Lunar Obverse

RSS stands for "frustration"

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:51:00 +0000

Somehow, Blogger broke RSS feeds on Friday or late Thursday. I don't know what happened on their end, but the XML files that get pushed out to Blogger users' sites that rely on FTP/SFTP publishing are zero-byte (or empty) files.

And that's not right. Not at all.

If you search the "Something is Broken" group for Blogger help for the terms "RSS" or "feed" you get lots and lots of separate threads, and all the users reporting basically the same thing I summarized above. I settled on updating this thread with my own specific information, and watched it all day yesterday for some kind of official Blogger response. None came.

However, the user "nitecruzer", a.k.a. Chuck, proposed a workaround. He found out a different address for the RSS feeds for a Blogger-published site and, armed with the internal blog ID # for my blog, I was able to access the RSS feed for my site and redirect it to/through Feedburner.

Long story short: my RSS feed has changed. I don't really know how to let people who read my site via the old feed know this, however. But if you wander over here because you haven't seen me update in a while, please take a moment to update your feed reader by using the following link:

Main site feed for Lunar Obverse

You can also use the link in the right-hand sidebar, labeled "Subscribe". If, however, you see "Feeds", then frakkin' Blogger hasn't updated my site template yet. I made the change an hour ago, and republished my site, but it still hasn't shown up for me. I have no idea why. If you see "Feeds" over there, could you let me know?

Squareup

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:06:00 +0000

In Twitter, people have invented a way to tag individual tweets so that they are part of a larger, tagged, group. That method is called "hashtags" because the tag includes a hash mark.

So all the tweets about the Twitter meetup (or "tweetup") at the KGW Studio on the Square yesterday evening are tagged "#squareup".

If one searches Twitter for #squareup, one would see all the tweets about the event.

Isn't that cool?

KGW has converted the old Powell's Travel Books location, a bunker under Portland's living room (a.k.a., Pioneer Courthouse Square), into a remote studio. And Wednesday night, the people behind their Live at 7 show, Stephanie Stricklen and Aaron Weiss, invited all their Twitter followers to come see the new space.

There were a lot of people there, more than I expected. The little studio was full of people I've interacted with, but have not met in person.

There were three exceptions: Neva, whose birthday party I went to a couple of weeks ago, and who seemed to see me as a familiar face in a sea of new faces.

Second was Aaron, who works for the county in the same building as I do. Aaron and I have been in the same meetings, and interacted on blogs in the past, but never formally introduced ourselves to each other until last night. (I expected Aaron to sound like Seth Rogen but he doesn't; he sounds like Aaron).

And, of course, Christopher Frankonis, The One True B!x, a Portland blogging star, whom I have seen in public previously; I finally shook his hand and introduced myself.

I got a hug from Stephanie Stricklen, and I got to tell the Director of Programming for KGW that I'd like them to do more local politics and reporting. I got to chat with a producer for the show about getting local musicians into the studio for concerts and shows. We, as a group, gave advice to the talent for the station on how to best make use of Twitter for their reporters - the basic idea being, let each individual reporter do what they want with their Twitter accounts, and just collect them all on the main KGW web page. Don't restrict them in what they talk about. If they want to just talk about the stories they work on, let them. If they want to talk about their pregnancy and where they had dinner, (like Steph), let them.

The whole point of Twitter (OK, one of the points of Twitter) is that you can follow or not follow people for whatever reason you want. Me, the bulk of people I follow are interesting in one way or another, and the bulk of those people are local. But other people might have different ideas on what makes others interesting or worth following. It's about finding an individual voice.

So far, the best part of Twitter, for me, is that it's led to meeting great people in person.

I took a few pictures of the event, and you can find more and better pictures of the event here.

The remote studio is small but packed with tech. The cameras are all robotic monsters that are controlled remotely from SW 15th and Jefferson, and directed into place via a rail marked with barcodes (which I tripped over and knocked out of place - sorry, Aaron!) There's a raised desk that, I believe, Steph said she would never use. There's a big green screen for doing weather in front of, a technical skill that is difficult for me to imagine doing gracefully. And nearly everyone commented that it would not be long before people, regular people in the Square, would be flashing and mugging for the cameras in front of the windows.

Which, I believe, is the real-world outcome of what D.J., KGW General Manager, described as "being connected with the community." Right on!

Not as rare as you'd think

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:31:00 +0000

Kevin and I were out and about, and driving around the Hawthorne area looking for a parking spot. Destination: Powell's on Hawthorne.

He pulled onto a side street, and while I was looking at him and saying something, I interrupted myself and pointed out his side window. "She's a stripper." He turned, looked, and saw a tall, dark beauty with a crimson swatch in her hair crossing in the middle of the street.

I told Kevin her stage name, and mentioned that she's on my MySpace friends list. Kevin was interested (though not beyond the bounds of basic curiosity), so after he parked, I pulled out my iPhone and showed him some of her pictures and related what little I know about her. "She's... well, she's probably not calling herself a 'Republican' anymore, 'cause the Republican Party is in steep decline. But she's anti-Obama, and pro-gun, and all the other generic Republican talking points. But, damn, she's got an amazing pair of (as far as I know) natural breasts."

I joke that spotting strippers in their street clothes is fairly common because Portland is reputed to have a very high ratio of strip club per capita (which urban legend has been examined and found wanting). That means, to me, that any random attractive woman I see is likely to have been, is currently, or will be in the future, a stripper.

But maybe I just see strippers more often because I go to strip clubs a lot? Maybe it's me? I'm so tuned in to the talent working at the various clubs I frequent, I recognize them more often than regular people?

Last evening, I was riding home on the bus, tired and a bit overwhelmed by the group I had just left (about which I'll write later). I was sitting in the seat right in front of the rear door, surfing on my iPhone, zoning out. The bell rang, the driver pulled over, the rear door opened, and a voice called out, "Thank you!"

The voice tickled my memory.

That voice was in a normal everyday tone of voice. But the last time I heard it, it was cooing and giggling in an assumed, but entertaining, tone of voice. In fact, the only times I had ever heard it. Or should I say, "heard her."

I looked out the window, and, sure enough, saw yet another stripper, dressed in normal street clothes, walking down the sidewalk and away from the bus.

It happens nearly every day. Don't you wish you lived here?

Arcade

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:23:00 +0000

Wil Wheaton went nuts over some recordings of kids playing arcade games. I haven't listened to them yet, so Wheaton may be justified in his nuts-going, I don't know.

What I do know is that Wheaton's mania for nostalgia is parallel to my own lately. So I found the ending to Wheaton's post a bit more thought-provoking, and, hopefully, worthy of a small post.

He posed the question of choosing, to own for your very own, any four arcade games, and what would they be? Oh, and a pinball machine.

