Introducing the Millidunst calculator

I have long (jokingly) maintained that Kirsten Dunst is the standard against which all other hot celebrities should be measured. This is partially because measuring actresses in "millidunsts" kinda rolls off of the tongue, as in "Michelle Trachtenberg is like 500 millidunsts." Dolapo begs to differ, though. He's completely obsessed with her, and is unswayed by the dark side she displayed on Gossip Girl this week. Clearly, we need an objective source of truth. Enter xrank from Microsoft, which is like Google Trends, but easier to scrape and more celebrity-focused. I was looking for a way to play with App Engine (which is amazingly easy to work with, by the way), and this seemed liked a good choice. Behold, the (slightly slow) Millidunst calculator! Enjoy.

Belize, Part 3: Sea-ing is belize-ing

Day 6, Thursday. We take a cab to Placencia at 8 in the morning, which feels less ungodly when you go to bed at 10. We check in at Westwind and head to the snorkeling shop (Nite Wind) where the nice lady sets up with some gear and takes a fair amount of our money. We're headed to the Silk Cayes, which are supposed to be on an excellent barrier reef. The boat is fast and bumpy and our guide is improbably named Engelbert. But there's a storm coming and wetake shelter on a random caye, where we get to know our fellow snorkelers. They include some college kids from Belgium living in Guatemala and some folks from LA staying at the really expensive Coppola resort up the road. We also get to know some hermit crabs, a rooster, and bugs that leave behind these gnarly looking bites with white circles around them. Thank god for DEET. We learn that no alcohol will be served in Belize until 6 when the polls close! This is amazing since until now there appear to be no laws related to the time, location, or age of alcohol consumption. (I am sure that American moralists will be shocked to discover that despite all this we encountered nary a drunken brawl or orgy.) We are glad we picked today to snorkel, despite the storm, since being stuck in town without booze would have left us pretty directionless. The storm lasts longer than planned, but soon we're on our way. I can't swim so well, and I figure there's a good chance of dying untimelyly today. But it turns out I can snorkel with a life vest, and life is good. Snorkeling is fun, but a little tricky when you're not allowed to wear your glasses and the waves are pushing you in the wrong direction. Also, the salt water keeps attacking my gums. The nice people help us around the reef, and we see a shark, and some purple fish going to school (we wave, but they don't wave back), some rainbow-colored fish, and a fish with a mohawk. The coral itself is awesome, just like on TV, but trying not to touch it is tricky because of the goggles' disorienting magnification. We eat a barbecue lunch cooked on burning coconut husks, and then we head to another caye. The reef here is a bit less vibrant, and most of the cool stuff is blurry to nearsighted ol' me. Engelbert pulls out a sea cucumber and a conch for us to examine. We head back, and on the way we see dolphins! Yay dolphins. Dolphins look a lot like waves and are tricky to spot. We also feel the beginning of a narly sunburn. Back in town, the bars are still closed! A lot of the bars and restaurants do not bother to open even at 6, through some combination of political fervor and economic resignation. We eat tasty Italian food because it is the only remotely vegetarian thing open. I introduce Emma to the mudslide at the one open beach bar, and she is enamored. It is unclear how Emma has never met the mudslide before.

Day 7, Friday. The whole day is allocated to relaxing. We start with fry jacks at De Tatch. Fry jacks are fried tortillas that you dip in honey, a Belizean version of fried dough that has somehow made it past the breakfast food censors. We stroll around town visiting shops. In one shop, we hear the music of Andy Palacio, which I will download on eMusic next week and listen to incessantly. We drink at the Barefoot Beach Bar again, and go for a several mile walk on the beach, checking out the resorts in town and burning whatever skin we had left. There is also some hanging out in hammocks. The food options are a bit limited and we end up eating Italian again, but the homemade pasta is delicious.

Day 8, Saturday. Time to leave, but first we wander around town and read in hammocks. The cab takes 10 minutes to take us to the airport, and it takes us about 10 seconds to check in. Our cab driver explains that the only difference between the two local airlines is that one pays its pilots per flight instead of per day, leading them to more willingly take off in inclement weather, which the cab driver considers a virtue. Lonely Planet informs us that, unsurprisingly, the airline has had more crashes. Our Cessna, thankfully, does not crash, and it flies low, giving us a chance to see a lot of Belize by air. At the airport, we spend our leftover money on snacks in anticipation of the hamburgers on Continental, which neither of us will eat. We also see t-shirts featuring every possible Belize pun - I feel very unoriginal. We notice a bit too late that everybody in the airport is drinking beer and rum punch. The airport has a bar and you can take the drinks with you! Emma, bored with her book and still waiting for me to finish What is the What, lines up and buys us beer with the last of our money. Hooray beer. Belize has been beautiful and fun and wonderfully remote, but I'm excited to get back to the Internet, television, restaurant options, and not getting sunburnt.

Belize, Part 2: B is for Belize, and for buses, beer, beaches, and bikes

(Addendum to part 1: Emma keeps a list of Questions for the Internet in her journal during the trip. This is a tradition begun during a disconnected ski trip last year, and it served us well. One of the questions for the Internet: how do I fold a towel elephant? Emma found the answer.)

