Month: February 2009

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.

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?

In these difficult financial times, I’m looking for any way I can to save money.

Which is why I proposed to my landlord that he could get tax credits from the Feds and the state if he installed solar panels for my apartment building.

It’s a win-win. My landlord could get money back (up to $4500, if I’m reading these web pages correctly) and I’d save money every month on my electric bill.

Plus we’d both be doing more to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and carbon-based fuel sources. OK, him more than me, but, y’know, still. It’s my idea.

I haven’t heard back from him yet. But I’m confident I will. Hear back, I mean. One way or the other.

Is it just me, or does the pun in this video make anyone else laugh hilariously?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qIcujTxA0E&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

To: info@zipcar.com
From: Brian M.
Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 4:54 PM
Subject: Suggestion regarding Zipcar’s online reservation system

First, I love Zipcar in general and all the great ways the company takes advantage of the latest technology, whether it’s the keycard access or hybrid cars, or the many ways you use online and internet technology to make things easy for us customers.

That being said, I have a small suggestion for the mobile version of your online reservation system: please change the default time for the start of a reservation to round up, not down.

When I make a reservation on my iPhone at, say, any time between 4:00p and 4:30p, the default starting time that the reservation software assumes is 4:00p – it rounds down. And it’s “costly” in terms of how many page refreshes and clicks I have to make in order to change it to a more useful time.

If I’m on my phone to get a Zipcar, chances are I’m either within walking distance of the car or standing right next to it. OK, maybe in that case it makes sense to default the time to round down, so that I can immediately get in the car and drive off. But if I’m making a reservation anytime between 15 and 30 minutes past the most recent half-hour mark, most of the time I’m willing to wait a bit so that I can get the whole half-hour segment I’m paying for, rather than just a fraction of it.

Honestly, it feels like I’ve been cheated in that case, simply because I didn’t go through the hassle of clicking and changing the start time to a point in the future.

Would it be possible for the software to default to the next half-hour, rather than the previous half-hour? Or can you pro-rate me the time I don’t actually use?

In any case, I still think you guys rock, and I’ve been a customer of Portland Zipcar since two mergers ago (Remember FlexCar? I forgot what the company was called before FlexCar but that’s when I originally joined).

—
Brian Moon

*****

To: Brian M
From: info@zipcar.com
Date: Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:54 AM
Subject: Re:Suggestion regarding Zipcar’s online reservation system

Dear Brian,

Thank you for writing. We do welcome your feedback and your suggestions regarding the current reservation systems. We will pass it along. We compile our member’s ideas and decide on them in future planning sessions. Thanks!

Regards,

Lynn
Zipcar Member Services

Does that seem like a brush-off to you, too?

Spoilers for “Fringe” and “Lost” below. You’ve been warned.

In this week’s episode of “Fringe”, the bad guy forces Agent Dunham to show off her psychic powers to remotely turn off light bulbs. Of course, Agent Dunham does not believe in psychic powers at all, let alone that she has them. The bad guy, however, tells her “Then I have something you don’t, Agent Dunham. I have faith in you.”

In this week’s episode of “Lost”, John Locke is trapped in a cave with a lovely compound fracture in his leg, and his spirit guide Christian Sheppard wants him to turn the big ol’ wooden wheel of time, collect his six friends and talk them into returning to Hell Island. The word “sacrifice” is used which makes Locke nervous; he doesn’t think he can do it. Christian tells him, “I have faith in you, John.”

Both of those are J. J. Abrams shows. But if those characters are searching for faith, they need to look to Friday nights, where Faith the Naughty Slayer has taken up a new job as a mind-wiped puppet solving crimes and kicking ass. (See what I did there?) “Dollhouse” looks complex and dark. Really really dark. You may have thought that a show about living over the mouth to Hell and killing vampires for a living (i.e., “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) was dark but that’s just peanuts compared to Joss Whedon’s follow-up, “Dollhouse”. The creepy submissiveness of the blank-slate Echo, played so well by Eliza Dushku, sets me on edge and makes me eager to see her get some retribution for being put into this position. Actually, from even the very first scene of pre-mind-wiped pre-Echo being recruited for this “job”, Dushku does an eerie good job of showing someone who thinks they have no other options but to… yes, submit… to this 5-year contract. Have I used the word “creepy” enough? It all gets darker from there.