I never really enjoyed pinball the way I enjoyed arcade games so I immediately modified it to be any five arcade games. Even then, I had trouble picking just five. Here's the list that first came off the top of my head:

Three of the five are vector-based graphics games. Only one (Elevator Action) features personal violence - the rest are abstracted violence (very much abstracted in the sense of competitive racing for Pole Position). And all of them feature a simple, single goal, rather than complex story-telling. They're just games where the point is to survive and do as much damage as you can (or race as long as you can go).

And they all date to 1980-1983 - the years I went to high school.

Every single one of those games, at one point, were installed in the local 7-11, and I must have spent hours and hours, and quarter after quarter, playing each and every one of them, oblivious to anything else, mesmerized by the flashing lights. Most times I would be wearing headphones and listening to a mix tape of some sort, songs recorded off the radio, which would explain the lack of any songs not cut from the corporate commercialist cookie-cutter, ugh. It wouldn't be until later that I discovered that there was a lot of awesome music that did not get played on Portland radio stations...

Blowing up asteroids, or stylized tanks, or shooting enemy spies, all stood in for whatever it was that I was avoiding out in the real world.

If only I had any idea what it was, exactly, I was avoiding?

What would my life, or anyone's life, be like without video games? It would be irresponsible of me to speculate.

Meditative running

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:14:00 +0000

I woke several times last night. I think I was hungry. Yesterday morning I ate a huge brunch at my new favorite place, the Delta (cheddar grits are tasty! And beignets with lemon cream!), then sat around and whined to myself about how rainy, hail-y, and cold it was outside. Basically I was trying to talk myself out of going for the long run I had planned on.

It almost worked, too. By 5 PM, I thought it was going to be dark soon. I had forgotten about Daylight Savings Time, though. Crap, I realized, it's not going to get dark until after 7 PM! Plus, actual blue sky appeared and the rain stopped.

With a nudge from friends, I was dressed and out in the sun, and, as predicted, I warmed up soon enough.

I kept my pace manageable and even, and if I felt myself getting too out of breath, I slowed my pace but did not walk. And out of the 5 full miles I ran, three of them were under 10 minutes each, which is pretty good since taking a break due to injury a few weeks back.

At one point, tiny bits of hail started hinting at possibly maybe falling on me. I thought it would get worse, and as I considered it, my feet still pounding the pavement, I realized that I was near the half-way point and a little hail would not stop me. But the full hailstorm never arrived, and in retrospect it might have simply been some residual hail being blown off the tree branches along that section of street.

I finished 5.4 miles in 0:55:37, for an average pace of 10:16 per mile.

My reward was an applewood smoked bacon and white cheddar burger (and fries!) from Mike's Drive-In, while watching the Sunday night cartoons.

And dreams of not being able to sleep. Dreams of having difficulty waking. And waking up from those dreams and having trouble getting back to sleep.

I think I was still hungry...

Past as prologue

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:10:00 +0000

In 1985, I was 20 years old.

Of all the factors that our society considered the hallmarks of adulthood, I had some but not others. No job, no car, unable to drink alcohol legally, still living with my parents. Yet I could vote, I had a steady, long-term girlfriend, whom I had met in high school. I was not a virgin. And I could think.

I knew that I was a citizen of the United States, and that the country and the leadership of my county were locked in a deadly enmity with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, and that the weapon of choice for expressing that animosity was the nuclear bomb. Both my country and the enemy had access to nukes; horrible weapons that did not just destroy the target, large targets, targets the size of large cities, but which also rendered the targets uninhabitable for decades, centuries, and caused deformations and illness in any victim unlucky enough to have survived the initial blast.

And both sides didn't just have one or two or a dozen of these bombs. They had hundreds. More than were necessary to merely "win" a "war". Enough to wipe each other out, and every ally, and everyone else, all over the world.

The strategy being pursued by my government, and the enemy (my government told me), for prevailing over the enemy was astonishingly insane: the strategy was to build more and more of these bombs, in order to scare the other side into not using their own bombs.

The madness that you and I now live under, the madness that caused men in caves to fly a jetliner full of innocents into large buildings, and the madness that caused our country's leadership to respond by invading a country they despised but had not direct connection to the attack of the men in caves, is almost understandable compared to my memories of the Cold War. Almost.

But back in 1985, it was such a horrible dark cloud hanging over the heads of all Americans that our responses were, by and large, anger. Punk rock is hard to define, but for me it will always include an anti-authoritarian, cynical, and political viewpoint, along with the feeling that, if we're all going to die we might as well have fun. And punk rock was born under the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Punk rock was part of a sub-culture that included comic books and bad movies. And in contrast to the conduit that the internet gives to making sure sub-cultures reach everyone interested today, back in 1985 sub-cultures were both more tightly-knit and harder to find and join. I had few people with which to discuss the paltry few comic books I read. I had few people with which to pick apart the lyrics to a song by the Clash or Bad Religion. I had to come to my own conclusions, by and large, about what, exactly, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were outlining in their 12-issue limited series "Watchmen".

I didn't get it at first. I didn't understand that the characters of Ozymandias, Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan were created out of whole cloth, with a complete backstory (there were previous versions of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre). I didn't see the depth that the Tales of the Black Freighter, a story of pirates and survival at sea, gave to the main story of the Mask Killer.

But I did understand the alienation of John "Dr. Manhattan" Osterman, a man who was given nearly unlimited power and found himself more and more detached from the fragile people around him. I did understand the Doomsday Clock, which gave us all a sense of how close we were to annihilation by nuclear holocaust, and its use in the comic. I did feel deeply affected by the depiction of heroes as sociopaths: the Comedian and Rorschach had their bizarre twisted ideas of right and wrong, each a viewpoint I could see in those around me. Kids I grew up with who worshipped the guns and armor used in Vietnam without understanding or caring about the human cost of the same. Cops who saw evil and crime everywhere but never looked at how far into criminality they themselves descended. I saw the point of asking who polices the policemen; how do we hold accountable those who we entrust with our safety so that we can remain free?

And, of course, the madness of trying to win a nuclear war.

Who the Hell were these people? Were they really the same species as me? Yes, I often felt anger and disillusionment, but it nearly always turned inward. If I were faced with a Darth Vader, a dark father intent on corrupting me, I would respond as Luke Skywalker did in "The Empire Strikes Back" and fall to my doom rather than fight back. Protecting myself by wiping myself out, and fuck all y'all; you're on your own.

I had no goals, I could see no future, beyond hoping I was still around next week, next month, next year.

I read every issue of Watchmen while standing in the 7-11 near my house. Standing in front of a wire rack in a convenience store, plate glass in front of me showing the ebb and tide of cars and customers in and out of the parking lot and the flow of traffic on the street beyond, hearing the bells and beeps of the video games and pinball machines off in the corner, and needing the brief escape from the emptiness of the rest of my life.