Day 4, Tuesday. We say goodbye to our Caves Branch friends and walk to the road to catch a bus. We anxiously scan the horizon for buses so we have ample time to flag one we think will show up around 10:30. Somehow, we find the right bus, and we even transfer successfully to a second bus. Some hitchhiker tries to convince me to pay his bus fare, one of the few examples of someone being not nice, much less shady, during our entire trip. A little kid on the bus plays air guitar while drinking sprite and wearing giant yellow sunglasses. The trip is remarkably quick, although the last few miles to Placencia are unpaved and bumpy. We arrive with half the day left, check into our hotel, and head across the street to the beach. The beach has palapas at regular intervals, and we settle into cozy little hammocks. There are only a couple of people on the whole beach, but nearly as many dogs following us around. We get nachos and beer at the Green Parrot and then go back to doing nothing. I try running on the beach, but it turns out to suck for running through a combination of sloping, detritus, interruption by trees, and limited tidal differences. We hang out in the pool for a bit, looking out at the sea. Our room has a TV, and there is some bizarre movie on with Keira Knightley playing a bounty hunter, plus news about how Obama is doing. There appears to be no local content. We have dinner at the nicest restaurant in town. Emma has a watermelon margartia and sassy shrimp. I have a mojito and a bunch of tasty appetizers. Bedtime! We go to bed early here. It's pitch black on our walk back - no street lights and barely any lights at all - the stars are amazing.

Day 5, Wednesday. The hotel's kayaks look a bit ghetto, so we opt for their also-ghetto but less-likely-to-drown-us bikes. We bike the 7 miles to Placencia, which takes a couple of hours due to the terrible condition of the road and the blistering heat. Along the way, we stop by the dreary, untouristy Garifuna town of Seine Bight, where we follow an ad for Lola's Art. Emma buys a mask, we both buy beverages. We look both ways for airplanes and then bike across the airport. Placencia! Emma calls it surprisingly ramshackle, this sounds about right. It's a small town with one road and one "street" that is literally a sidewalk. We find a Barefoot Beach Bar and drink away the afternoon in the shade with our books. We make it back fairly quickly, checking out some restaurants on the way. We opt for dinner at the Green Parrot, which suspiciously and generically resembles their lunch. We try "premium" Belikin beer, which is less than a dollar more and tastes marginally better. Time for bed again - tomorrow will be a long day.

Belize, Part I: In which the jungle generously decides not to kill us

Day 1, Saturday. Belize City's airport is small and squat and it takes two minutes to get through customs. The tropical/post-colonial architecture and typography is reminiscent of India. Our cab driver is excited because the election is on Thursday and they're hoping to replace the PUP, believed to be corrupt and selling out the country's assets, with the UDP. (Sadly, there are no engineers around to make UDP jokes to.) We quickly learn that Belizean English is highly accented, and is even written with Caribbean slang. Also, the Belizean dollar is pegged at half a US dollar, but prices are sometimes listed in US dollars, requiring a double take when looking at any price.

The best way to get to Ian Anderson's Caves Branch is via bus. Bus schedules are under-codified, but the right bus eventually shows up. It's a former US school bus, but painted orange. The bus ride is a good time to learn new facts about Belize from our dear friend Mr. Lonely Planet: the entire country has 300,000 people, for example. Also, in the old days, some pirates got tired of stealing wood and become loggers in Belize instead, and some ants told the Mayans to stop their successful rebellion in Central America. We drive past farms and small towns and lush jungles on the main highway - two lanes.

Caves Branch greets us with a welcome drink of rum punch. Welcome drinks are fucking genius and every hotel should have them. Walking from the road to the resort, Emma notices a snake, which we photograph and walk past. On Day 3, we will discover that this is a fer-de-lance and getting bitten would have killed us immediately. Our room at Caves Branch has no windows, just mosquito netting, and no electric light, just beautiful-if-easily-damanged oil lamps. It's made of gorgeous dark wood, has a real thatch roof, and the towels are folded into elephant shapes and are bearing flowers. At dinner, we make friends with some fun guys from Amazon, who tip us off to the idea of making cookie dough without the eggs for safe-dough-eating, among other things. We first encounter Belikin, the national beer.

Day 2, Sunday. We're signed up for the Black Hole Drop, which is a long hike up in the jungle, rappelling down into a canyon left by the collapse of a ginormous limestone cave, hiking around the caves, looking at some petroglyphs, and then hiking back out. We see a range of palm trees, plus two hazardous trees that grow conveniently next to their antidotes. The weather is great and there are surprisingly few bugs. Lunch is thick tortillas with fresh vegetables and cheese. Delicious. Our guide's grandparents are founders of the neighboring town that is now trying without success to institute a tax on its residents. The other person on our trip is a nice young woman from Montreal named Manon. Emma tries to eat an orange from the orange fields while we wait to go home but can't get through the tough skin. We take our first outdoor showers. There is enough time for a nap before chips and drinks at 6. The schedule they've set up is great, and the all-inclusive package means stress-free drinking. This is my first Times-inspired vacation, and it's yuppily wonderful.

