Spacey’s character grew up, including Iron City and “yunz.” The acting was amazing. Just spectacular. There was just so much to it and it built up while drawing one in and not overdoing it or breaking the spell (Naomi Watts should take lessons from these people). This was acting as it is supposed to be done. The play itself is quite good and other productions of it might be good.
• the Producers Funny, clever, well-acted (by Lee Evens as Bloom and Brad Oscar as Max, in this version, and supporting roles, especially the swedish bombshell part). Classic Mel Brookes in many ways, reusing some of the same jokes from his movies and things. Deserves the praise and worth seeing.

Movies seen en-route:

• Alfie meh.
• that new Bridget Jones one meh.
• Unforgiven a 1992 effort from, in this case, director, producer, star Clint Eastwood about an old west outlaw that comes back for one last job. I’m not a fan of westerns or the idea of westerns, really… This one has some complex characters and Clint’s great directing and acting. Morgan Freeman is superb as usual. Not a top 10 movie of all time, but certainly quite good.
• Spanglish another Adam Sandler movie that’s not really an Adam Sandler movie (others being the Wedding Singer and Punch Drunk Love). I thought this movie was entertaining and made some interesting points about other cultures in America, especially Latin cultures in America, but in the end, I was put off by the final moral and the heavy-handedness of how it was presented. Definitely not a bad movie to see on a plane though.

Yesterday, while out running errands, Andyl and I were at BevMo just across from El Mercadito Latino in Redwood City. I decided to go in to see if they stock Coke in glass bottles made with sugar (instead of corn syrup). They do. I bought 6 @$1.19. I now have 3 left.

It’s so good. I like the glass bottle. I like the way it feels in my hand— the cold glass with condensation. I like the way it feels on my lips. I like the way it tastes; it’s crisper and less syrupy. I like how it reminds me of cokes I had in bottles in South Africa (and, to a lesser extent, Germany and Tanzania among other places).

An article about Mexican Coke vs. American Coke.

Other things that I like in glass bottles or with sugar instead of corn syrup:

• Straus Family Creamery Milk (for my cereal at work)
• heinz organic ketchup (from Pittsburgh, no less!)
• Dublin Dr. Pepper. The holy grail of sugar sodas. I bought a bunch at the Dr. Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas on my last road trip across the country.

yes, to answer your questions, I am apparently a total hippie.

Dis jaggoff on sa’urday night live jus did a picksburg accent n’ at! Dat is sumpin dat I nevr thought I’d see. Right der in one of dem sketches! Did yunz guys see dat?

Problem was, he was drinkin a bud, not an arn, and hes sez steeelers not stillers. But he did talk plenny bout Cowhr.

[Update: Check 'is aht. An article in da Picksburg Post Garzette jus 'bout dat sketch!]

I have been thinking about this for a while and I got reminded by Gwen Stefani’s appearance on Letterman backed by a marching band.

For those of you who don’t know, I did marching band for four years. I sort of hated it, but I was also damn good at it. I like indie rock. I have for years. Put those together, and boom! You got a promising concept here.

[Here's a decent primer on marching bands if you're unfamiliar with stuff.]

This is my idea: approximately a 30 piece ensemble, definitely a bass drum or two, and a snare or two. probably snare-mounted high hats. Maybe a quad or a quint. Definitely a glockenspiel. It’d probably be brass heavy. A couple trumpets and trombones. A tuba holding down the bassline would be cool. A sax or two. Flutes and clarinets could probably be skipped. Eh, maybe a clarinet or two would be cool.

All common instrumentation thus far. It’d be cool to have guitar with one of those wireless do-dads. A bass might also be cool, but if the tuba/ sousaphone can do it, that’d be better. Other things that could have pickups and a wireless do-dad: ukulele, banjo, 80s-style guitar pianos.

Singing: I think there’d have to be a lead singer, but also plenty of chorus/ backup parts by the people on the field. Thinking about this for the past few days, it might be cool to have the singer be the conductor on the platform out front. My most recent thought would be that there wouldn’t be a conductor (phasing shouldn’t be a problem with a <30 person band) and everyone would do formations. (I did mention that, right? that everyone would do formations. Probably not super complex ones, but it wouldn’t be one of those band that just walks on the field, plays and walks off. There’d be no pit.) The time could be led from within; this would make speeding up easier, I think. So maybe the guitarist is singing and playing and marching with everyone else. The problem with that is that people like looking at the singer/ lead man while the thing is going on. hmm.