Yesterday I sat in a theater, beside my best friend from those days, and watched Zak Snyder's adaptation of "Watchmen". Many were the moments I remembered the kid I used to be; the feeling of the paper beneath my fingers, the look of four-color printing showing earlier versions of the scenes digitally projected onto the screen in front of me. I had not read the books in years, many years, and yet Snyder's faithfulness to the comic's words and images meant many small nostalgic moments during the 163 minute film's run.

I want to know if anyone whose experience doesn't include the hopelessness of living under threat of the entire world coming to an end can feel the same thing I felt watching the movie and recalling that I and everyone I know and everyone else might die due to the insanity of my government's idea of defense. I want to know if anyone who didn't try to escape entirely into a fantasy world, learning the ins and outs of costumed heroes and Jedi Knights and paladins and rangers and rogues, can feel what I feel when seeing those fantasies being portrayed by living human beings. Is that possible?

Are these feelings I have... nostalgia? That's what I felt when watching "Watchmen". So lost I was, and the world was, then.

Not sure we've come very far since then, either.

More of this? Why?

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 02:31:00 +0000

I had about 20 minutes to kill until my bus arrived. I was cold. Wanted something warm. There was a Starbucks nearby, with free wifi and hot coffee.

There's always a Starbucks nearby.

But I wanted decaffeinated since Dr. Carl has told me to cut back, and the three cups of coffee I had eaten with breakfast were probably my limit.

The last several attempts to order decaf at this specific Starbucks had been marred by a complete lack of decaf, which news was delivered with an apologetic tone of voice but no real explanation. In each previous case, I had been offered a decaf Americano, which I had sometimes accepted with resignation, and sometimes declined along with any other option.

I waited my turn, and when the black and green clad employee asked me what I wanted, I said, "Tall decaf, please, with room."

The boy barista (baristo?) half-turned towards their brewed coffee, then turned back with a familiar faux-sad expression. "I'm sorry, we don't have any decaf. We stop brewing it after a certain point."

Still smiling my I-expected-this-answer-but-it's-not-OK smile, I sighed and said, "OK, give me a tall decaf Americano, with room" and handed over a couple bucks. As he rang me up, I said, "This is the fourth time I've come here and you haven't had decaf."

The girl making the espresso drinks piped up. "They told us not to, anymore."

Baristo handed back my change and kept talking. "I guess they figured that we just don't sell enough of it."

I shook my head, smiling faintly, and stepped back so the next customer could order.

The baristo said, faux-sympathetically, "You're not the only one!" Really? That's the exact opposite of the excuse you had before, you know, I thought, either no one buys it or lots of people ask for it. Which is it?

"Sure, great," I said, "but it still disappoints me." They? I thought, who are they? Is that corporate? "I'll just have to tell them that." I tried to project a sense of I-know-it's-not-your-fault-but-it's-still-not-OK-but-please-don't-spit-in-my-drink as I walked over to the espresso-drink waiting area.

The girl ahead of me had ordered lots of drinks for a big group of people, and when she was done collecting them, finally the girl behind the counter called out, "Tall Americano!" and set a drink on the ledge.

I walked over, put my hand on the cup, and said, "You mean 'tall decaf Americano,' right?"

She turned the cup around to see what was written on it, her face falling. "Oh! No... I didn't see it," as the baristo called from the cash register, "Yeah, that's supposed to be a decaf!"

Honestly, I wasn't upset so much as amused. How much more wrong could this transaction go? I now looked like the customer from Hell, even though I thought my requests were well within the bounds of reason. The blockage wasn't me, and the initial problem was up the corporate ladder somewhere, and this current blip was an honest mistake. Still, everything was conspiring to turn it all into a Really Big Deal. I smiled wanly, then stepped aside so she could make me the right drink.

The baristo, who had some experience in these things, told the girl to keep the Americano because someone would probably order one soon enough. Lucky customer!

She completed my drink and brought it out; she handed me a coupon at the same time, worth one free drink next time. I thanked her, then walked to the condiment area. Yay, a free drink. If I had been really unsatisfied, would a reason to visit again in the future really be the trick to turn me around? Luckily, I'm addicted, and Starbucks are everywhere. I tucked the coupon away for later.

I waited for the clueless elderly Asian couple to finish stirring their coffees and adding their flavorings, then stepped up. Everyone has a routine, a little coffee meditation, a ritual they perform. Mine is: take the lid off, pour in a little half-and-half, tear open and pour in two packets of turbinado sugar, stir thoroughly, replace the lid so the cup seam is on the back.

Only this time, it went like this: take off the lid, reach for the half-and-half... of the two stainless steel pitchers, one was labeled "2%" and one was labeled "Whole milk". No half-and-half. Oh, this is an easy fix, I thought, and turned to the girl. "There's no half-and-half," I said, as gently as I could after the customer catastrophe earlier.

And she gave me the face again, the one that says she's really really sorry, but... "We ran out of half-and-half, we don't have any."

I couldn't help it. I laughed. Loud. Hard. I hope I didn't hurt her feelings. It was simply absurd. I turned back to the condiments area and reached for the 2%, while the girl continued to explain that she had used the last of their half-and-half to make someone else's drink. Now I started to notice more little touches to this comedy: there was no turbinado sugar so I used regular white sugar; in their urge to satisfy me they had not given me a cup with room as I'd originally asked, meaning I had to pour some out to make room (which, if the employees had seen, probably felt like salt in the wound but was simply me being practical); and when I stirred, I got a little hot coffee on my fingers.

I intend to send an email to corporate telling them about my experience and the contradictory "we don't sell enough decaf so that's why we often disappoint our customers" reason I was given. I've had reasonable responses to complaints to Starbucks previously.

I'll leave the entire story here, though, for your delight, to live on the internet for as long as the internet lives.

Lifeboat

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:14:00 +0000

I sat on the edge of the small conference room, along with about twenty of my union brothers and sisters, while we listened to our union president, Becky, and vice president, Michael, discuss what leadership was proposing we do to save our employer money, and therefore save jobs.

Of course, unions being a democracy (the only democratic (small d) institution in the workplace meant that first, the union membership had to vote to approve any plans the union executive board put forth. That vote was early next week. And to our benefit, my union appears to be among the few in the county that are taking pro-active steps to save jobs; others have been taking a "wait and see" line.

The twenty people in this room, this one "brown bag" session, represented such a tiny fraction of the total membership, so I was unable to gauge the mood of the entire voting block from the mood of this handful of people. But the people in this room felt overwhelmingly pro-job-saving.