Day 3, Monday. Today's activity is cave tubing. We stand on a flatbed pulled by a tractor, which fords 3 rivers in the course of our journey. It's like living the Oregon Trail. Cave tubing turns out not to be the leisurely activity we imagined, and our arms are tired of paddling our innertubes around the same time the novelty wears off. The caves have the occasional bats and verdant windows into the outside world, but are mostly pretty homogeneous. I fall out of my tube in some wussy rapids. We drop by the local cenote, the Blue Hole, and then it's time for last of free drinking before we head for the beach in the morning. The mango and rum drink is tasty. Ian Anderson tells us about all the scary animals on the premises, including aforementioned deadly snake. The guys from Amazon tell us that a transit system in Seattle was briefly called SLUT.

Coming soon: part 2, and pictures.

Acrophobe!

Everyone needs a coding project over winter vacation, right? Mine started out as a Facebook game called Sentences, where you'd get a random set of words, try to make a sentence out of them, and then vote for your favorite of the ones you friends wrote. I spent a bunch of time collecting word frequency lists and trying to pick words with different frequencies, but in the end the game actually didn't seem like it would be fun. You can try playing against your self here. Anyway, I got talked into writing a simple Acrophobia clone, which actually let me reuse a lot of the code. It still took longer than I'd expected, mostly because PHP is a terrible, terrible language - a lot of weird silent failures, odd object-copying semantics, etc. Anyway, Acrophobe's done! It hasn't been played that many times, so you may encounter some bugs. There's also a notebook with notes from my wanderings, including various word and letter frequency lists. (It was actually hard to find a numeric list of initial letter frequency, so the numbers I'm using for Acrophobe are sort of inferred from the few sources I found.) The app is even hosted by Joyent's free hosting, which was relatively easy to set up and probably more reliable than the server for this blog is. ;-)

Beerownies

Last night, Emma lured me to Brooklyn with a promise of beer and brownies. While waiting for the extremely delayed train to Brooklyn (do the Brooklyn trains ever run smoothly?), I suggested we combine them into beerownies. I then repeated this over and over, as I am wont to do. Anyway, there are no Google results for beerownies! How sad is that? But there is a recipe for Triple Chocolate Stout Brownies provided selflessly by the National Beer Wholesalers Association. Please make some and bring them to me. I will call them "beerownies" and then titter endlessly. Much fun will be had.

Orange crush

The other day at work I was trying to come up with a clever name for my new workstation, and with the help of Ak and David, we decided it would be orangecrush (easier to spell than electrolite, less like an SNL actor than fallonme). But one of my worries was that Orange Crush was kind of a depressing song, although I wasn't quite sure what it was about. Some Googling found that wikipedia, songmeanings, and songfacts all had some interesting tidbits from interviews and concerts (interspersed with the usual population of clueless illiterates). I decided to make a handy dandy Custom Search Engine for the next time I need to do such a search. Try it out, it seems to work better than my other CSE attempts.

Colors and figures

(Emma's favorite was Cut)

I finally made it to the Whitney after two years of thinking I'd really like to go, now that there are two artists on exhibit I'd read about, Lawrence Weiner and Kara Walker. Both were as fascinating as I'd hoped. (I also liked the room in the regular collection that featured paintings of modern anxiety.) The profile of Kara Walker in the New Yorker was really interesting to me, since it mentioned how she had started out not thinking much about her race and then sort of grew into it. (Foolishly, I thew out the magazine assuming it would be online, and it's not. You can get a little bit of a sense of it in this interview and in the Times.)

It's not quite the same, but I find it sort of strange that this is the first time in my life I've had Indian friends or really referred to my ethnicity in everyday conversation (notably the ongoing battle with Neil, Ak, Vijay, and Rohit for most brown). I used to be annoyed I wasn't like everyone else, and just did my best to pretend I was, although somehow I was also annoyed if there were other Indians present, because then I wasn't special anymore. Maybe I'm just easily annoyed.

Not wanting to be thought of as Indian feels a bit like my friend's (can I say who you are, friend?) discomfort anytime someone discusses an Asian fetish. She's Asian, and I can sort of see why this sort of conversation might be troubling - it's sort of depersonalizing. I'd like to think that anyone attracted to me didn't just have an Indian fetish, but is that really so different than liking curly hair or a slim figure? (And shouldn't I just be glad someone's attracted to me at all?) I feel like in most cases these "fetishes" aren't really these mindless impersonal things, right?

Anyway, just wanted to put that out there. Say something interesting in the comments.

(Also, I wouldn't be really male without quickly switching the topic from emotions to technology, so... the Walker exhibit had some bits and pieces she'd typed on index cards. I really love the typewriter aesthetic, and the other week we were noticing how well magnetbox did (lcd soundsystem also has a good analog/kitsch vibe, though not so typewritery). After the exhibit, I started playing with trying to make Courier work harder programatically, rather than using fonts or Photoshop, but the best I could do in the moments I stole yesterday looks super-hokey and only works in Firefox. :( )

New Notebook Version!