Between Mr. Abrams and Mr. Whedon, I’m getting more than my weekly dose of well-written, well-plotted dark sci-fi. Which is a good thing, considering that “Battlestar Galactica” only has five more episodes left.

It truly is a good time to be a fan of dark sci-fi filmed episodic television.

In the earliest moments of Valentine’s Day 2009, I was sitting with a bunch of friends, including Tracy, in the Acropolis strip club, shouting at a friend of the DJ over his cell phone to some guy at home alone.

Tracy and Gina liked the girls at the Acropolis better than the ones we had seen a couple of weeks earlier at Devil’s Point. The dancers at DP are Goth-y, tatted, jet-black hair and lots of eyeliner kinds of girls. The dancers at the Acropolis span a much wider range: from tall blonde Barbie types to buxom Bettie Page types to young-seeming naughty schoolgirls to my favorite dancer of all, S., who is a slender sun-worshiping brunette who cracks wise and has a great laugh.

Tracy summed it up thusly: “The girls here look like what we wish we looked like.”

I hadn’t thought of that…

I haven’t yet had a chance to read it but I’m posting it here for anyone else to read.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has issued its opinion in the case of Lea Lakeside-Scott vs. Multnomah County and Jann Brown.

Apparently it has overturned the lower court’s ruling and accepted the defendant’s arguments.

A travesty of justice. I hope that Lea is not done fighting, because it’s not over yet.

The flip side of lost things is, of course, found things.

That’s a set of memories, however, that is buried a bit deeper. Nothing immediately comes to mind. So I’m typing it out, mentally clearing my throat by just typing randomly, until a memory resolves itself.

Found things. Found objects? I’ve found money before. I remember working in the mall, nearly 2 decades ago, and finding a small manila envelope with two twenty dollar bills inside. No identifying information at all, just the two bills. It was after the mall was closed, and I was walking through the now-dark empty shopping center. I spent that – on what, exactly, I don’t recall. Who lost it? Were they hurt by it’s loss? Did losing it prevent them from doing something important? Or was it just mad money? I’ll never know. I may have changed a life that night. I hope they didn’t come back to find it, re-tracing their footsteps and yet not crossing my path. The money didn’t exactly change my life, as far as I can tell, beyond giving me a paragraph to blog about.

Last weekend I I found a restaurant. Not that it was lost, mind you. I’m sure the staff, the owners, and all the previous customers were doing just fine by it before I walked through the front door. But my life is much richer for finding it. I’ve already eaten there twice. Once for brunch, as I documented, and once again for dinner, the following night, with an old and dear friend. I had the chicken fried steak with gravy, and an amazing corn bread stuffing that I can still taste if I close my eyes. And an awesome spicy Bloody Mary complete with every garnish known to man: celery stalk, pepperoncini, green olive with pimento, and green bean.

Something that may surprise my readers, considering my strong atheism, is that I’ve “found” God twice. Twice in my younger years I attended a church revival and approached the preacher at the end to be “born again”. The combination of the enthusiastic crowd, the charismatic speaker, the time-tested language of salvation, and my own dissatisfaction with mundane reality and my desire to please my friends, all led me to think that giving in to the brainwashing was a good thing.

Fool me once, shame on you… The second time, I rationalized it by thinking that I was a back-slider from the previous time, even though I had done far less than my friends who were supposed to be strong in Christ had done; I hadn’t done any of the major sins – no drinking (yet), no smoking, no drugs, no sex (not that I wouldn’t have given my left arm to actually have sex, mind you). My worst “sin” was that I played Dungeons and Dragons. So fearful of the powerful damnation caused by a simple game of make-believe that, once, I snuck a Bible in a coat pocket when I went to my friend’s house to play, and while engaged in role-play, reached into the pocket and touched the small book of Bronze Age writings, seriously expecting to be burned when I did so. I was not burned. Neither angels nor demons appeared and spoke to me. I did not receive any signs of divine intervention, even though I sincerely hoped and desired for one. It was just a book, and the game was just a game.

But even in my most lamb-like state, I still approached things with an experimental, scientific mindset. I tested the claims of the preachers and pundits. Of course they were found wanting.

Since those early years, I have found something much better: I have found comfort with myself, and with the world, and all the uncertainty that it represents. I don’t need an invisible sky man or a magic book to show me how to live my life. Morals and guidance come from a rational base of our social lives, our empathy for others and the world, and our desire to better ourselves and leave a better world for our children and future generations.

That’s the best thing I can think of finding.