Uniforms: there’d have to be uniforms. I don’t think just t-shirts and jeans, but also not normal marching band uniforms. maybe jump suits? there’d have to be some hat, too. Marching bands have hats.

Songs selection and styles: indie rock. I think a lot of it would be post-rock. It’d be important to do mostly original songs, but some covers would be alright. Imagine a nice build going on the field while they are all stationary, then the drums come in and the mass of people start coming toward you and changing formations and stuff. I think it’d be pretty sweet.

Excuses for not doing this right now: it’d take a lot of time to start up and there aren’t people in the area that are that interested in indie rock bands. I think if I lived in an area with a higher concentration of people of my interests, it’d be easier. Like Cambridge, MA.

dang! I’m tired!

this week’s playlist for my radio show.

if anyone was listening, the dead air and awkwardness in the later part of my show weren’t my fault. I had a dj trainee sitting in on my show.

hey andy, remember when we’d have mike glasser “sit in” with our band? and all he’d do would be to sit on a chair amongst the band? that was good stuff.

During all my years of high school, I played trumpet in the pit orchestra for the high school musical. Much of the time was boring and we were under-recognized for our tremendous skill. We were also some of the only people to see the musical in its entirety many times—many of the leads and chorus members only saw the scenes they were in—to the point where we knew all the lines and scenes in the musical, putting us in a unique position to make fun of it.

An that’s what we did. Jeff Miller and Colin Ashe, still friends of mine, started with a small-scale parody of Cinderella. The following year was the first real Pit Skit with Toilet Paper Man, a parody of Music Man, where a man comes to town to try to sell toilet paper to the people. The next years were Brig-a-Mart, a story of a Canadian convenience store that was stuck 10*pi years behind, a parody of Brigadoon and Joseph (or was Jorje) and his Amazing Techinocolor Pimpcoat, where I played the lead, a parody of, well you should figure that one out by now. The three that I did (Toilet Paper Man was the first) were a lot of fun. We wrote and rehearsed these two-act, 20-30 minute elaborate skits complete with props, a program, and plenty of sexual innuendo. They were performed over two nights at the pre-show meeting. We regularly would have to ask people to not laugh as much because we didn’t have that much time and they were missing our other funny lines.

What got me thinking about all this was a scene from Brig-a-Mart that still makes me smile. In Brigadoon, there was a scene in which the guy from the present is talking to one of the stuck-300-years-in-the-past Scottish ladies that goes something like this:

him: are you crazy?!
her: what is ‘crazy’?
him: insane.

And Brig-a-Mart, we had it like this:

him: are you nuts?
a guy-dressed-as-a-girl: what is ‘nuts’?
him [hands her a dictionary]: here’s a frickin’ dictionary. look it up!
a guy-dressed-as-a-girl [flips to page]: oh, I see, ‘testicles’.

The guy was played by Jimmy Cramer and the guy-dressed-as-a-girl by one of the best to ever play such a part, Pat Bird.

I should also mention that we didn’t rehearse with props. I would go around my house the night before and collect props. Sometimes we would forget about a prop and just fake it.

This all leads up to how the above scene played out during the perfomance. Pat and Jimmy were going along with the scene. I realized that the dictionary was still in the prop bag still. I reached into the bag and grabbed it. Jimmy’s facing me and Pat away from me. Let’s see how it turns out:

Jimmy: Are you nuts?
[I make eye contact with Jimmy and indicate the dictionary]
Pat: What is ‘nuts’?
[I toss the book. It makes a perfect parabolic arc over Pat's head, clearing it by a couple inches. Jimmy snatches it out of the air just as he's beginning to say:]
Jimmy: Here’s a frickin dictionary. Look it up!
…

I couldn’t have planned it better. I still smile thinking about it.

Any other USC HS people have fun Pit Skit memories?

You can get a large stone church for under $300K. It still has the pews and organ and everything!

Jon Werberg put it nicely on Sunday. Some teams just stick with you. The BoSox, the Steelers. It’s the history, it’s what the team represents and it’s to a large extent, the fans. What the team means to the fans. It became national news this fall what the Red Sox means to Boston and the Red Sox Nation.

Pittsburgh is more insular though. The flux of people in Boston, adding to the Red Sox Nation, is not common place in Pittsburgh. But that doesn’t stop every home game to be sold out. That doesn’t stop the largest crowd to ever watch a Steelers home game from showing up in sub-10 degree weather to see their dream team fall.