Just wanted to share my relief at getting a new version of Notebook out the door. It includes the ability to tag and sort notes and integrates with Google Bookmarks, features that people have been wanting since we launched a year and a half ago! It also includes (thanks to David's 20% time and Akshay's whining) the ability to export your Notebook maps into Map Shop. For example, I exported the final route of the Exponential Decay Bar Crawl.

Breathless summary of recent events of or relating to Southern California and marriage

I promised Annie a shout-out in honor of her getting married, so (belatedly), Hi Annie! Congrats! She was quite the radiant bride, and the wedding had numerous highlights, including but not limited to

• the bartender giving me a bottle of Curvoisier to take back to my table
  
• Annie's brother-in-law explaining how getting married was choosing a life of "ennobling pain"
  
• this Newlywed Game-ish quiz about who does what in their relationship
  

Wes also did a great job showing me around LA - we went to the Dali exhibit (that man was obsessed with ants), had tasty Italian food, shopped for a couch, went to Trader Joe's for panini ingredients, ate at a pancake place that his friend saw Turk from Scrubs at twice, and went to a tea bar showing football games with scantily-clad waitresses. I guess I should actually thank Yelp, which is where Wes's roommate-to-be found most of these places.

While I was in SoCal, I also got to catch up with Jen, Robin, Vince, Albert, Yaz, Jenn, Judy, Kathy, Richard, and Charles. So many people! Other than the fact that everybody's getting engaged (congrats Yaz and Robin!) or in relationships, the most important thing is that we need to convince Vince to recapture his dream to start a business.

I also spent a lot of time in traffic. How do people put up with that?

Speaking of Southern California - my family was evacuated but is now back home. Thanks to everyone who was checking in - I felt very loved!

Cleaning up is hard to do

One of the few things I routinely use my kitchen for is to make popcorn, which is very tasty, but always leaves a frustratingly hard-to-clean oily pot behind. This weekend, Googling in anger, I discovered that I should be using a Dobie pad. Skeptical of the ridiculous name but desperate, I bought one, and it worked miracles! Dobie pad, I love you! The Dobie pad has joined the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Scrubbing Bubbles in my pantheon of life-altering cleaning products.

Tips for Manhattanites venturing into Brooklyn

After countless forays into our hipper, less convenient neighbor to the East (mostly to meet up with girls - why do all girls live in Brooklyn? discuss), including one just this Saturday, I feel like I should share the various valuable lessons I have learned:

1. Bring an umbrella. Especially if Dolapo is coming. Nine out of ten times, if Dolapo is present in Brooklyn, it will be raining. I do not know why this is. Maybe Dolapo secretly controls the weather and does this to give him ammo against future invitations to Brooklyn. Maybe Brooklyn hates Dolapo. The jury is still out, so your umbrella should be, too.
   
2. Bring numbers of car services. Dolapo-inspired rain can humble even the most golfish of umbrellas. For example, an awesome Philip Glass/Dracula/Kronos Quartet was cancelled halfway through because the lightning might possibly kill us. If this happened in Manhattan, we would hail a cab and head for safety. This is not an option in Brooklyn, where there is significant religious opposition to cabs. Instead, it's important to bring the numbers of some "car services" which you can call for a ride out.
   
3. On a related note, bring a map. Most of Brooklyn is not near a subway and these are often places you want to go, such as the Red Hook ball fields (remember NOT to bring Dolapo!). And the parts that are on the subway turn out not to be near one another. If, for example, you are going from Park Slope to Williamsburg, it's pretty much a toss up between walking, a horse and buggy, and the G train. If you are going from my apartment to Prospect Heights or Fort Greene, it will take at least two transfers, and probably the train will be skipping exactly the stop you intend to get off at.
   
4. Be sure to tell people serving you food and/or beverages that you are from Manhattan. For example, the man serving us mojitos on Saturday (in lieu of our ballfields visit, *cough* Dolapo *cough*), was very entertained to hear that we were from Manhattan, and promised to do his best to rival those on our island. Although the drinks were cheap, they also tasted heavily of sour mix.
   

Don't get me wrong. Brooklyn is awesome. There's tasty food. And a park. And large apartments. Just come prepared.

Oo, my 10-year high school reunion is coming

I was catching up on my blog reading, and it was a good thing, too, because Annie had a link to the web page for our reunion. And now I'm passing it on!

I sold my soul to Apple and all I got was a wasted evening

[ pretend there were some prefatory remarks about not blogging in a while because so many exciting things have happened, too many to enumerate at this late juncture here ]

This Saturday, I lost my phone in a cab (yes, the second time this year, but only the second time in my whole life (not counting some close calls)) just as I was lusting after everybody's iPhones, which was quite convenient, some might say suspiciously so. So Sunday, I finally went to the Apple Store and decided, hell, while I was there, why not get the Mini I've wanted forever as a media PC (if only it could play Netflix movies without buying Parallels!). Being a good OCD shopper, I had already looked up the various options for connecting the Mini to my TV, which suck, since Apple has decided the Mini, because it is useful, should be harder to connect to your TV that the Apple TV, which is neither useful nor more expensive. I believe this is what they call "market segmentation," in so far as I, the market, want to segment my eyeballs in frustration.

