cool stuff for people

LA

2009-03-18T15:05:00.001-04:00

So we went to LA this past week, and boy am I happy to be not there.

Awesome Name!

2009-03-18T15:04:00.000-04:00

nothing like an awesomely appropriate last name to make one laugh while reading an AIDS article.

Read this

heh

iPhone thought

2008-12-19T17:05:00.002-05:00

I want to be able to use my iPhone as a touchpad to control a Mac.

I thought I'd seen something like this, but it may only be for jail-broken phones.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Here's something for the old school

holy crap

2008-12-18T16:58:00.000-05:00

what a story

Cool stuff for people

2008-12-12T01:12:00.001-05:00

This is a nice thing to have, and it's small.

network drives are all the rage - easy access to storage for all the computers in your place.

Port Hawkesbury

2008-05-28T14:17:00.003-04:00

Ok, so Port Hawkesbury. It's a small town to right once you cross over the causeway onto Cape Breton Island. It appears in no guidebook that I found, as it turns out, for good reason.

We drove up the hill leading to the town and I was starting to freak. It looked pretty much like I remembered, at least at first. There was our neighbourhood, Grant's Pond, on the left. The big pond that would freeze over in the winter, allowing for lots of hockey and ice skating. The bank on the corner. The high school/library/pool building right over there, a bright orange. The Lutheran church at the stoplight. Then I noticed other buildings gone or changed - the Vocational School building, the municipal building now looking like it should be in the Caribbean somewhere with it's pastel front, the Tim Horton's donuts that must have finally opened.

As I said, I was freaking. I wasn't totally sure why, but something was going on.

We drove down into my old neighbourhood, as I pointed out this place and that; my friends lived here and there, we used to knock on that guy's door and run away, there's the next door neighbour who never let us use their pool.

Wow. This was all a huge emotional rush.

We stopped in front of my old house, now blue rather than white. It took me a good few minutes before I could be convinced to get out of the car for a quick picture. There was no way I was going to go up to the door and knock. It was just too weird.

We drove around the town, just looking at different stuff. It really seemed to be such a depressing place. The main strip was just a bunch of parking lots and stores - it was particularly ugly.

Both of the elementary schools (k-4 and 5-6)were torn down to make way for other buildings. The mall was basically a huge Wal-Mart now, and what had to be hundreds of acres of forest had been cut down to build houses for god-knows-who. Especially with the trend of out-migration that the whole province has been experiencing for years. There just aren't jobs.

We had plans to stay at a B&B in town that night. However, after driving around and seeing what I saw, there was just no way that I could stay there. I had a set of memories that were good and I felt that I had no need or desire to make more. I had left when I was 13 and, as my brother remembers, I was thriving. I had lots of friends, forests to run around in, and no knowledge or concern about how damn strange my family was and how we didn't fit in at all.

Now, as an adult, the town was depressing, ugly and frankly, scary. I was scared to think about who I would have been had we stayed. My older brother had a terrible time in high school there - fights everyday after school and constantly being picked on for all kinds of things from reading too much, to being Jewish or vegetarian or whatever. He even took up (and became very good at) Judo in order to be able to protect himself. That's fucked up.

It seems I left at the perfect time, looking back. It was before cool mattered. Before testosterone and girls and clothes and all the things that change when you go from being a kid to being not a kid anymore. Ever since I left, I had always felt somewhere deep down that I would have been happier there, maybe. Now, I see that had I stayed just a bit longer, there still would have been drastic changes in my life, but not likely the kind that I've had that have made my life and experiences pretty awesome. I doubt I would have ended up in the Alberta oil-fields like many of my friends. It's unlikely I would have ended up working at the paper mill where many others are now working. I'm sure I would have gotten out at some point, but in the end, I'm glad to have gotten out when I did.

As J says, it's my old stomping ground, and I could see my footprints everywhere I looked. My feet are bigger these days, though, and trying to stomp around now would have only trampled all over what I had.

wow.

Pics from today

2008-05-25T23:29:00.001-04:00

Canso - day 2

2008-05-25T20:35:00.002-04:00

Ok, so lots happened and I need to figure out how to put all of this down.

After a nice breakfast, we walked up to try to figure out which house was the one I was born in. We figured out that it was one of two houses. After further determination, we decided that it was the one and started taking lots pictures of it and me in front of the house. After a few minutes, a woman came out of the house next door. She asked if we were related somehow so I said that my parents had lived there a while back. "Oh for goodness sake!" she said. Turns out she totally remembered my parents and that we were taking pictures of the wrong house - it was one next door.

She invited us in and got us in touch with one of the women my mom remembered from back then. We checked out the hospital that my dad helped open and was the first administrator for and got a quick tour of the old spots - their house again, the old hospital (a house, now a day-care center) and stopped in to see a few more old friends of my parents. It was really cool to hear how much they not only remembered my parents but all the good things they had to say about them. The first thing almost everyone we met said that I look just like my dad did then.

Good stuff about how he was a great administrator. Just cool.

It was funny to hear them also talk about how I was born at home. This was totally bizarre at the time and quite a big deal in town. No one could believe that my mom was actually choosing to have a baby at home.

We made a quick stop at the building where the main Trans-Atlantic cable hit North America. It's a cool old run-down brick building that was built in the 1800s sometime. When they first moved to the area, my parents lived in the apartment building originally built for the telecom workers.

After a couple hour drive, we crossed the Canso Causeway into Cape Breton and on to Port Hawkesbury.

More soon.

pics posted

2008-05-23T22:45:00.000-04:00

Halifax pt.3/Canso pt.1

2008-05-23T21:51:00.004-04:00

We got up early for breakfast at 9. We walk downstairs and into the dining room to be greeted by our dining partners - a pregnant priest and her husband, a priest. That's what they called themselves, by the way, though I thought that Anglican wo/men of the cloth called themselves ministers. Yeah, so they were these two Episcopalian priests, one with child. I don't believe her to be a virgin, but if the baby is Jesus, I'll have a sick story.
Turns out they were in town for the election of a new bishop for the region. We talked about the obvious connection of election-election and it was only slightly awkward until we were all sure that the other crew was in sync politically. Good thing we didn't have to kick some pregnant priest ass.
I'm happy to have had the opportunity to write that.