I haven’t been to Green Bay or Chicago (and I was in Boston when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl), but it’s hard to imagine a city more devoted to its team. Or a city more crushed by their team’s loss. Pittsburgh doesn’t get a lot of good news. The city is bankrupt; the county will be too soon. People and jobs move away. My team—my boys as I call them sometimes—lost and I’m sad. But almost moreso I’m sad for my home town. I don’t think anyone that isn’t a Pittsburgher can understand how much joy this team gave them; the bouyancy that Pittsburghers had during the seasons; and the hopes that were rested on the team.

In the words of fans of the losers that always get so close “next year will be our year.” And I think it may be. Plaxico is leaving but it seems most of the rest of the team will stick around. Roethlisberger may come back from his only loss in the NFL and be better for it; he may have a sophomore slump. Time will tell.

Was I glad I went? definitely. I’d probably even do it again knowing everything I know now.

Mean time, I think it’s about time to put my name on the season ticket waiting list. In 10 or 15 years I may actually be back in Pittsburgh by the time I get them.

Alright, so I’m crazy.

I bought tickets for $$$ on ebay to the AFC championship game. I bought a ticket to Pittsburgh for $$ as well. Looks like I’m going. Let’s home this guy on ebay is for real and I don’t get utterly screwed.

Pretty much as soon as I bought the ticket I had a bad feeling. I’m not too superstitious, but up until that point I was 100% sure that the Steelers would go to the Superbowl (and win). Now, I’m not as sure. Like me going is going to make the Steelers lose.

Don’t tell the Steelers I’m coming! Then they will still win.

I’m getting in Saturday night and leaving Monday morning. I’ll be in Pittsburgh for less than 36 hours. Pittsburghers, if you want to hang out Saturday night after I get in, after the game Sunday night or have lunch on Sunday, let me know.

Part of me really enjoys being young and dumb and reckless with my money. Another part of me wants to check my bank acounts and formulate a good plan for saving after this.

Here we go, Steelers!

[Update: my dad has the tickets in his hand, so the somewhat sketchy guy came through. I forgot to mention Jon Werberg is driving down from New York to go to the game with me. He lived in Pittsburgh for a bit over a year so he's got the Steeler's bug and a few friends in town.]

I’m bidding (and getting outbid) on ebay for tickets to the AFC Championship game in Pittsburgh. It’s scary. I feel I could get screwed in so many ways. It’s also exciting.

Between this and my adventures on shopgoodwill.com, I’m starting to remember why I used to be hopelessly addicted to ebay.

And end the season at 15-1. Pretty spectacular.

People in Pittsburgh, if you have a line on a pair of tickets for the AFC championship game, let me know.

My life is a movie. A perfectly scripted movie. I have come to an obstacle and fallen, only to persevere and be rewarded in the end.

Pittsburgh-Las Vegas-San Francisco. Easy enough. I can do that. Easy. Nothing to it. The first flight was at 8:45am. I arrived at the airport at seven am. I waited outside in the cold, the twelve degree cold. You do not make up a temperature like twelve degrees; you make up a temperature like nine or sixteen. I saw the line inside. It was long, too long. The line outside was shorter, but still long. Maybe a third the inside. I�ll wait outside. It�ll take forty minutes. Maybe forty-five. An hour tops. You must check in half an hour ahead of time. Relieved! It was eight twelve when I handed my driver�s license to the skycap. SFO via Las Vegas, thanks. Woo. That was close. Twenty minutes and I�ll be through security. It�ll be tight, but I did it.

Expletives! Expletives under my breath! Expletives muttered aloud! They thought it was past eight fifteen! It�s not! Can you not see my watch! Do you see a five or a six or a seven in that time! No, you see a three at the end so it is clearly not quarter past! You are clearly mistaken. My computer has shut that flight down; I can�t do anything about it. First one locked out of the flight.

Seconds! Missed it by mere seconds. Perhaps many seconds, perhaps one hundred or two hundred, but not five hundred. Not one thousand.

Another line. My feet are warming up at least. My feet are freezing. Blocks of ice! Another forty-five minutes in line. I was on the Las Vegas flight, eventually to SFO. Oh, you won�t be able to get there till tomorrow. Tomorrow? I work tomorrow I�m being picked up today! I am being picked up at half past two today! Don�t you see?

I�ll see what I can do.