Except for one, outspoken, angry, defensive woman, who kept chastising Becky for not doing "more", trying to get "more" out of management in this severe economic downturn. Like what? She mentioned more vacation time, more sick time, a promise to get the money lost back next year if things turn around...

I found her greed a bit overwhelming, and after the meeting, my friend Ken summed it up best by saying, "She sees it as the union vs. management, when in reality it's the union and management vs. the recession."

Quite so.

Sub-domain-er

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:04:00 +0000

And now, a little bit of meta, behind-the-scenes tech talk.

A week and a half ago my site had a little downtime. The cause was a result of the dynamic IP address that was assigned to Eggers¹, my web server, was a little too dynamic: it changed, without warning, putting my site on a little cul-de-sac on the internet.

I was able to move my content over to another server I had, on a slower connection, temporarily. And since then, I've moved everything back to Eggers, but I've left my site content on my secondary server, Lethem², as a backup.

I've been slowly working on the backend stuff necessary to have my backup server automatically mirror the main one, and to act in the future as a failover in case something goes wrong again in the future. And, knowing technology, something will fail in the future.

Not all of it is in place yet, but I'm kind of proud of the fact that I know have sub-domains to my main address on the internet. eggers.bamoon.com points to my main server, and lethem.bamoon.com points to my secondary. I've got each server emailing me their current IP address at 1 AM in the morning, every morning, and it checks against the previous day's address and sends a separate alert if it changes.

Next step is to implement a script, using Mac OS X's launchd(8) to copy the primary over to the secondary if the primary has updated. In order to make that work best, I need to upgrade both servers to Mac OS X 10.5 - they've been running 10.4.11 since their inception.

I would not call myself a Unix or command-line guru or wizard - at best, I'm a padawan, still learning and not yet a master. But I've been learning all sorts of new stuff:

I've learned a lot about using crontab(1) to run scripts on a regular basis. Unfortunately, crontab(1) is deprecated on Mac OS X - the functions of it are in Apple's replacement, the previously-mentioned launchd(8), and launchd(8) adds more, to boot.
Because the default editor for crontab(1) is the viciously-user-unfriendly text editor vi(1), ugh, I've been learning how to do basic editing in that.
In the process of setting up my sub-domains, and having my main domain point to two different IP addresses and two different servers, I've learned a lot more about how DNS, the internet's address book system, works; like how I can have multiple A records in a single DNS entry, to utilize DNS's ability to load-balance traffic.
And, of course, I've learned more about how to write shell scripts, since those are what do all the heavy lifting of mirroring each server, checking IP addresses and notifying me about any changes.
This may seem like a simple thing, but since Unix-y (and Mac OS X is Unix-y - well, technically, BSD-y - at its core) operating systems are configured by simple text files, being able to manipulate and make changes to lots of different text files quickly and efficiently is a key skill. To that end, rather than wrestle with vi(1) all the time (or, more correctly, in addition to wrestling with vi(1)), I've learned how to use the command-line tool sed(1) to do fast search-and-replace on multiple text files with one fell swoop.

...and in these hard economic times, learning new skills is always a good thing. Anyone need any web server work done? Anyone? I work cheap while I'm still learning...

¹ Everyone has a naming convention for their hardware. Mine is to name my computers and computing devices after favorite authors; in this case, my main web server is named after Dave Eggers, author of "A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Genius" and others.
² This server is named after Jonathan Lethem, an incredibly dark and brilliant author.

How can this be?

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:33:00 +0000

While doing some light cleaning around the house this weekend, I noticed that my vacuum cleaner wasn't the best. I bought it on the cheap, and it doesn't always pick up dirt and paper shreds and whatnot from my new carpet.

And I thought, "my vacuum cleaner sucks."

And I laughed.

Because sucking is pretty much what a vacuum cleaner is supposed to do.

I spent a few minutes working on how someone could express that their cleaning instrument wasn't very good at what it was designed to do, and it made me laugh.

"My vacuum cleaner sucks" and "my vacuum cleaner doesn't suck" have both the same meaning, and the opposite meaning. At the same time.

I thought of "flammable" and "inflammable" and how, even though the prefix "in-" usually reverses the meaning of the word to which it is affixed, in this one case, it does not. But it's not entirely the same because the two words just seem like they should mean the opposite. They don't.

Not like the "vacuum/suck" conundrum.

I wonder if the Language Log folk have ever talked about this?

One to Ten

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:33:00 +0000

I was thinking about how rude some people can be, when I stopped to consider where they would fall on the canonical 1 to 10 scale.

Of course, when assigning a level of rudeness on the 1 to 10 scale, you have to think about what the extreme ends of the scale represent. In this case, the 1 would represent "polite", which is the least rude one can be.

But then I tried to figure out what the high end of the scale would be. What would 10 on the rude scale be? Would it be the rudest person ever, like, say, Andrew Dice Clay's public persona, or even Rush Limbaugh? Someone who is barely socialized and whose every utterance is designed to shock and dismay?

The problem is, I kept thinking of more and more examples of people who were even ruder than that... like, say, Osama bin Laden, or Dick Cheney. But then we're getting into a definitional gray area: are they rude or are they simply evil?

And I decided that there was no way to assign a top end to the 1 to 10 scale of rudeness. Rudeness, it turns out, is somewhere in the middle on some other scale, a moral scale.

It's kinda funny like that.

My most popular status

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:30:00 +0000

On Friday, I had a stoopid headache that may or may not have been a migraine. It was painful, and I felt like throwing up, and I was light sensitive. Also grumpy; I chose not to inflict my presence on my friends for the normal Friday night Battlestar Galactica showing at the Bagdad.

But some say that since I was still conscious and was able to watch TV (albeit in the dark, curled up on the couch like I was re-inventing the fetal position), that it was not an actual migraine.

So I updated my status on Facebook (and MySpace, too, but as you'll see, all the fun was over on Facebook) to read:

"Brian is starting his weekend with a migraine."

This turned out to be the most popular status update I've even posted. I got seven responses to it from six different friends. I got expressions of sympathy ("Your pain. I feels it."), denial ("It's not a migraine. It's all in your head!"), enthusiasm ("Fantastic! You know how to par-tay!")

All of which were more than welcome. Still, I have to give the random award of Best Response to a Complaint of Pain to Nicole's "Maybe it's a tumor..."

I'm here to tell all y'all... It's not a tumor!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

"Coraline" IN 3D

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:47:00 +0000

Neil Gaiman, author of the book "Coraline", has this to say on the subject of where to sit when watching a 3D movie:

"@lunarobverse for 3D movies you don't normally want to be in the front couple of rows, and middle's seems preferable."

I have to admit, getting a direct answer from the author of the book that was translated into a movie to my question about where to sit has me feeling more than a little bit fanboy-ish.