After breakfast, we got our stuff together and drove a few blocks to the Citadel to actually go inside. Turns out a lot of history has been commemorated there. It mostly has a lot to do with how stoked they are to have never revolted against the British.
They shoot a canon off at noon, and that was loud.
Walked around, ate pub food at an Irish pub, got in the car and on the road.
The whole time, it's raining on and off, by the way. We are prepared, however, and have yet to be daunted.
Got started and were immediately saved by the wonders of GPS. As we were getting on the highway to go over the bridge (remember the bridges? the two matching ones with the orange stripes? right?), I see terrible traffic ahead and cross two lanes to take the other tine. It was a true demonstration of my faith in a higher power - satellites.
The next few hours were spent flying along the highway at 110, which in kilometers is slower than a person might think. It was raining and blowing wind the whole way, so that was exciting. It's a lot of driving through farmland and past trees.
We got to Antigonish and tried to get in touch with old friends of the family but failed. Some planning could have helped.

We pushed on to Canso to get in before dark.
Ah, Canso. The place of my birth and first two years.
Canso is the smallest place ever. The population these days is about 900 and looks it.
We're staying in a lovely B&B right on the pier, about 100 feet away from where the fish processing plant is being demolished. Turns out, thanks to poor fishing policies, there isn't any more fish. Hm.
There was a great dinner ready for us, which we totally didn't expect and it was delicious. The owners of the place are this lovely english couple - she's a PhD in something and came out here as a life-changer five years ago. Not sure about him, but he's nice. After dinner - with wine! - we went for a walk around to see if we could find the my parent's house. Based on what they told me, I think we did, but we'll take pictures to be sure. Walked around more in the strong winds and rain coming off of the open Atlantic Ocean.
The only things open, of the five or so businesses in town were the Kwik-Mart and this other thing. Outside of the Kwik-Mart were a bunch of kids hanging out. Can't be much else to do on a Friday night in Canso. Either that or hang out in front of the high school. Which they then did, right across the street.
The other thing open looked like a cool old brick building on the outside, but is all these cubicles on the inside with what looked like telemarketers sitting in them. Maybe just way to create jobs for people now that the fish are all gone.
Walk, walk, walk then back home.
The internet works so I write, she reads.
All is good.

Halifax pt.2: last night

2008-05-23T21:09:00.003-04:00

Oh wow, what a day - but first, last night.

We walked to downtown, about 15 minutes away. Downtown is pretty small. It doesn't seem like it's as big as a city should be. Obviously, coming from NYC, I'm totally skewed. I was saying to my dad that when I was there last, it seemed like a really really big city.

Goes to show.

We saw tons of bars, but they were all spilling college kids out into the streets. We headed to one that we had read about, but it was a 5 buck cover charge, had bouncers and getting near the bar looked impossible. So we found a cool looking quiet place and had a few drinks. Turns out the place opened only a week earlier. It was totally nice, a nice enough guy kept talking to us and in the end we reserved tickets for a concert on Monday night when we'll be back in Halifax.

Back to the room, crashed. After we moved the creepy doll from the bed. Yep.

Halifax pt.1

2008-05-22T20:40:00.003-04:00

The flight was easy enough. Very short - only 1.5 hours from Boston. Coming in to Halifax was interesting. The land is freaking bare of houses, paved roads, etc. Wild.

So here we are, in Halifax.

It's relatively cold here, though lots of people were wearing shorts, tshirts and flipflops.

I guess it hasn't been so warm recently.

We found the B&B we're staying at and left the car. The room wasn't ready yet so we left it and walked to downtown.

It was only about a 15 minute walk down Spring Garden. It's a really college-y area so the shops reflected that - coffee, clothes, music, food, etc. Cool enough.

I didn't spend a lot of time here as a kid; just a few times a year to see the sights. I saw most of what I remembered - the public library with the statue of Winston Churchill that we used to play on; the waterfront with the sailing ships; the Citadel. We walked up and around the outside of the Citadel, but it was closed so we couldn't go inside. The Citadel is the huge fortress on the big hill in Halifax. Pretty cool and old.

I forced M to buy a practical fleece jacket that would actually keep her warm. Just don't mention to her that it's practical and also looks good. Thanks.

Now, back at the B&B with the creepy English guy who runs the place, we're getting ready to go out.

off to my roots

2008-05-21T22:04:00.002-04:00

We're traveling to Nova Scotia tomorrow - Thurs May 22 - for 5 days.

This will be the first time since I moved away that I will be back.

It's totally weird and kind of freaky. I can't imagine what it's going to be like to go back there and see all of that everything.

I plan on recording my every emotion and reaction in various mediums, so you'll be fully informed.

Now to finish packing and worrying about the trip.

garden part 3

2008-05-21T21:55:00.002-04:00

the garden is coming along amazingly.

i have about 80 sq feet of growing space that i'm pretty sure is not being used most efficiently, but it's a freaking good start.

there will be pictures here: click

and the one here.

on to the next post.

garden part 2

2008-04-16T21:20:00.004-04:00

still nothing.

I have to say that I am mildly disappointed, although I know that's crazy. I grew up with gardens, so the process isn't new, but still - I want peas now.

we had a couple large gardens for a while when I was growing up, in a small place in Nova Scotia called Evanston. I say small place, because I'm not sure what else to call it. The Trans-Canada Highway was the big road and Evanston was a bunch of houses, trailers, an elementary school and a small hospital. They all sat along a road that ran off of the Trans-Canada, straight off and down to the left. We lived up a driveway that started down at the bottom of that first turn, as the road headed back up the hill, right down in front of the elementary school.

The driveway went up to the house from the right side as you faced it, another driveway coming in from the school access road. The in a white one-floor-with-finished-basement house, house to the left, and the big gardens up behind it. There were a couple of greenhouses, usually staffed by birds with broken wings we tried valiantly to save. Also, the place where my grandfather would sit to eat his lobster when he came to visit my militantly vegetarian parents and their spawn, who would have loved to eat all the white flour, unnatural bagels they wanted.

Hm. Could I use this for that?
Thanks for listening.

ok, so here's something to write about - my garden

2008-04-15T20:19:00.002-04:00

I have officially started my garden, such as it is.

I planted sugar snap peas in a couple of window boxes and some lettuce in a few pots.

This is all in advance of my bigger plan to have a couple of raised beds to grow more.

I am also planning on tomatoes.

This is all extremely exciting for me - growing things is the best thing ever. It's really hard to believe that the seeds I just planted are going to actually grow. To be perfectly honest, I won't really believe until I see the little shoots.

wow man.

I'll post pictures when it's daytime.