So, here I am, it's Monday night. I was up late last night with a tool called DisplayConfigX, which is about user-friendly as its name might suggest, eventually gave up, came home, and tried again for a few hours. There are all sorts of random settings for various TVs posted on the Interwebs, but not the ones for mine. Although my TV claims it can do 1024 x 720, when I feed it that resolution, the image is most definitely cropped on the top and the bottom, and that's even after fiddling with the "front porch" and "back porch" of the signal to get it to center correctly. Did you know video signals had porches? It's fascinating. I'm imagining my desktop drinking mint juleps between frames. Or not.

Right, so, it's Monday night and instead of doing anything remotely useful, I have labored extensively and am now the proud owner of a screen that has a 1 inch black stripe on the right side and is cropped on the top and bottom and another that is center horizontally and vertically but still cropped and ostensibly the wrong resolution. Two great choices.

But I am listening to my mp3s over an optical connection to my receiver, which is hott. And I do love love love my iPhone. Anyway, if anybody has any leads on getting this perfect on my TH-37PHD8UK, I'm all ears.

Update 11/23: I managed to at least make all the pixels show up and not look funny and fill most of the screen at the totally random resolution of 1048 x 700. The settings are Horizontal (16 front, 112 sync, 216 back) and Vertical (40 front, 3 sync, 21 back).

Liveblogging jury duty

The rumors are true, there is Wi-fi in the waiting room! But, for reasons that have not really been explained even during the handy video introduction from some of your favorite national news personalities (including graphic depictions of the trial-by-ordeal that we should be grateful for supplanting with this "jury" thing, a reminder that some day when we're on trial the awesome jury we get will justify all the waiting around, and the specious assertion that jurying is more important than voting), the demand for jurors is incredibly unpredictable. Anyway, we arrived at 8:45, the first people left at 10 something, and around 11:15 they dismissed us from a 3 hour lunch. Now, an hour later, 1 batch of folks has left and the rest of us are sitting around. A girl in front of me has read 150 pages of In Cold Blood so far. Highlight of the day: bubble tea. Yum.

Math makes intoxication classy

Saturday was the long-awaited exponential decay bar crawl. Thanks to a handy-dandy planning notebook, some fuzzy math, and Rohit's task-mastering, things went very well, whiny-trooper-friends-without-any-girls-to-enamor-them-between-64-and-8 notwithstanding. We went to Baker Street @63 (cute bartender), Blockheads @34 (cheap frozen margs), Petite Abeille @20 (very alcoholic Belgian -beer), Bua @8 (espresso martini!), Stillwater @4 (outdoor seating!), dba @2 (mollie bought me framboise!), one and one (dancing! late arrivals! more booze!), and double happiness (more dancing!). All in all, about as ridiculous as you might expect. Luckily, the hangover was not so bad.

My new running secret

A few weeks ago, I discovered that it's possible to cut across Manhattan pretty quickly on Houston, and this pretty much changed my life. Anywhere north or south of Houston is pretty crappy due to a combination of lights and pedestrians - best I've done is Tribeca, but there's a lot of annoying twists and turns involved in that. Today, Ak tagged along on my second 10 miler in the past few weeks, and he was annoyingly in shape considering he doesn't run that much, but fun was had.

I'm also getting a lot of, ahem, mileage out of my new Fuel Belt, which keeps me from buying lots of overpriced and heavy Gatorades en route. It took some getting used to and weighs me down a bit, but it was totally worth it. I'm going to try tracking my runs on Sanoodi, although it's a little annoying because I can't list a date without also listing a time, and I never precisely time anything.

Whence Union Square?

Susannah and I were debating what Union Squares around the US were named for. My vote was railroads, hers was labor unions rallying. We're both wrong.

10 things I learned at my 5-year reunion

1. People don't change much in 5 years
2. Except that all the girls are engaged
3. And everybody is now a lawyer, doctor, or grad student
4. Guys age less attractively than girls
5. Yale runs a stingy open bar
6. The ghetto mall has been turned into upscale apartments with this surreal indoor courtyard thingy
7. When Yale says they are going to serve you $50 tofu ravioli with a side of quinoa, they may decide to omit the ravioli
8. Large groups of people you haven't seen in 5 years are intimidating but fun
9. Skipping out on getting a room and trying to take the 4:40 am train (last train at 11 pm = wtf) is possible, but unpleasant
10. Bars in New Haven are cheap, but close too early

Personal space

Apropos of almost nothing*, I was thinking about how it is that although my first first kiss definitely occurred when I was sober, pretty much every other first kiss since then has not. The idea that I could ever brashly invade someone's personal space like that without some sort of lubrication seems pretty absurd.** Who knew that girls would actually get more intimidating as I got older?