I love the immediate feeling of connection I get from Twitter. I actually posted my question while waiting in the lobby prior to the movie, while the theater personnel were cleaning the theater, just 20 minutes before the movie was to start. I posted the question from my iPhone, on a whim. And had my answer in plenty of time to adjust where I was sitting to take full advantage of 3D during the film.

Even some of the previews were in 3D, and for the most part, it worked: the preview for "Monsters vs. Aliens" actually looked almost enjoyable from a technical standpoint, although I still suspect it lacks the depth of any random Pixar flick. Except, perhaps, for Pixar's next flick, "Up", which leaves me feeling underwhelmed. Really, Pixar? A movie about a grumpy old man who wants to get away from everyone? Of course, I'll still go see it in the theater, but color me skeptical.

Oh, wait, this was supposed to be a review of "Corline" IN 3D. I got distracted by the special effects for a moment, and the tiny interaction with one of the films' originators.

I have not read the book on which the movie is based, but the film was sufficiently creepy from the very start. Coraline is a little girl who feels neglected by her parents and alienated from her friends and hometown; the family has just moved to a rainy little place called Oregon, and her parents are always grumpy and nose-deep in their writing and computers. Little Coraline goes exploring and soon stumbles on a parallel world where her Other Mother and Other Father are happy, doting, and giving people who cultivate a garden that looks like Coraline and bake all her favorite foods and buy all her choices in clothes and do nothing but play games with her.

So of course the ones who spoil her and lavish attention on her are the bad guys.

Seeing the movie with adult eyes, I felt creeped out by all the attention the Other Mother and Other Father gave to the little girl. I wonder if any of that translated so well to the younger members of the audience. I would be surprised if it did not, though I have only my own instincts to go on.

I'm glad I got to see the movie in 3D; with only a couple of scenes near the beginning and during the end credits, the effect was used to simply give depth and perspective to the movie, and not to shock and reach out of the screen. The level of detail to the world was evident.

I recommend the movie. If you can see it in 3D, more the better - but hurry, because apparently the 3D screens are being slowly replaced with some Disney Jonas Brothers thing. Ugh.

Anarchy texts

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:31:00 +0000

My iPhone vibrated and chimed to let me know a text had come in.

I was sitting at my desk at work, so I dug the silver brick out of my pocket and looked to see who had texted me.

The screen just showed a phone number, which meant that the person wasn't in my address book. The text mentioned a birthday party for the sender, tomorrow night, at a bowling alley. It had the look of something sent to a bunch of people, a blast group text, rounding up a posse.

I had, just a week or two ago, done some cleaning up of my address book. Had I mistakenly deleted someone who still texted me? I couldn't think of anyone - the list of texts I had received in the last few weeks had names and pictures attached to numbers; it looked complete.

Was this from someone I hadn't talked to in a long time? A girl I had dated once or twice and then fallen out of contact with? Did I get included by mistake? Was this spam?

So many questions. I tried Googling the number, but nothing turned up.

I walked over to my friend Ken's cube, sat down across from him. "I just got this text and I don't know who it's from." I showed him my phone.

"It could be spam," he suggested. "Replying might sign you up for something." He shifted to his Announcer Voice. "Congratulations, by reying to this text you are now the proud recipient of a lifetime subscription to the ringtone of the month club, billed in one lump sum of $999.99!"

"Who, me?" I smiled.

"Did you try Googling it?"

I nodded. "I should just reply like I know who it is. Maybe mess with 'em a bit."

Ken gave me a blank stare. "Or you could just tell them that your address book is messed up and you don't know who it is."

"Where's the fun in that?" I was smiling, still. "You and your whole 'be honest and straight-forward' kick!"

Ken turned back to the computer he was working on, quickly. A bit too quickly; he betrayed a little frustration. "Whatever. Just reply."

"This could very likely be a wrong number, or someone I removed from my address book for a good reason," I continued, only half-serious. "It's entertaining to play around a little." Meanwhile, I was already keying in a reply - an honest and straight-forward reply, explaining that I had messed up my address book and did not know who had sent me the text.

Ken said, "You're going to mess something up and piss someone off, just because they invited you to a birthday party! I just do not get you sometimes!" He was a bit rant-y.

"I like things that are entertaining. And if they're not already, I like making them that way. What can I say?" I was needling him a little, even as I hit send on essentially the text he suggested I send.

"You're trying to make it a better story. When it's already a good story to begin with."

"May-be," I conceded.

Soon enough, the reply came back: it was a waitress at the Limelight, a restaurant I eat at frequently. I sent a quick "Oh, hi! Happy almost-birthday!" back to acknowledge I'd gotten the text. Nice!

Good thing I hadn't carried through with my random anarchy plan...

characterized by or preferring the state or situation of being alone

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:10:00 +0000

I haven't been getting out much. Except for my regular Friday nights out with the guys to see Battlestar Galactica's final episodes at the Bagdad Theater, and my obsession to become a regular customer at the Delta Cafe, and getting to and from work, I haven't spent a lot of time outside of my apartment.

I'm not sure why that is: a long, cold winter; most (but not all) of my friends living in other counties and me not having a car; the pressure of financial tightening as the economy worsens; or even grumpy-old-man-ism, a preference for being inside and away from strangers.

Perhaps none of these. Perhaps some of them.

I've even had invitations from new friends to hang out, spend some time, be social and have fun. Some, like Neva's birthday party, I accepted. But several I have not. It's not them; it's most definitely me.

I lack the energy to dig into my own motivations. I think I'm afraid to find out what they are. At least, I think that, I don't know for certain. Because... I'm afraid to examine my own motivations. Duh. QED.

I haven't run in over a week. Last week, after feeling some pain in my groin for several weeks, I finally got up the courage to visit my doctor to figure out what it might be. My fears ran rampant, as you might imagine, considering the sensitive area the pain was in. But it turned out to be a simple ligament sprain, a "sports hernia", requiring nothing more than some prescription NSAIDs and rest. My doctor, Dr. Carl, once he'd eliminated all other causes, demonstrated definitively for me that that was all it was - he literally put his finger right on the tendon and the spot where the pain originated from, and further demonstrated that rest would relieve the pain.

Running is my anti-depressant, on top of allowing me to eat donuts for breakfast and not gain weight and giving me an excuse to be outside and active. Take away my running and I fall inward.

Luckily the waiting and resting is over. I'll be able to run again soon. And hopefully my mood and my energy will return.

And hopefully I can lose the several pounds of... um... fuel... I've gained in this short time.

I think the lack of energy is contributing to my blogger's block lately, too. It's harder for me to come up with a post a day. So excuse this free rambling. I'll be back on track soon enough.

Spring can't get here fast enough, for so many reasons.