Spring, Sprung, Sprang

2008-03-23T13:17:00.002-04:00

I ordered a thing to grow tomatoes in today. I'm psyched that we have this huge outdoors area and can't wait to grow so much stuff.

boo yah.

last night

2007-05-19T12:55:00.001-04:00

I had a great time last night at this artshare I went to. A bunch of people doing readings, mostly, of poems, plays, etc that they've written, all to great acclaim from us, the audience.

There's an old guy I see. He must know more than me. He must.
But I go to his house. To his house. And I show him what to do.
How can it be that I know more?
I charge by the hour, so I can't ask him what he knows.
I can't waste his time, his money.
I can't learn about his 80-some years, about his life, all that he knows.
I'm sad that our interaction is him paying me for my silly knowledge.
I imagine what he knows as I collect my cheque.
I imagine what I could learn and wish I didn't have to get paid for the time I spend with him.

An idea for Google Reader

2007-05-16T20:13:00.000-04:00

here's an idea for the google reader people - when in a post in google reader (or pattycakes as it's called internally, I believe) an option was recently introduced that allows you to email a particular post.
quite convenient.

here's what I want to be able to do - in my iGoogle preferences, let me choose my default im client. right beside that lovely email link I spoke of above, put a link that will open up a chat window, or maybe pop up my entire buddy list.
then I can send that link by im, and not slow slow email.

i'm just saying.

oh, and if you don't use google reader, it's an RSS application - that is, a continuously updated feed of information from pretty much any website you could want, all on one page.
useful stuff.

This is pretty far out

2007-05-14T22:21:00.001-04:00

check it

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

Philly and so on

2007-05-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

We're in Philly for the weekend for L's graduation from college.
It's really nice to be back here - it's definitely my top place where I would want to live, I'm pretty sure.
It just seems to have everything we could need, and for what it doesn't have, New York is just up the freakin' road.

Know what's good about my job? I get to tell people what they/I need/want and then they get it. No questions asked - or at least none that I can't answer in such a fashion as to dispel any doubts. Of course I don't get to walk away with it, but it's still cool to get this stuff, set it up and see it working well. How else would I get to set up all kinds of different routers, external drives, laptops, printers, etc etc etc.

jesus, what a geek!

here we are, and better than ever

2007-04-25T20:44:00.000-04:00

by which I don't mean anything. I'm actually home sick.
I think I am going to try to talk about my job more, maybe about some of the interesting shit or people I see, and maybe even see the intersection of those two things.

I'm an IT consultant - I go into mostly residences and some small businesses and deal with everything technology related. I set up networks, fix problems, help people buy computers - you know.

I have some stories to tell, some funny, some sad, some stupid.

Stay tuned.

jesus. i mean....what?

2007-02-12T21:49:00.001-05:00

it's just too absurd, right??

why does this need to happen?

yeah, yeah

2007-01-18T17:15:00.000-05:00

this sucks, he never writes anything, my beer is warm, my crotch itches, and he never writes anything anymore.

yeah well, such is life.
i couldn't write from France and Belgium because we didn't have good internet access.
and you know what, it's hard to find the time.

but anyway, all is well and life is decent.

it snowed today, the first real-ish snow of the season. i don't think it stuck around for more than a minute or two, but these days, who does??

it's a french, french world

2006-12-25T12:52:00.000-05:00

and all a body can do is pretend they speak it.

yep, a few well placed bonjours and a oui oui, oh non non, and you can get along.
good thing, too.

got in this morning really early and went to the hotel.
checked in, ended up switching rooms to one with a view of something besides a wall.
which is nice.

chilled for a little bit whilst the lady slept, then me, Lisa and R went out for a little petit dejeuner.
it was pretty much exactly what I wanted - coffee, croissants and jam. Just lovely.

Paris is cool so far, though I haven't really seen much. I love the architecture, the way the streets are laid out, and I'm excited to see more.
Going out for dinner soon, and then meeting up with Lisa (who was here for a semester last year). Her french skills are quite impressive, I must say.
In the am, it's off to Notre Dame (Go Irish!), St. Chapel and some other stuff.

Ok, Miriam, you can use the internet.

from brooklyn to paris

2006-12-24T17:37:00.000-05:00

that's what I'm saying.
we're going all out, leaving it all behind, not caring about who we hurt along the way.

sitting here in the President's Lounge at Newark Airport. Personally, I'm disappointed that the president isn't here, but I guess he's got lots of airports to cover. It's cool in here, with free drinks, free toilets, carpet everywhere, and obnoxious people wondering who the hell I killed in order to be let in.

I'm excited to get to Paris for a number of reasons - it's Paris, it's not New York, it's a vacation, croissants.
That's four reasons, and that's todays number.

Four.

There will be videos most days and I plan on rocking the blog from here 'till next week.

a great joke

2006-12-17T20:44:00.000-05:00

so this computer guy is walking down the street, he turns the corner and feels a drop on his head. He reaches up, figuring it to be a drop of water, and runs his hand through his hair.
Feeling something warm, he looks at his hand.
It is covered in bird shit.

Oh yeah, it's not a very funny joke. In fact, it sucks.
Almost as much as it sucked to have my head and hand covered in bird shit.

here's a pretty awesome interview.

2006-12-12T22:45:00.000-05:00

I love this guy!
He's great!
!

It's from Salon. Is this breaking their copyright? Hm.
I guess that if you see this ,Salon, and you want me to take it down, I will.
I love you, and I don't want you think that I'm trying to hurt you.
Now go to sleep.
Shh.

Former Air Force officer Mikey Weinstein says evangelicals are trying to turn his beloved military into a "frickin' faith-based initiative."

By Alex Koppelman

Dec. 13, 2006 | When a Christian group shot a video inside the Pentagon that featured uniformed senior military officers talking about their evangelical faith, Mikey Weinstein went on the attack. Himself a former Air Force lawyer and Air Force Academy grad, Weinstein, who is Jewish, is the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He founded the MRFF earlier this year to oppose the spread of religious intimidation in a military increasingly dominated by evangelical Christians.

On Monday, Weinstein held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce that he was asking the Department of Defense's inspector general to look into the video, and determine whether the people who appeared in it -- Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack J. Catton Jr.; Army Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, the former public affairs director of the Army; and Undersecretary of the Army Pete Geren -- had violated military regulations. He also filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the government to find out who, if anyone, had approved the video shoot.

Bob Varney, the executive director of Christian Embassy, the group that made the video, tells Salon he believes no regulations were violated, and he says Weinstein's allegations about increased evangelical influence within the military are wrong.