*I could try to argue the fact that the rental company's smallest car on Monday was a Ford Mustang is a symptom of some deep-seated American need for a maximal radius of inviolability, but I'm not going to play that card.

**The exception to this is of course the oh-right-you're-one-of-those-girls-who-hugs-goodbye goodbye hugs. These are simultaneously awkward and pleasant, but still less awkward than the goodbye handshake with another guy, especially a good friend (When did our personal friendships start to so closely resemble business acquaintanceships? "Thanks for hanging out"? Foolishness.) that turns into a half-handshake half-hug with manly back-patting after a confusing are-we-going-shake-hands-or-hug-i-mean-we're-really-good-friends-we-should-probably-hug-right(?) moment.

Things

It's been a while since my last post, so, for narrative simplicity, I have done some soul-searching and grouped recent events into 3 handy categories: things that make me unaccountably sad, things that make me happy, and things about which I am ambivalent.

Things that make me unaccountably sad:

• Truffle oil isn't really infused with truffles
  
• Online dating. I spent some time trying to fill out a profile on Ok/Cupid before deciding being lonely was probably easier than fabricating and documenting ways in which I'm unique and exciting.
  
• Freya. Will I ever beat Guitar Hero on expert? Not at this rate.
  

Things that make me happy:

• SpamKarma. Saved my life, where by life I mean, you know, blog
  
• New music. Car Wash for Peace. Wax Tailor. Heartbreak World Silversun Pickups. Cloud Cult. Peter Bjorn and John.
  
• The Burg
  
• Parties themed around food wrapped in dough
  
• 7th Inning Stretch in Milwaukee
  
• Man Diego
  
• San Francisco in the daytime. Significantly reduced sense that one will be attacked and killed.
  
• Mojitos, as always.
  
• Grilled cheese at Tiny's. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
  

Things about which I am ambivalent:

• Frost/Nixon. I'm glad Zan convinced me to see it, and it was very well staged and provocative and well-acted, but it's somehow annoying that facts were manipulated for dramatic effect (real video, real transcripts)
  
• Autograph Man. Entertaining, but a little disjointed and not as good as White Teeth.
  
• Orthotics. With new shoes, they're better, but not perfect. Am I doomed? Discuss.
  
• Zombie Movies. Somehow Dolapo dragged me to see both Grindhouse and 28 Weeks Later (even though I was much more excited to see Kirsten Dun...Spiderman 3). They were fun and all, but especially Planet Terror (the first part of Grindhouse - the second part is an awesome Quentin Tarantino flick that inspired me to rent Reservoir Dogs) had me cringing the whole time and left me wondering what sort of terrible thing was around the corner in everything I encountered from then on. Damn you, Dolapo, damn you.
  

Free as in association

So, I lost my voice on Friday, which is one of those things that always sounds fun in that girls-will-find-me-pathetic-andor-sexy-and-swoon-before-me kind of way. And it was sort of entertaining for the first few hours, but on day 3 it's just getting to plain annoying. It especially sucks because I'm going to be out of town a bunch soon and was going to meet up with people I haven't seen in a while, but since meeting up with such people involves obligatory catching-up conversations, we decided that it was best to not meet at all. Which is weird, and yet somehow sensible.

In any case, canceling those plans and my need for warm beverages and entertainment did free me up to explore my neighborhood a bit more. I'm really starting to enjoy it now that I have a favorite coffee shop (Full City, which always has good music and where I randomly ran into someone from work yesterday). I tried out the exotic indie donut shop I always walk past but for some reason decided to play it safe and get a cinnamon bun. I also tried out this new Flicker's Coffee Shop, which didn't have seating, making me skeptical about their prospects. I also went to the library across the street, where I picked up Autograph Man and Human Stain*, but not Interpreter of Maladies. I was very excited that they had a reasonable selection of books in English despite its Chinatownness. At this point, I'm just concerned my rent will go up a bunch and I'll have to leave. Word is that Spike Jonze is moving into a building down the street and there's some organic wine bar opening up near by. Hello gentrification!

Later in the evening, after dinner at Mercadito (awesome drinks and guac, okay taco things), we tried out High Chai, which looked neat when I walked past it. As it turned out, the service was not great and the tea was frustratingly lukewarm, although at least there were live music and tasty scones. I guess trying out new places is a classic high-risk/high-reward activity.

Speaking of high-risk, high-reward, I think this quote from the author of Black Swans in Wired was right on: "All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options. It's like venture capital: Most of the money you make is from things you weren't looking for. But you can find them only if you search."

--

*About some guy's life being ruined by a misinterpreted racial slur - surprisingly contemporary given the whole Imus thing.

...a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony....I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping form one end of the White House to the other and bearing a legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

Are you kidding me?

I think I'm in the wrong line of work for my height.

...in a study of more than 20,000 online daters...They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000.