Zombie lies

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:11:00 +0000

I think I first heard the term "zombie lies" from Duncan Black. That link goes to top hit for "atrios zombie lies", not necessarily the first instance of him saying it, by the way, and I'm not saying that he invented the term. But he uses it often, and it always seems to refer to the same idea: a zombie lie is an argument or idea that has been thoroughly debunked and refuted, time and time again, and yet still seems to have people in the public sphere promoting and defending it.

Like the zombies of fiction and fantasy, you can't put them down. No matter how many bullets you put in them, no matter how many times you stab one, they just will not die.

And the zombie lies seem to revolve, politically anyway, around conservative policies and themes. Like the whole "Social Security is going bankrupt!" zombie lie. You hear this a lot. You heard it from President #43 right after he was elected in 2004. You hear it even today, while we are in the middle of an economic disaster caused by tax cuts and deregulation. But the fact of the matter is that Social Security as currently structured will pay out full benefits until the year 2041. Y'know, somehow I think we have some time to deal with the "problem" of a fully-funded safety net for retirees and the disabled for the next 32 years. Maybe we could be focusing on the more immediate problems right now?

Another zombie lie is related to, and in argument against, the just-passed mostly-spending bill in Congress, and can be summed up in the phrase "government should be run like a business!" This zombie lie includes the idea that "we're broke - we shouldn't borrow any more!" It's a bit more insidious because individual Americans can certainly understand their own household economics: when income decreases, spending should likewise decrease. You don't borrow money when you're broke. The reason this is a zombie lie, though, when applied to governments and larger economies is that only the government is large enough to absorb the costs of infusing new capital, in the form of spending, into an economy in an effort to reverse an economic depression. If no individual is spending any money because of a depression, it takes the government to step in and make things happen.

How do we know that this is true? Because FDR's New Deal spending is what got America out of our Great Depression. In fact, when FDR gave in to some "fiscal conservatives" in Congress and cut taxes and decreased spending, in 1937, you can plainly see that those cuts reversed the gains from the previous spending. It may seem counter-intuitive to those of us who are clipping coupons and cutting back personally, but if we want to get out of this economic nightmare, we should be cheering the spending portions of the stimulus bill that just passed, and should be booing the Republicans who forced a bunch of tax cuts into it.

Just look at how great President #43's tax cuts were at sustaining and building on President Clinton's budget surpluses. Oh, wait. #43 turned a $127 billion dollar surplus into a $455 billion dollar deficit.

We need more spending; and because #43 left us in a hole with his tax cuts for the rich and his wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan that costs us billions, and the free money give-away to banks and financial institutions (which I will admit, President Obama supported at the time and is continuing), our situation is far more dire than it should have been. But that doesn't take away the proven fact that building infrastructure and putting more capital and money into the economy is the answer, in a nutshell.

Luckily, that's what President Obama is proposing. Sadly, the Republicans seem to want to obstruct that spending and, in some cases, Republican state governors are considering refusing the money. That's about as willfully destructive and ignorant as they could possibly be.

Y'know, just like zombies.

Twelve hours of sleep

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:04:00 +0000

Sorry I don't have a real post for you this morning. I've been sleeping.

Got home last night from work, and was immediately tired. Well, I'd been tired all day, and had a bit of a headache. I barely had any energy but forced myself to get a load of laundry done (a bunch of black t-shirts, actually) then crashed on the couch and watched a little bit of recorded TV (last week's Clone Wars) and then... drifted into bed.

Where I slept for twelve hours.

Had a dream about shopping for a VW Jetta that I was sure I couldn't afford. Had another dream about moving into a new house that I, also, couldn't afford. I think those dreams stemmed from the conversation at lunch about the economic crisis our country, and the world, is going through.

But beyond my vague remembrances of dreams, being in bed was a half-day of oblivion.

Now I'm over-tired and stiff, muscles sore, and a bit sweaty (I didn't turn down the heat before sleep so it's too warm in here).

And now, I'm off to work.

New label added

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:04:00 +0000

In case you liked my latest in the "Motels and Hotels I remember" series, you may want to read the past installments.

I've added a new tag, so you'll find all the previous posts here.

Beat the system

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:40:00 +0000

The new Dell laptops we (the place I work) are buying have biometrics built-in - fingerprint readers. You've gotta figure that's pretty secure, right?

The folks at Mythbusters have successfully beaten fingerprint readers, though, a couple of years ago.

Myth Busters-Finger Print Lock - video powered by Metacafe

Wonder if fingerprint readers have gotten better since then? I don't know, but my guess is, no. Not in retail off-the-shelf laptops anyway.

Motels and Hotels I remember

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Fifth in a series.

Oasis Motel in Gretna, Lousiana

Thanksgiving weekend in 1998, I lived in Austin, Texas, working as a contractor for Apple Computer. It was my first-ever Thanksgiving weekend away from my family. The Wednesday before the long weekend, I sat with a bunch of work friends in the backyard of some bar whose name escapes me and Google. It was a chilly night, in the mid 50s, and drinks were flowing. A bunch of us were trying to figure out how to spend our time off. I had no idea, but my co-workers were concerned about finding me a place to spend with friends and food. I got several offers to come over for turkey and all the trimmings. It was nice to feel so wanted.

But the best offer was when I found out that Chris and John were planning a road trip... to New Orleans.

I had never been to New Orleans, but it had captured my attention more than once in books, songs and movies. The Big Easy! Crescent City! Mardi Gras! Let the good times roll!

I asked them if I could tag along, and they agreed. Splitting costs three ways was cheaper than splitting it two ways. Since John didn't have a great car, and neither Chris or I had any car at all, we were taking a rental car.

The following morning they picked me up. It's a 500+ mile road trip, give or take, from Austin to NOLA, or about 8 hours of driving. Luckily, we had a four day weekend, and three drivers to take the wheel. I remember driving through San Antonio, though we did not stop there. To this day I've never been. When we passed through Houston, we stopped at a Denny's for dinner; I remember the oil-covered canal and the huge oil derricks pumping oil and burning off the extra, making the landscape look like a watery Hell.

East Texas was green and swampy, very much unlike West Texas, which is dry desert. And southern Louisiana is, of course, the Bayou, a lush green dense wetlands.

The trip itself was largely uneventful, but once we got to the city proper, it was late and we decided to get a motel first. We drove through New Orleans and over the Ponchartrain Expressway, to the land on the other side of the Mississipi River, into the suburb called Gretna, before getting off the highway. We first came to the Oasis Motel, the improbably-desert-themed resting point for our two night stay.

We were three cheap guys, so we all shared a room. One on each bed and one on the floor, I volunteered for the floor first. Chris and John joked about cockroaches, but I was too punk rock to care. The room was just like every other motel room you've ever been in: smelled of stale smoke and sweat, beige in spirit if not in color, mismatched bed clothes and curtains.