"I don't understand how one could come to that kind of conclusion," Varney says. "The military believes in religious freedom, it offers religious freedom, it therefore offers people of different religions to express them, and we're one among a number of different religions that are working in the Armed Services."

Weinstein spoke with Salon Tuesday afternoon.

The Christian Embassy is now saying it had permission to film this inside the Pentagon. Were you surprised to hear that?

Not at all. They're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't. If they said they didn't have permission, they would have been blown away. Having permission, to me, just shows the complicity. We have a systemic problem. You sound like you're too young to remember Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor," but the premise of that movie was that there was a CIA within the CIA. We have a virulently dominionist, fundamentalist evangelical Christian element within the Pentagon. They would prefer this to be the "Pentecostalgon," not the Pentagon. That's what they would prefer. They're trying to turn the Pentagon into a frickin' faith-based initiative, and that is not what our military is about.

These are the people who, when I talk to senior members of the military at the flag-level rank -- I don't know if you're familiar with what that means, that means admiral or general -- that have looked at me and said, "Come on, Mikey, what's your problem? We have the cure to cancer. If you had the cure to cancer, wouldn't you want to spread the word?" They don't realize when they say it, they don't have the mental wherewithal to understand that to a person who isn't an evangelical Christian, you're calling our faith a cancer.

What's wrong with this video?

I'm trying to think where to start. It is absolutely violative of a mountain of Department of Defense internal regulations, guidelines, core values, instructions, making it very clear that members of the military can not endorse any one particular political position, partisan religious view, they can't hold up a tube of toothpaste like Colgate and push it. Irrespective of that, it's also blatantly violative of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and at least as important it's violative of Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution -- you don't even have to get into the Bill of Rights -- which states that we will never have a religion test for any position in the federal government, which was brilliantly prescient of our Founding Fathers.

This, to me, constitutes as much of a national security threat to this country as al-Qaida. In fact, the video itself, to me, would be the No. 1 recruiting tool that I would expect bin Laden, the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, although he's dead, Ayman al Zawahiri, Hezbollah with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, to get angry young Islamic men and women in Iran, Syria and Lebanon to join the insurrection and jihadi terrorist activities. This would be a perfect accelerant to create even further conflagration.

Now, I was a JAG [judge advocate general, the lawyers who act as prosecutors and defense attorneys within the military] in the Air Force. I spent three and a half years as a lawyer for President Ronald Reagan in the West Wing, I've been Ross Perot's general counsel. I know the religious right would love to vilify me as a tree-hugging Northern California Sierra Club membership chardonnay-sipping liberal -- not that there'd be anything wrong with that, to wax Seinfeldian -- but I'm not. I'm a Republican. And my family has a very, very long and distinguished military history. We have three consecutive generations of military academy graduates, and my youngest son, who's at the Air Force Academy now, he's a senior, what's called a first classman, is the sixth member of my family to attend the academy. We have 115 years of combined active-duty military service to this country in my immediate family from every combat engagement from World War I to the current one, and this is a pernicious torturing of what our military is supposed to be about.

Of course, I realize people have religious rights. We only have about 2,200 chaplains in each of the military branches; every base has multiple chapels, and these people can pray all they want to themselves, like kids in school can pray to themselves, but when you're in the military, and you're coming in like that one person, Catton, whom I knew when I was a kid at the [Air Force] Academy, and he goes, "I share my faith, that's who I am, and let me tell you right now, the hierarchy as an old-fashioned American is that your first duty is to the Lord, second to your family and your third is to your country." That is the exact opposite of what is taught, and for anyone who understands anything about the military, it is always the country first. When you're told, "Troopers, we're going to go take that hill," you can't stop, fall to your knees and see what your particular version of Moses, Vishnu, Satan, Jesus, Mohammed, Allah, whatever they're going to say, and then quickly make a cellphone call to your family. So it is beyond-the-pale egregious, it is a national security threat every bit as bad as al-Qaida, and these people should be court-martialed.

Forty percent of active-duty military personnel consider themselves evangelical Christians. Is your position popular in the military?

We have 702 U.S. military installations scattered in 132 countries around the world, and I get calls 24/7 from the soldiers, Marines and airmen. Unlike cops, they don't have a union, they have my foundation, that's it. They're being tormented. And 96 percent of those who come flooding in, on fire with torment, are Christians, three-fourths of whom would be traditional Protestants: Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians. The other one-fourth are Roman Catholics. These are Christians being preyed upon by evangelical Christians -- pray and prey -- and being told that you're not Christian enough, therefore you're going to burn in a hell of fire.

Many [evangelical Christians] tell me, "Mikey, OK, Anne Frank, Dr. Seuss, Jack Benny, Gandhi, they're all burning eternally in the fires of hell." And here's the distinction they just don't fucking get, these cocksuckers do not get this: I would give my last drop of blood and my last breath, and I would commend my three children in the Air Force -- one of whom's going to be heading to Iraq in a few months -- to give their last drop of blood and their last breath to support the rights of these people to believe that Anne Frank is burning eternally in hell … If they want to believe that their version of Jesus has her burning eternally in hell, I'd give my life for that. But I will not do that if my government tells me who are the children of the greater God and who are the children of the lesser God or no God at all. And that's what these monsters are doing.

Is there pressure on the non-evangelicals in the military to convert or keep quiet because some of their superiors have these views and are talking about these views?

Oh, absolutely. Like I said, in the military, many of your constitutional rights are gone, because it's necessary. Look, let's make sure your readers understand something, OK, put it in perspective: The U.S. military, which I consider a noble and honorable institution, is technologically the most lethal organization ever created by Homo sapiens. When you have the leadership believing that to be a good soldier, good Marine, good airman or sailor you have to be not just a Christian but the right type of Christian, we're no better than al-Qaida. And it's hideous, beyond belief. My kids were called "fucking Jews" and accused of total complicity, they and their people, in the execution of Jesus Christ, by superiors up and down the chain of command at the Air Force Academy.

But like I've said before, most of the people who've come to me are Christians. That's been the big sea change here. Look, Sinclair Lewis said it best, in [the 1930s]. He came back from Germany, he was observing it for a number of months ... and he [said] that he had now seen fascism up close and personal, and he knew that when it came to America it would be wrapped in the American flag, carrying a cross. And you know what? He's right.

It's one thing to be pushing evangelical Christianity on prisoners in a penitentiary and to be pushing intelligent design in public schools. That's bad enough, but that's not our fight. My foundation focuses, with laserlike precision, on the Marine Corps, Army, Navy and Air Force, because if we lose them, we lose everything.