Also (and be sure to read comment 84)

on average, a woman got a “yes” from about half the men she met (meaning that the guy would like to go out with her). But a man, on average, got the thumbs-up from only a third of the women

and

the more attractive women set a higher bar for their partners than less attractive women did. But the German men set about the same bar for their partners no matter what they looked like themselves or how successful they were professionally

Google Notebook is all grown up!

After a long slog, our sexy new version of Google Notebook is out. There are still bugs and things missing, but I think this version is a lot more fun than the old one. To celebrate (and hunt for bugs - I found 3 scary ones Sunday morning (you really wouldn't believe the mind-blowing Javascript convolutions involved in this bad boy)), I made a notebook about the bars in New York with dancing (I snuck away from my computer last Saturday night to go to Double Happiness). It demonstrates my pet feature, which I've been wanting to do pretty much since Notebook launched: you can view it on a map. I think this would be especially hot for apartment hunting and such. It's also good for my New York to Try notebook. Anyway, enjoy the new Notebook. Tell your friends. I look forward to interacting with human beings, laundry machines, and restaurants on the weekend again. ;-)

Yay plays

I saw 2 plays in the past 5 days, which is a record for me, both very last minute, which is definitely my style. The first wasn't actually a play, but a bunch of one-acts, some featuring sraub's friend. My favorite part was a chorus of four girls who opened the show and reappeared during set changes. They sang a series of "lullabies" about a guy they dated who died named Jamal. They were pretty haunting and subtle. The rest of the plays had some good performances and clever premises, but except for one about two couples and one about a reading group, were a little overeager.

Anyway, tonight I saw Coast of Utopia when Ardan had an extra ticket. I'd been wanting to see it after sraub and Andrew recommended it, but I'm sure I'd never have gotten my act together on my own. It's about these Russian poets and philosophers in the 1830s, and it's a sometimes-earnest, sometimes-irreverent blend of love, philosophy, politics, and art. The acting was amazing - especially Billy Crudup who plays this sort of insane little guy (Ethan Hawke played a really unlovable character) - and the set blew my mind. So now we have to go back and see parts 2 and 3. Weirdly, the play is directed by Jack O'Brien, who directed basically everything in San Diego when I was a kid.

It's been a busy few weeks at work. I feel guilty enough about taking time out to go to these plays - I definitely shouldn't be blogging much. ;-) (Although, while I'm here, can we discuss how ridiculously slow it is to move money between bank accounts? It would be easier to get cash and ship it UPS. Some industries just don't quite seem to be in the digital age.)

Wine after Wine Index

(For those of you not in the know, Wine after Wine was my dubiously-conceived high-school/wine-party mashup. You can judge the results for yourself.)

Bottles of wine consumed: 18.25 (2 malbecs, 2 cabernets, 2 rieslings, 2 shirazes, 1 sangioevese, 1 moscato d'asti, 1 merlot, 1 pinot noir, 1 haute-medoc, 1 montepulciano, 3 random spanish/portugese reds, 1 random spanish white, part of a bottle of port)

Corkscrews mangled: 2
Corks mangled: 3
Corkscrews purchased mid-party: 1

Fraction of Kushal's party playlist deemed inappropriate for parties: 1/4
Cyndi Lauper songs on said playlist: 2

Ratio at which table salt should be substituted for kosher salt: .5
Approximate number of masa tots made with a substitution ratio of 1: 60
Number consumed: 20

Avocados consumed in guac form: 3



Discussions about whether Tom is grabbing Lisa's breast in their save-the-date manget: 3

High school yearbooks analyzed: 1

Viewings of Can't Hardly Wait: 1

Failed attempts by Larry to put his name tag on his wine: 3

New life goal

Pass the Wikipedia notability standards. This one should keep me busy for a while. ;-)

Oo, another musical

Making up for lost time, I went to see Company on Sunday (thanks for the invite, sraub!). The music wasn't as rockin' as Spring Awakening, but the book was really interesting, very incisively conveying all the ambivalence about marriage and adulthood that may or may not have led me to make terrible mistakes in my life decisions. ;-) Lots of funny, memorable characters, trippy set, and the whole thing where the singers are also the orchestra is pretty awesome. Great gem of irony from Wikipedia: "Shortly after opening night, Jones withdrew from the show, allegedly due to illness, but actually due to stress he was suffering from ongoing divorce proceedings."

Totally Fucked...

...is my favorite song from Spring Awakening, which I saw with Mollie after she agreed to see it for a second time. We got tickets on the stage, which seemed magically cheap at $31.25 (plus the usual usurious fees) until we got there and realized that it's hard to hear the vocals when the speakers are pointed away from you and you're next to the band and that faux schoolroom chairs are incredibly uncomfortable. But pretty much everything else about the performance was awesome - great songs, cast (including Miles Papazian from 24), lighting, and it was pretty surreal having the action happen all around you.

I always feel better when I take advantage of living in New York. ;-)

Overheard in Taboo

Craig: Shift-6 on a keyboard. Shift 6!
Crowd: Percent? Dollar?
Craig: You can eat it.
Michael: Hash?
Akshay: Colon?

In other news from the Google ski trip, I can almost kinda sorta turn now.