Once we dropped off our bags, we drove back across the toll bridge to explore the wonders of Bourbon Street. It was a foggy night, and the streets were home to wandering groups of tourists. I marveled at the fact that we could get our booze in to-go cups and walk out into the street; just another way that New Orleans was different than my hometown.

The architecture was different, as well; tall townhouses with large wooden double doors, and balconies that looked out over the street. Chris explained that those balconies were filled with women showing their breasts for strings of beads during Mardi Gras - another idea that was new to me, but as a lover of breasts, I approved.

It looked crowded to me, but the bartender at the first place we stopped that night made mention that it was dead due to the holiday. That's right! It was Thanksgiving! I ran into the back to find a pay phone and called home.

My mom and dad could barely hear me over the music and noise of the bar, but I shouted a Happy Thanksgiving to them and happily explained that I was fine even without turkey and stuffing. And then, my family duties discharged, I went back out into the perpetual party that was Bourbon Street. We worked our way down the street, one bar at a time, until we reached the dark end, where Lafitte's Blacksmith Bar and Grill lay. The oldest building in use as a bar in North America, it was purportedly built by the pirate Jean Lafitte and his brother Pierre, back in the early days of the Union. Inside it was black as pitch and lit only by incandescent bulbs made to look like candles.

We stayed out almost all night, and Chris and John had a hard time getting me awake the next morning, because the tradition was to have coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde. I wasn't a coffee drinker, and I was hungover, so I was grumpy until John patiently explained that I was harshing his groove. "This is a tradition. You don't have to understand it. Just go with it." Since I preferred much more substantial breakfasts (something with eggs and bacon) selling me on light fluffy dough-y things was a bit difficult, but eventually I got into it. Well, I got into it when the coffee and beignets were there in front of me and ready for devouring.

We wandered the city the rest of the day, and in the evening decided to take a vampire and ghost tour. On the drive back to the motel room, we got lost in the thickest fog I can recall, and made many loops of the freeway system around the city before figuring out how to get back across the river into Gretna. And the following morning we toured a Mardi Gras museum, filled with old floats from many past parades.

We probably spent about 10 total hours in that motel room over the course of our stay. That fact, and the huge amount of food and alcohol I ate and drank account for my lack of memories of the place, specifically. But that trip sealed my love for that city. I've been back once but would love another trip someday.

Maybe even during Mardi Gras.

Transit night life

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:27:00 +0000

Last night, after having a great time at nevafeva's birthday party in NE Portland, I faced the downer of a long bus ride back to Sellwood.

Bear with me for a little Portland geography; surely most everyone who reads my posts already knows this but just in case, let me set the scene. The majority of all bus routes in Portland pass through, or end in, downtown. The first part of my bus journey was on the #6 bus, which basically traveled up and down the north- and south-bound highway of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, before hopping over the Hawthorne Bridge into the downtown bus mall.

Then, to complete my journey from one end of Portland to the other, I had to grab the #33, which hopped back over the Hawthorne Bridge to drive south-bound highway of McLoughlin Boulevard, where I debark and enjoy a half-mile walk to my little apartment building o' fun.

Two boulevards, two straight shots, each with a juke into the city center. Easy-peasy, right? I should be home in a flash, right?

The first part of the trip went smoothly. I love people watching the folks who ride the bus late on a Saturday. The attractive young girls who are going to a dance club. The middle-aged men who still think they're young men talking to the young girls. The older lady, drunk out of her mind, just riding around for something to do. Just another bunch of damaged humanity (including me). I felt a kinship with all of them, but sat in my seat and watched.

I debark downtown, and check the schedule on my iPhone. Side note: I found the best iPhone app for anyone in Portland who rides a bus. Last Friday, the website I have been checking for TriMet bus arrival times went away - I got a 404 error. So I poked around Apple's App Store and found a long list of iPhone programs for transit times. Our local transit agency actually has an API to let others use their schedule information, which explains all the Portland-specific iPhone apps I found. The top rated one was called PDXBus, and it was free, so I downloaded it.

It's full of features! Bookmarks for most-used stops, it can show multiple stops on one page, it lets me organize and arrange the bookmarks and rename them, it uses Core Location to show me the closest stops to me in case I'm in an area of town I'm not familiar with. It even has a built-in blue flasher that I can use to flag down buses at night.

Last night, though, iPhone told me that I had a 35+ minute wait for the next leg of my trip home. It was cold and I was tired and did not feel like standing in the wind for that long, so I walked 6 blocks to the only open coffee shop I could find, the Starbucks at Pioneer Courthouse Square, which was open until midnight. On my short walk, I was asked directions, as I normally am whenever I walk anywhere. I must look like someone who knows where things are. I accidentally gave incorrect directions (no, seriously, it was accidental). Got a small coffee, had to wait a bit while it was finishing brewing, was offered an Americano instead (no, I'll wait for the brewed coffee, thanks), texted goodnight to my bestie, Tracy, found out the wifi at Starbucks wasn't working (which matters much less since I bought an iPhone), and then walked the six blocks back to the bus stop.

And got asked directions once again. His Spanish accent was thick so I had a hard time understanding what he was asking for but we eventually got it sorted out and I pointed him in the right direction.

Got to the stop and the bus was already there, laying over until time to leave. Hopped on, started people watching again while surfing to kill the time. A driver and 15 or so people just wanting to go home, or somewhere else at least, on a Saturday night.

The driver was tall, and white-haired but strong looking, and when it was time to go he pulled out into traffic sharply and crisply. Turned onto Madison to cross the bridge... then just kept going straight.

He should have taken the off-ramp down onto McLoughlin and continued south. He didn't.

A passenger walked up to the front of the bus to ask him about this mistake, which is always a touchy situation. If the driver is defensive at all, or the passenger is rude at all, it can turn into an argument. This passenger was deferential enough, or the driver was humble enough, to avoid that. "I'll just have to go around the block to get back on track," the driver said.

So we continued onto SE Hawthorne, crossed Grand Ave., went one block up and turned right. Now we were parallel to McLoughlin and two blocks away. It's a little complicated by the fact that the major streets are one-way onlies, but the very next right-hand turn would have gotten the driver right back on track.

He kept going straight.

I kept quiet, but made eye contact with a couple of my fellow passengers. We wanted to see where this was going. We didn't want to point out that the driver was lost. Well, I did, but I did it on Twitter.

After just a block or two, the driver was screwed, because McLoughlin becomes a raised thoroughfare with no on-ramps. Now, when he got to an intersection and looked right, he could see that he had no way to get back on McLoughlin and back on track. Now, his little GPS unit was beeping at him that he was seriously off course. Now, he (or at least I) could feel the tension of all the passengers wondering where the hell we were and where we were going. A girl who had been talking on her cell phone to a distant friend started narrating the streets we passed, trying to figure out what the score was and how much longer until she reached her destination.