Your youngest son is at the Air Force Academy, which has been the focus of a lot of the allegations about evangelical proselytizing. With you being so out-front on this, has he been the target of any reprisals?

No. I think that they realize if they touch a hair on his head, I will open up the skies and bring down a hammer and tongs like they've never seen before. There have been some snide remarks, but in the main it's steady cruising.

Now, my older son and his wife have had a few things. They're both first lieutenants. In the military, you wear a name tag, and their name is Weinstein. My daughter-in-law has had senior officers walk up to her and say, "I know who you are, and I know what you're family is all about." She's a junior officer, so she just looks at them. In the main, it's been fairly calm, because they're not that stupid to think that my kids wouldn't make a phone call, and then I'm going to do what I have to do.

But I can tell you that I get -- I don't think I'm in double digits, but it started at about 10 o'clock last night; after the press conference in the morning, I've had nine death threats since about 10 o'clock last night. I usually get about two or three a week. They're very grotesque, everything from wanting to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel to threatening to blow me up, threatening my house will be blown up, raping my wife, blowing up my house. We've had our tires slashed, we've had feces and beer bottles thrown at the house, we've had dead animals placed on the front door of the house.

I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "Fuck you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff.

So if this is a nice, Christian response, my response is take a number, pack a picnic lunch and stand in line, because we're not going to stop, we're not going to ever stop, we're going to lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds on these people that are trying to destroy our Constitution. This is not a Christian-Jewish issue, and it's also not a political spectrum, left or right issue, it's a Constitutional right and wrong issue. These officers, and what's happening in that video, simply by appearing in a video that is blatantly and vociferously sectarian, by simply doing three things in that video, they should be court-martialed. That would be circulating blood, reflecting light and breathing. That's all they had to do and that alone would have been enough. You're not Jewish, are you?

I am, actually.

You understand the word "dayenu"? Well, it's dayenu -- the dayenu factor is simply by letting the light reflect off you, circulating blood and breathing in that video. Everything else beyond that is extra. Dayenu's my favorite song at Passover, that's why I use it.

My response is I've given the new secretary of defense 20 days to answer the Freedom of Information Act request, which the law gives him, and at the end we intend to get as much information as we can, fashion it into a dagger and then stab at the heart of this unconstitutional, wretched, vile, darkness at the Pentagon. This unconstitutional darkness, we will stab at it with our dagger until we kill it.

-- By Alex Koppelman
Salon Media Group, Inc
101 Spear Street, Suite 203
San Francisco, CA 94105
Telephone 415 645-9200
Fax 415 645-9204

and the whole thing smelled like smoke..

2006-12-02T18:30:00.000-05:00

we were on our way to philly on the train, when all of a sudden, the train jolted to a stop. the lights went out, the ac went off and the smell of smoke filled the air.
shit, i thought. this can't be good.
turns out we hit something, though they never told us what.
thinking quickly, i ran to the food car to get some supplies. who knew how long it would be?
i picked up a couple of beers and some m&ms. perfect.
on the way back to our seats, they announced that we hit something and they have to make sure that the train is ok. "we will be stopped indefinitely."
i got back to the seats and told j to rush back to the food cart and get more alcohol.
this could turn into a huge party, and i didn't want to be under-supplied.
she came back with a couple more bottles of beer, some whiskey and some pretzels.
along with the ipod video, we were set for hours.
between beer one and two, the train started again...i'll admit i was somewhat disappointed.
we chugged the beer and whiskey, finishing as we pulled into 30th street station, about two hours late.
that'll teach you.

So here's a freakin' cool story

2006-11-26T17:43:00.000-05:00

My dad was in synagogue this past shabbat, and there was a new person, obviously a visitor. As my dad does, he went over to the guy and introduced himself, welcome to providence - I'm Mark R.
Answers the guy, I'm Tsvi R.
(Assume that R. is the same name)
So where are you from, Tsvi-with-the-same-last-name?
Mexico City, he answers.

Hm, dad says - I have relatives there!

After some discussion and looking at our family tree (that cousin sarah awesomely did a while back), it turns out that my father and Tsvi share a great-great grandfather.
A while back my dad had visited some of the family down there, and my aunt has also.

this branch lives in Boston now, though there are still lots in Mexico still.
They even compared their thumbs - the R. thumb, as it turns out, and my dad and he both have it.

wild.

?

2006-11-21T20:16:00.000-05:00

what do you mean, where am I? obviously i'm sitting in the bathrom of an office building, typing away. so far today, i've been to a famous theatre person's house. that's a neat thing about this job, is all the interesting people I meet. good stuff.
also, yesterday I was on the subway and hs guys shpiel was that he has no bowel control, and therefore needs money. huh. was I a hostage to stinkypants?
nope. I got off at the next stop.

2006-11-21T09:15:00.000-05:00

this is the first post from on the road -in this case, the road is my office, where i am testing this keyboard.

starting a new job, and jobbing a new start

2006-11-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

i said that just because i wanted to, but i couldn't think of anything clever that would work both ways.

so i started a new job as a Technical Consultant. I go to houses, apartments and small businesses all over the world (theoretically, at least) and fix computers. it's cool in some ways, not so cool in others.
feel free to ask me about that.

otherwise, all is good - the wife is working literally full-time; like 24 hours full-time, and the apartment is great.

is that it?

it's sunday and it's dark

2006-10-29T17:41:00.000-05:00

what a day, today.
just relaxed the entire day, sat around and relaxed.
that's all we did.
ordered in food, sat around, read, webbed, chilled.
an entirely comfortable day, it is so far.
m is napping, i'm watching pirates of the caribbean, part two.
we're planning on going out to dinner in a bit, so i hope that works out.

we had a great time last night, and by we, i mean the royal we.
went out to a bunch of parties, did a bunch of stuff and had a good time till pretty late.
it was good to have hair, if just for an evening.

livin large

2006-10-27T18:26:00.000-04:00

yep.
just sitting around hanging out. baking bread. sweeping. mopping. washing dishes. organizing. doing laundry. straightening up. doing stuff.
hanging out. that's what I've been doing for a while, and it's all going to come to an end now.
there's a job i'm most likely taking, and for sure it's a good job. it's just been a long time since i worked. long for me at least - definitely the longest break since i ever started working full time, about eight (8) years ago.
the parentheses are there in case the word isn't clear enough, and you mistake eight (8) for a different number and end up going some other number of miles rather than eight (8) miles and run right off a cliff because that other number is what you entered in to your GPS thing.
huh. pretty crappy to blame it on the GPS thing, if you ask me. It's pretty common among some people, i'm sure, to blame their own personal failings on the technology that is around them and that they use every day, because they're just dumb.
or don't know english, in which case i'm being terribly mean.
so anyway, like i was saying, i will happy to be back at work, but not looking forward to working.

my cousin marv was visiting

2006-10-26T19:38:00.000-04:00

she drives me crazy sometimes.