In which TV saves the day

I watched a lot of TV on the 6 hour (plus 1/2 an hour at JFK - can someone explain to me again why the planes can't just be scheduled to board at a time closer to their actual takeoff?) flight last night, and a lot of it was good. Besides the obvious Daily Show (although Bill Gates got to use all the same canned stuff he used on the Today show - is Jon Stewart that much of a shill?) and Colbert and My Super Sweet 16 and 24, there was also Engineering an Empire (which I can't link to directly because apparently the history channel doesn't understand this whole hyperlink/Internet thing). Engineering an Empire is history the way I'd like to learn it, with the occasional mention of wars and politicians as background to various feats of engineering. ;-) Dimitri Martin. Person. also rocked. Yay JetBlue!

Kicking the ITunes habit

After an awesome, awesome Essex Green (even better than I hoped, and when I bought a shirt, the band itself was manning the merch table) / Camera Obscura (surprisingly good) concert at the Warsaw (high-school-gym-ish, a little out of the way) last night, I was compelled to buy another EG album, and the "Underachievers Please Try Harder" album from Camera Obscura, which has the haunting track "Books Written For Girls" (well, it was haunting in concert, less hot on the album). As I was about to spend $20 at Itunes for DRM-ed music, I remembered Akshay's insistence that almost everything anyone could want was available on Emusic, so I investigated. Stupidly, Emusic.com shoves you into signing up without seeing what tracks are available, but some Googling helped verify that the CDs I wanted were available. So, I'm now paying less money for music that (gasp) can be copied and shared. I feel liberated. So take that, iTunes. I wonder if Apple will ever be less compulsive about restricting my rights? Maybe they'll be forced to legally? Certainly locking down the iPhone is a step in the wrong direction.

Tasty tapas

Dinner tonight at Boqueria was a reminder of how bad I am at predicting what will be best from a menu. The thing I expected to be deliciousest (because, in Spain, it was) - Pa Amb Tomaquet - was the most bland. And the most boring sounding - Patatas Bravas and Pimientos de Padron - were really tasty. Yay tapas, for letting me try lots of stuff. The desserts were uniformly awesome, and we had a good Priorat wine. For a tapas place in New York, it was reasonably priced and the wait wasn't bad.

Added to the good restaurant notebook.

Poll: What's your most-listened song in iTunes?

In honor of international iPhone day, what song has the highest play count in your iTunes? Mine is Don't Know Why by Essex Green with 116. This is surprisingly low given how much I play single songs on loop. Anyway, not coincidentally, I have an extra ticket to an Essex Green/Camera Obscura concert this month, but nobody wants to go. :-(

Problems. Solutions.

- When I got my hot new HK receiver and JBL speakers, I was all excited to play music off my laptop. But there was this annoying electric hum. Then, last night, it occurred to me that I could use the attenuator I got to use my Shure headphones on airplanes. Voila! Now I'm listening to all the new music I downloaded for running (Fergalicious, Love Generation, SexyBack, Right Here Right Now) with pounding bass and annoying my neighbors! I think I also need to work on lowering the input level at the receiver itself, but that involves more menu navigation than I have the energy for.

- On Friday, I went to Rosa Mexicano. They don't list anything vegetarian on the menu, and I was worried. But as soon as I said I was vegetarian, the waitress said they could make a vegetable enchilada. This was exactly what I wanted, but WHY DON'T THEY JUST LIST THIS ON THEIR MENU? This always happens with French restaurants. I don't get it. In any case, the atmosphere was awesome, but if I'm going to pay obscene amounts of money for enchiladas, I prefer Dos Caminos.

- Last weekend, I did two 6 mile runs in a row, and what felt like my shoes digging into my foot turned into incredible pain. I broke down and went to a podiatrist, who said it was just inflammation (I guess fractures cause the foot to swell up?). Anyway, some Aleve and ice made it go away, although to keep it away, he's suggesting I get ridiculously-expensive custom orthotics. I guess I'll just break down and do it.

- As long-time readers of this blog will know, I'm on an unending and unpleasant quest to find shirts and jackets that fit me. For some reason, small implies wide (and often also tall). I guess that's what happens when you compress two dimensions into one, and why our beloved capitalist system has failed to move beyond this is totally mystifying. Anyway, Catherine spotted XS sweaters at jcrew.com (not available in stores). Very exciting. They also have XS shirts. Akshay & co recently procured a XS fleece from Uniqlo for me (thanks!). And I was able to find a nearly-fitting sportcoat at Zara. Yay.

- Problem: I was almost done with Guitar Hero. Solution: Richard got me Guitar Hero 2 for Christmas! Problem: I keep playing Guitar Hero instead of going to bed. Solution: Caffeine.

- I couldn't go much longer without mentioning that Catherine and I broke up last month after 3 mostly-awesome years. I guess it would be more accurate to say that I broke up with her. I'm pretty sure that makes me an asshole, and possibly stupid. Haven't found a solution to this one yet.

(On a lighter note, Happy Birthday Brian!)