Minutes past. Where is she? I think she�s eating breakfast. Surely she cannot be working on my flights still. She cannot be still seeing what she can do. I look around for commiserating glances from people in line, people at neighboring check-in counters. I only get blank stares ahead. Everyone is tired, exhausted.

My supervisor wants to put you on the ten fifteen Charlotte and the evening flight to SFO. You�ll get there at eight fifty-one. Tonight. I can do tonight. Maybe Dave can still pick me up, maybe not, but I�ll get there tonight.

Standby.

Still on standby. Bischoff, there�s one seat on the flight if you want it, unless you want to give up your ticket for a voucher and another ticket. No no, I�ll go now. I�ll go now. Thanks.

I�m that guy. I�m the last guy on the plane. I�m the guy that everyone stares at. Where were you? they burn at me with their eyes. Sorry. I�m sorry. I wanted to be here earlier. They wouldn�t let me on. I was standing out there ready but they were not ready for me. I have a guilty look on my face, but I can�t help it; it�s not actually my fault.

But do you see? But do you see where I am now? (This is where the rewarding for perseverance comes in.) I have been rewarded. I am four hundred miles from San Francisco and seven miles off the ground and I have leg room. I can put my ankle of one leg on the knee of the other right in front of me. Do you want to see me do it? Did you see that?! It was great. I�m done doing it now though because I am typing and that is not comfortable for typing. I did it just to show you I could. I just ate my third snack�cashews, chocolate-covered wafers, pretzels�and I�m on my fourth drink�heiniken, coke, water, coke. Do you know what the people had for dinner in coach? Nothing. I had stuffed chicken with and excellent salad and an impressive, but not untoppable, pecan pie.

You cannot make up a story like this�you can actually and people did and then people stopped because they thought it was too far fetched, too clich�. This is it though. It happens. Persevere. Persevere and be rewarded.

1. explaining why jokes are funny
2. explaining any slight connnection someone or something has to Pittsburgh
3. self-deprecation

We were talking about football at the dinner table tonight. I am going to watch the Steelers game tomorrow with my mom and explain how it works (and I suggested she drink beer and smash the can on her forhead as well, but she didn’t like this suggestion) and as to illustrate why, I’m going to excerpt some of our conversation from dinner.

Mom: Why is the quarterback so important?
Dad: Because he directs the play on the field. He throws the ball.
Mom: He always throws the ball? They always give it to him?
Dad: I thought I didn’t know anything about the game. I’m an expert compared to you!

Yeah, that’s how it is in the Bischoff household. I think my mom finally figured out the rules of baseball though.

that I’m not above snooping around, poking and prodding presents and trying to find yet-unwrapped presents hidden to see what I’m getting. I hope I’m never too old to do that.

On my flight from SFO to Las Vegas (where I stopped enroute to Pittsburgh), I was seated next to (well, practically underneath) a bulbously obese woman. Her arms overlapped approximately 1/3 into my 18″ wide seat. I was uncomfortable trying to sit all the way to the opposite side of the seat and trying to keep my arms cocked off-axis. More than once I was awakened by her moving her arms or shifting in her seat. I don’t think this is fair to me. I think I pay for the privilege to sit in a seat with my back firmly in the center of the seat and to be able to move my arms unobstructed within the confines of the seat.

I’m not bringing up this because I’m annoyed (though I am) or I have something against obese people (people can be fat or thin or whatever as long as it doesn’t affect me). It got me thinking though, what’s fair or permissible in regards to charging or seating obese people differently. I’ve made a list of ways that airlines differentiate people:

• children are charged less for seats
• unaccompanied minors are charged an extra fee
• infants may ride for free as an infant-in-arms
• people in wheel chairs are helped on an off the plane and are given priority storage space, but I didn’t find anything about priority seating, except in exit rows (Here is a set of rules for carriers with regard to disabled passengers)
• smokers are told to go shove themselves, even on the longest flights
• first and business class passengers pay more for the service and added space

Now, is there any way to differentiate people who are, say, over 24″ wide in their widest dimension? I see nothing in the disability literature about priority seating (if you are going to consider obesity a disease). I’m sure if you were seated next to a person without the use of his legs, you’d be incovenienced, because it’d be difficult to get passed him to the aisle. But then again, you probably wouldn’t be constantly uncomfortable.

I don’t think charging obese people more for a wider seat would go over well because the airlines would be sued under the American Disabilities Act (ADA) for sure.