2006-10-26T19:31:00.000-04:00

moving forward

2006-10-16T21:47:00.000-04:00

just to let you know what's up:

We're settled in, more or less.
We have a sofa coming on Thursday. Sofa's are much more expensive than you would think. Unless you already know what they cost.
The lawyer started her job, and that's wild. I don't want to go into it, but it's going to take some time to get used to that. Even once I start working. I'm just more used to coming home to her; now it's the other way around.

I'm looking for jobs (i do computer fixing, macs and windows, if you hear of something or need some work done), meeting with random people, headhunters, hr people and the like. I put on my sharp-looking suit and tie and march off. Feels weird walking around the neighbourhood, I have to say.

Our place looks cool, also. It's really big, the outdoors space (terrace), the full kitchen, raccoon, doorbell, and closet space are all good. Please visit.

I guess I'm getting used to living back in NY, but I don't like not riding my bike as much, and I think it's too crowded everywhere.
And those damn handholding things on the bus? I walked into one today and have a massive bump on my forehead. Hurts, too.

Annnnnndddd we're back.

2006-09-25T00:01:00.000-04:00

And in so many ways, are we back.
We're back in NY from Philly.
Back in NY from the honeymoon.
Back in...well, ok, I thought that was going somewhere, but it isn't.

We got back from Hawaii last Friday, but honestly, I just haven't had the energy to talk to you people. The last week was spent setting up our kickass apartment, dealing with all the wedding gifts we got, decompressing from the last many months and so on.

Let me just say some things about Kauai before I get into the present.
I know I've said it before, but it truly is the most beautiful place ever. This is coming from a guy who has been literally everywhere there is to go, so trust me.
The people are extremely chill. At least the people we met, which only included white folk - haoles, as they call them. Some are "local haoles" - born in Hawaii, but white, but mostly haoles - whites who moved there at some point. But they like to think they are locals. Imperialism at it's best, according to most Miriams.
It seems like most people drive around in pickup trucks, and everyone hauls around a surf board with them.
Oh yeah - we went to Poipou, this town on the south shore and went boogie boarding. Huge freaking waves, for real. It was pretty scary at times, but definitely awesome. The whole timing thing is very interesting - unless you get up on the wave at just the right second, you miss it. When you catch it, though, then it's an awesome ride. Getting caught up in a wave and getting sucked under and slammed isn't fun. Frightening to feel totally out of control, trying to hold limbs close to my body, thinking about hitting rocks and turtles (seriously - they get swept up in the big waves and you can see them as the wave crests.) Anyway, I totally could see living a life of surfing as much as possible. Good stuff.

boy is it nice here

2006-09-12T04:53:00.000-04:00

seriously.

not that these pics enable you to see anything, but please be assured that we are having the best time in the most beautiful place on earth.

Some Enchanted Evening

2006-09-12T04:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was our groundhog day.

We left Kyoto through the shrine gates and landed on an Island that's closer to Paradise than anything we've ever seen. And it was earlier than it was when we had left! So we had two Sundays. To the rest of the world, one day had passed. But to us (and everyone on our flight), 2 days had passed. Thus, we embodied the twin paradox and discovered Einstein was right. It first occurred to us that maybe we could live in this Sunday limbo forever, going back and forth across the dateline. And we considered how much we would pay to pause time eternally. But then we realized that it would all be ruined once we crossed the dateline backwards - we would be going forward in time. One twin only looks younger to the twin who stays.

But it was our groundhog day in more ways than one. Yesterday in Kyoto we saw rock gardens and lotus blossoms. We took off our shoes to enter temples. Yesterday in Kauai we saw a rock garden at the airport. A sign in a coffee shop in Kapa'a bore the Kanji letter for "peace." Our B&B required us to remove our shoes upon entering. We passed a restaurant called the "Blossoming Lotus" (which we ate at tonight--Monday, really, but Tuesday for us. . . not bad, although slightly too filling).

We had our second chance. Did we blow it?

The looking glass:

Us on our way through the looking glass:

Yesterday was our groundhog day.

We left Kyoto through the shrine gates and landed on an Island that's closer to Paradise than anything we've ever seen. And it was earlier than when we had left! So we had two Sundays. To the rest of the world, one day had passed. But to us (and everyone on our flight), 2 days had passed. Thus, we embodied the twin paradox and discovered Einstein was right. It first occurred to us that maybe we could live in this Sunday limbo forever, going back and forth across the dateline. And we considered how much we would pay to pause time eternally. But then we realized that it would all be ruined once we crossed the dateline backwards - we would be going forward in time. One twin only looks younger to the twin who stays.

But it was our groundhog day in more ways than one. Yesterday in Kyoto we saw rock gardens and lotus blossoms. We took off our shoes to enter temples. Yesterday in Kauai we saw a rock garden at the airport. A sign in a coffee shop in Kapa'a bore the Kanji letter for "peace." Our B&B required us to remove our shoes upon entering. We passed a restaurant called the "Blossoming Lotus" (which we ate at tonight--Monday, really, but Tuesday for us. . . not bad, although slightly too filling).

We had our second chance. Did we blow it?

On an island, somewhere off of Osaka

2006-09-10T20:51:00.000-04:00

This morning, we woke up early, packed the last few things and went down for a breakfast set. We were going to be picked up by a tour guide for a 5 hour tour of some stuff in Kyoto. Thanks Danny and Natasha!

Us and The Nakamura:

Mr.Nakamura picked us up in a very posh car, wearing white gloves and a unifrom cap, all very fancy-like. He was extremely nice, and great guide. We went to a bunch of places that we had wanted to see, and were very glad we did so. The large zen rock garden was especially great. Really really great. After each stop. he would give us a frozen wet cloth to cool off with, and ice cold water. Along the way he would also draw us different diagrams of things, and was full of awesome information that we never would have known otherwise. We finally got to see some really incredible gardens, even nicer than ones we had seen before. It was really a great gift.
The last place we saw, and it was in a hurry so we could make our train, was a place called Fushimi-Inari Something Temple . It was full of thousands of orange gates, all in a row together that had paths between them. It was very reminiscent of the Christo gates in Central Park last year. The Japanese clearly aren't very original, and must have stolen the idea from him. It was strange that they didn't give him any credit.