I thought ahead and realized that the driver was going to have to zig-zag through inner Southeast and past the TriMet Center garage, along SE 17th, before he could get back to the normal route. And so he did.

Because the boulevard is one long multi-lane highway, even with this long detour, the driver only missed one stop. Still, I felt bad for anyone who was waiting at that stop for a bus home; the next bus to pass there wouldn't do so for another hour, and that was the final trip of the night. They'd be waiting a long time, and with no word about what had happened. Maybe they (these hypothetical people I'm picturing) saw their bus pass over the bridge - I've stood there at that stop and I know that where this bus had gone was in line of sight from there. How frustrating that would be, to see your bus be so wrong, knowing the next one won't show up for an hour or more...

Such is life when one relies on transit.

Coffee cart girl

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:19:00 +0000

Friday morning and I approach the coffee cart in my building's lobby. The coffee cart girl sees me coming and smiles.

"Good morning," I say, hopefully brightly but probably, considering the early hour (at least an hour before the normal opening hours for my office), more likely mumbled and blurry.

"Good morning, sunshine!" she replies, her smile wide in her freckled face.

I laugh. "Sunshine? I like that." I move around to the side where the row of brewed coffee [things] are arrayed. I get a medium cup and start to fill it with half decaf, half macadamia chocolate flavored coffee. "Actually, though, my last name is Moon, which is pretty much the exact opposite of sunshine."

She's not facing me; she's setting out the trays of donuts, wiping down the counter. The cart has just officially opened for the day. She laughs, too. "So, then: goodnight, Moon?"

"Ha, ha! 'Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, cow jumping over the moon.'" I recite back at her, and she and I finish speaking the last sentence in unison.

"I loved that book. It was my favorite book when I was a little girl."

"Mine, too," I say, still smiling. "For obvious reasons." I pull out my wallet and lay down some money for my coffee, and pluck a donut, a giant apple fritter, from the tray. "But I really wanted to get my hands on Harold's purple crayon. Or run away with Max where the wild things were."

"Ah, but do they have donuts?" she asked.

"Wild things don't need donuts," I said. Nor do they need friendly cute redheaded coffee cart girls, I thought as I wished her a good morning and walked away.

Downtime

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:51:00 +0000

My apologies for the downtime on this site this morning. Not sure what happened, but for now I've got things temporarily working on another, slower, server.

Things may be broken - links, pictures, and whatnot and suchlike. Feel free to let me know or you can just wait and I'll get everything working at full capacity (such as it was) eventually.

I tend to forget how much has to be changed/updated to move even a simple blog like this from one place to another.

This is probably a reminder for me to back things up more often, too.

Home cookin'

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:38:00 +0000

Last night was supposed to be the Thursday Thing with Kevin. But an early morning email from Kevin announced that he was sick; too sick to hang out after work, he not only did not have the energy, he did not want me to catch what he had, too.

I missed him already, but wished him well.

I went through my day and kept busy, but when the end of my work day arrived, I was both glad to be done but in a strange reluctance to go home. Old Barfy, about whom I've written before, has taken to storing shopping carts of bottles and other recycled goods in the shared backyard, and a couple of nights ago I discovered that these shopping carts (yes, multiple) have multiplied to the point of being right next to my kitchen and bedroom windows, and my back door. I had left him a note about it this morning, and I anticipated having to talk to him about it after work.

What better reason to not go straight home, then? Yes, I'm generally non-confrontational. I will get around to it, but it might take me a while.

Instead, I transferred from my normal #70 bus to the #19, and went up Woodstock to the Delta Cafe (about which I've written before). Kevin and I were planning on going there, and I decided that I would still keep that appointment, even though Kevin had had to bow out to get well.

The thought of the home cookin' perked me up from my already-good mood. Walking in the front door I could smell the BBQ sauce and fried foods. The hostess sat me down near the window, and gave me a menu.

What to have? I knew I'd start with corn bread. I love corn bread.

After rejecting the idea of ordering something I've already tried (I haven't been going there long enough; I need to try more of the menu) I landed on pork chops. Grilled tender pork loin. With applesauce. For my two sides I tried the mac and cheese and cole slaw.

After I'd placed my order with the tattoo'ed black haired dark-mascara'ed waitress, I texted my order to Tracy, who is always down for some food porn.

And it hit me: every item I ordered was something my mom used to make, and serve, as a meal. Not just each individual thing by itself, but the meal as a whole. Corn bread, pork chop, mac and cheese, cole slaw, applesauce. It was literally just like mom used to make. But mom was long gone, buried up in Willamette National Cemetery.

And in spite of my generally good mood that day, and my anticipation of the delicious dinner still yet to be served... I missed my mom.

Forgive a blurry phone cam shot but, daaaamn.

It was so good, with just a hint of sad remembrance. Not that my mom was from the south; she was born and raised in Oregon, though she and dad moved and lived up in Aberdeen, Washington, and outside of Seattle, and in Kalama, before finally coming back to Portland. She visited Mexico a couple of times, and went on road trips with dad back east to visit his family, and down to California a couple of times, and even got her wish to see Hawai'i before cancer took her. But she was an Oregonian in all senses of the word.

She only knew a few recipes, and when she cooked she made lots of use of pre-packaged ingredients, but that was the food I grew up on, and grew fat on, to be honest, so I remember it fondly.

The food at the Delta is higher-end, but the menu could just as well have been the menu when I was a kid. And it took me until last night, my third visit, to realize it.

It's truly comfort food for me.

What kind?

bamoon@gmail.com (Brian Moon) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:48:00 +0000

Donuts (or doughnuts, if you prefer) are tasty pastries, deep-fried fluffy or cake type, covered in frosting, or not.

The canonical donut is a torus; an inner tube or wheel shape, a ring with a hole in the middle. The round nuggets called "donut holes" are, therefore, the bit of a donut punched out of the middle.

But donuts can be other shapes. Two bits of dough twisted or braided and then fried can also be found on donut trays, in donut cases, or in donut shops around the globe. Sweet rolls, without a hole in the middle at all, are also called donuts. Round puck shapes, filled with custard or fruit jam, are likewise donuts, without any hole. And apple fritters, lumpy and irregularly shaped, are also commonly called "donuts".

All of which leads me to a question, on I have pondered for nearly as long as I have eaten and loved donuts themselves:

What kind of "nut" is a donut supposed to resemble?

Is it the nut that you'd screw onto a bolt?

Or a nut that you'd pluck from a tree?

Is this a binary choice? Is it one or the other? Or has the lineage of the suffix "-nut" passed beyond the word it was derived from, so that "donut" no longer has a connection to its root word?