On the other hand, effecting does allow differentiation, at least in the case of smokers. There is the added fact that second-hand smoke can be a health risk to those around the smokers, but I don’t know if the law requiring flights to be smoke-free was enacted after the second-hand smoking research was done or not. I’m betting it was enacted because a lot of people complained and it is socially acceptable to make laws against public smoking.

(A thought provoking thing I once heard: A guy was in a bar with some friends/ colleagues and started smoking (apparently not Boston or San Francisco or many other places, or it was a while ago) and they started to tell him that smoking was bad for him, etc etc. And he hypothesized that if he turned to a portly colleagues and started berating him in a similar manner because being fat is a health risk, it wouldn’t be as socially acceptable.)

Children are charged less for seat and they use less of a seat, but I believe that these two facts are not effect and cause (respectively).

Any thoughts on this? I haven’t come up with anything thing that I’m satisfied is fair to all parties involved.

I opened up one of the Wurlitzer’s last night and re-wired the power (the 206A was a student model so they were all powered from the Teacher model). It was pretty painless. I powered it up and it worked first try. This particular one sounds really good. The bass is heavy. I’ll try to record some stuff so you can hear how it sounds, but I won’t be able to get that online until after Christmas.

I’m flying to Pittsburgh tonight. I’ll arrive early tomorrow morning and I’m leaving on the 28th fairly early. I’ll probably blog some at home. We have wireless so it’s so easy!

As I will be home, I won’t be doing a radio show tomorrow night. I’ll be back on the air December 31st from 0000 to 0300.

I got some sandals made out of tires from Lauren Owens (a friend of mine that’s doing Peace Corps in Tanzania). She’s back in America for the holidays. I tried to get a pair of these sandals in South Africa but they wanted R150 for them. That’s about $25. In Tanzania they apparently go for 150 shillings, which is about 15 cents. These ones are pretty skillfully made and fit pretty well.

• Bought boerewors for my parents and other sausages for a bbq at Dittmer’s Wursthaus
• Bought beers (including a fine Schwarzbier) at Bev Mo
• Had a last-minute bbq with a few of them teppers (as my dad would call them*) namely Dylan, andyl, Raag and Leo.
• Open up one of those Wurly’s and check out how the new power wiring will work with andyl. A common ground is already established. Yay.
• Slept for 6 hours.
• Watched Shad install a new starter in my car. (”Install a new starter in my card with Shad” would be a blatant lie and “Help Shad install a new starter in my car” would be a fib; I did hand him a wrench a couple times.)
• Work.

*Which got me thinking: there are these things like this where originally people do things that annoy me and then it becomes part of my picture of them. I’d correct him to say “teps” but now if he called them “teps” I’d be disappointed. His “error” has become endearing.

The Steelers do it again. It looks like this year might be the year for the one for the thumb.

After the BoSox (who, incidentally, were just named the Sports Illustrated Sportsmen of the Year), the Steelers doing well, I’m happy.

I’m at my gate to cincinnati. short flight there and then to sfo after a short intermission of sorts.

Last night was my 5 year high school reunion. In many ways it was exceedingly weird. I went down with andy, dave and randy. we stood awkwardly in the have-to-yell-over-the-music loud sports rock cafe. we played the who’s that? game and then talked to various people for a few hours. I talked to kirstin richardson, lekse, ben jewel, and kristen werner mostly. A few people didn’t recognize me at all. I guess I do look pretty different from high school.

we headed to mineo’s, a great tradition among us. it’s a classic greasy pizza joint that’s open late. kirstin met up with us there having left the reunion before us. we ate some pizza, drank some pop and–this is the best part and probably the keystone of the tradition–we read the City Paper and didn’t talk to each other besides reading sections of various articles aloud.

we finished off the night with half of the big lebowski at kirstin’s and then andy and dave crashing on my couches while I packed and showered. my mom and the two of them came to the airport with me to say bye.

good times. the reunion, I may remember as awkward, but this day I’ll remember as a good one– we did good on this one.

1. my boy scout uniform. it’s just one of those things that I’ve spent a lot of time on (not the uniform but earning the various patches). I guess it’s just important to me.

2. my soda can collection. I’ve got some sweet ones in there. do you remember crystal clear pepsi? of course you do. do you remember tropical fruit pepsi? yeah, I thought so.

3. my baseball card collection. it’s just one of those things that moms throw out and then is worth lots of money.

4. my yamaha electone yc-25d portable organ. this is one sweet keyboard.