One of many pics that The Nakamura insisted on taking of us:

Then it was off to Kyoto Station and on the train. And here we are.
Miriam is doing the crossword puzzle, while I tap away.

Sayonara, Japan and Aloha, Hawaii!

My gezaimas are killing me!

2006-09-10T04:38:00.000-04:00

This will be the last post from Japan, though it will likely end up on the 'net when we get to Hawaii, sometime last week. EDIT: we have free wireless at the airport. yay.

Yesterday we had a really great day. We took a short train on a short train ride to Kurama, a very small village in the mountains outside of Kyoto, where there are some very beautiful, you guessed it, shrines and temples. I'm almost craving Disney World, in a Taco Bell kind of way.

Small town:

We got off the train, with little idea of where exactly to go, and not a bit of english in sight. We had the Lonely Planet guide, which had a vague map, and that helped somewhat. We made our way to the gate of the shrine, which is also near the bottom of the mountain. Upon paying, we got an even more vague cartoonish map. To my not-very-surprise, it was better than the Lonely Planet guides map.

Shriners palace:

We hiked up the top the mountain, seeing various small shrines along the way. It was extremely hot and sweaty, and we drank a lot of water to counter the heat. Good on us. Close to the top of the mountain, after about 45 minutes or so, we got to the main temple building, or honden. The view was incredible.
The view, being incredible:
Getting back to roots:

Rain was coming down periodically, and it was very cool. You know how in Japanese art, the rain is depicted as lines, as opposed to drops? It's because that's how it really looks. You can actually see the lines of the rain coming down, and it is pretty neat looking.

A common thing to do is to hike over the top of the mountain and go down the other side, and end up in another town call Kibune, so that's what we did. It was a really nice hike. It was weird to see many many people walking the trail wearing short skirts, open-back sandals, tight jeans, warm clothing, etc. Maybe they didn't know it would be insanely hot. Um.

When you come off the trail in Kibune, there is a very narrow road lined with ryokan and restaurants, with a river running alongside. In the summer, a lot of the places build platforms spanning the river (only about 20 feet wide at most) and customers can happily eat nourishing eating food there. We tried to find some places that weren't all just fish, but you know how that goes.

Restaurants:

We ended up walking about 30 minutes back down the road to the train station, and caught a train right away back to Kyoto. A late lunch at some pizza place, and then back to the hotel for naps and laundry-doing, both sorely needed.

When we woke up, we spent some time packing to leave, and then took a final bike ride along what is known as the Path of the Philosopher (soon to be a major motion picture starring the Gowanus Canal, I'm sure.) It is a very beautiful path that winds it's way along a small canal in the southeastern part of Kyoto. The path runs through a very nice neighbourhood full of large houses with high garden walls that are sure to hide immaculate gardens. We scaled one wall and were immediately set upon by attack dogs, clearly put there to keep away intruders like us. We barely managed to escape with only minor bites and scrapes.
That didn't happen.
The ride was very nice, and the path was lovely. It was a great way to round out our solo Kyoto experience. We went back home, finished packing, wrote many postcards and hit the futon.

Me being sweaty:

Sorry Ansel:

Imperial, shmimperial, I'm the freakin' Shogun!

2006-09-09T08:30:00.000-04:00

And away we went, riding our trusty (or is that rusty?) steeds towards the palace to rescue the Princess Fiona. But first we stopped alongside the lovely river that runs through Kyoto to call Mikey for his 24th birthday. Whoohooo!
The river:

On the phone with Mikey:

and another pic by the river that's just cool. click on it for a full size, if you didn't know that...

We rode on, hoping to be able to get "permission" to go on a free tour of the Imperial Palace Grounds. You have to apply, which means filling out a form. We had tried online, but it said it was completely full. Figuring we had a chance anyway, we went to the Imperial Household Agency and gave it our best shot. After much cajoling, bribery, and finally just filling out the form, we were given permission for the 2 o'clock tour. This gave us enough time to go to the tofuya, or tofu shop that the owner of the restaurant had told us to stop into.
Sweet.
Or neutral, as tofu tends to be. We rode over there, and found it pretty easily, not something that seems to happen a lot, especially when using the Lonely Planet guide. Have I mentioned that their maps are really bad? And that the addresses they give tend not to be right? Well, it deserves mentioning again.
We managed to make ourselves understood to the tofu makers, and they were pretty impressed with the fact that I was willing to part with Miriam for so few soybeans. After a few more tries, they understood that I was actually telling them that my father used to make tofu and had learned from a book. This impressed them even more.
Here's a vat of fresh tofu:

Mmmmm...so creamy and delicious. This is my creamy and delicious face.

After this nutritious breakfast (the original breakfast of champions - ask any yokozuna), we figured we had enough time to ride out to the Kinkakuji Temple, or Golden Pavilion. We didn't and figured that out about 20 really hot minutes into the ride. You may not know this, but it is really really really hot here in Kyoto, with basically 100% humidity. This means that it's very hot, and it rains for minutes at a time - sometimes very hard, sometimes just sprinkle, but all day, on and off. Very different. The moisture in the air is very much so.

So we rode back to the Imperial Palace, parked the bikes and took a cab to the Golden Pavilion. It's a famous place, not only for being gold (plated - cheap bastards), but because in 1950 it was burned to the ground by a young apprentice monk, for reasons that are unclear. He may have been overcome with some emotion. Or he tossed a cigarette butt in the wrong place. Which is why the warnings on cigarette packs here speak about how they are hazardous to your temple. They rebuilt the temple, and you would never know that just 50-some years ago, the place was an insurance-monks dream.
Here's the temple - it reflects too:

I forgot to say this earlier, but we had a plan to meet up with a friend of a college friend of Miriams, a tour guide named Michiko. She was coming with us to the Imperial Palace, and on to Nijo Palace afterwards.
We left the Golden Pavilion, and realized we had plum run out of cash. I say "plum", because the Japanese use plum paste in various ways, mostly pickled. They call it umeboshi. We had some travelers cheques and managed to find a bank to cash them. They took their time approving us, and we just made it to the Imperial Palace on time.
We met up with Michiko and joined the tour, which was pretty neat.
Here's us with Michiko:
And here's Miriam - I'm a big fan.

The palace is full of very cool buildings, none of which we could go in, but we heard about how they look on the inside. I'm sure you can just picture it.

In fact, picture this:
And this:
And here's a garden from inside:
And here we are, keeping cool:

Overall one of the best palaces I've been to.

After the Imperial Palace, we headed over to the Nijo Palace with Michiko, where she gave us a great tour of the place. By the way, the Japanese should really watch more Disney movies before they start calling these places "palaces". I mean, come on.
They did have these very cool floors called "nightingales" that were designed to make little chirping sounds as you walked on them so that the Shogun would be warned when someone was coming.
Here's what they look like from the bottom:

The shogun, by the way, was the military leader of Japan, under the Emperor. At some point, he took total control and made the emperor the titular head. The Meiji Restoration changed all that.

Here's a nice garden from the Nijo Palace, and another building from in the palace:

After the Nijo Palace, we went back to our hotel and passed out for a while. We wanted to go check out this hour-long performance of different Japanese artforms, such as flower arranging, Geisha-dancing, comedy, and English-translating. The show turned out to be pretty weak, but we both convinced ourselves it was "worth seeing." After the show, we took part in a tea ceremony, which was actually pretty cool. I can't imagine having to go through that every time I wanted tea, however. I think the Japanese don't want to either, which is why it's now just a ceremony.

A little dinner, a few drinks and off to bed.

So that was that. Another nice day in Japanland.

Oh yeah, this was a shrine we passed in the street. There were statues of pigs all over the place.

Here's some random videos

2006-09-08T20:43:00.000-04:00

A Pachinko Parlor. They sit and watch balls fall around, while going deaf and insane. And pay lots of money in order to do so.

This here is some of the Tsujiki Fish Market insanity.
They drive these carts around and try to not kill each other

Here's a short clip of a guy we happened to see gonging the gong at the Nikko shrine. It was interesting because he would gong it, then move one little counter over to keep track of how many gongs he had gonged, then look at his watch to count how long the gong had gonged.

The Harajuku girls. They are very...interesting.

Commodore Perry very merry

2006-09-07T19:40:00.000-04:00

Kyoto is beautiful. Pretty, picturesque, and calm. Yesterday we rode our bikes (yes, we have bikes here too! The hotel where we are staying, which, incidentally, has a pay TV in the room, gave them to us for free!) down this willow tree lined narrow street that is cut in half by a river and there is no railing from the street to the river. At night you can barely see where street ends and water begins. In America, this would be grounds for a thousand lawsuits.
The view from our window:

We were searching for this vegetarian restaurant, but unfortunately, I was looking at the wrong "fork" icon on our Lonely Planet map, and led us in the wrong direction. Fortunately, this led us to stumble on a tofu restaurant where we ate cold tofu, hot tofu, tofu skimmings, and tofu skewers. Zack was in heaven. I thought it was pretty good, too. As we left, Zack told the owner of the restaurant--who spoke pretty good English -- about how his dad used to make tofu in the '70's in Canada, and the owner freaked out and told us we must, must, must go visit the little shop where he buys his tofu. He gave us his card, and told us to be sure to tell the shopkeeper about Zack's dad. We plan to do this today.
Here's the wonderful tofu meal:

But first - the Imperial Palace. My father was right and we should have planned this trip earlier and got tickets online for the Imperial Palace and made a million phone calls to confirm it and not relaxed until after we had seen it. But alas, we did not. So we are going to head over there now and beg to be let in. Apparently, they only let you in with appointment. This is better than the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, which doesn't let you in at all. The guidebook doesn't seem to think it will be a problem to get tickets for the same day. We'll see.

Last night we walked through the Floating World, where we looked into the windows of wooden houses and saw women entertaining men. Are those geishas? We wondered. They looked like regular people, no face paint, nothing. But then we found out the answer when we saw a cab carrying two women with faces painted white, one of them adjusting her hair, the other on her cell phone. Geishas! Then we saw another geisha walking down the street and into the subway. They exist.

We stopped into an Irish pub, where the bartender was this guy from Liverpool who had moved here 25 years ago and spoke a pretty good Japanese. We were impressed to see this white guy chat it up with the locals. I asked him, "What's the deal with the geishas?" The deal, it turns out, is that there are two kinds - maikas and geishas - both have white faces. A maika aspires to have a man--usually married--sponsor her so that she can open her own geisha bar, and in return she must give the man "special favors." This is how the maika becomes a geisha. Maikas who are not yet geishas are simply entertainers--versed in art, poetry, music, and it is perfectly acceptable to marry a maika because they are not sexually obligated to their customers. But if some young salaryman does take a liking to a maika, she will of course have to leave the geisha world to marry the guy.

I also read about some lawsuit against the geisha world, and I'd be interested in reading more about that.

Now, off to the Imperial Palace.

now with video!!

2006-09-07T02:13:00.000-04:00

yep, we figured out how to add some video.
so, keep an eye out for the google video thing, like the one of the sushi chefs.
We won't put them throughout, and make you re-read everything, though you should anyway, because the deepest insights only come after many re-re-readings.
R-e-a-d-i-n-g, find out what it means to me.

Hit the play button, and join us on a journey through time and space.
Or just some short, spastic clips of Tokyo.

Last train from Tokyo

2006-09-07T01:42:00.000-04:00

We're on the Shinkansen now, the bullet train, on our way from Tokyo to Kyoto (same letters...coincidence? I don't think so.) It moves pretty fast.

We are definitely ready to leave Tokyo. It is a really busy place, with way too many shops and lights, and lots of people. Lots and lots of everything, really. We both had the thought that out of all the places we've been, some of us more places than others, Tokyo is one place that we wouldn't want to live.
I just don't feel like I would like it very much.

The place we stayed was really nice, in a cool little neighbourhood, and that was a good thing. I'm sure we could have stayed places that were in much more hectic areas.

I have to say that I'm pretty ready for some good ol' American food - whatever the hell that is. Seeing as how I don't eat fish (though Miriam does) or meat, there's not a heck of a lot to eat. Yes, yes, there is tofu in all it's glorious forms, but most places for the most part are fish and meat. Even this morning at Tokyo Station while waiting for the train, I wanted to get some pizza, and it all had meat.

So - what did we do yesterday...hm.
We woke up earlyish, as we've been doing, me a bit earlier than Miriam, and rode our bikes (big up to Miriam, because I didn't want to rent them but she pushed for it-best idea ever) to the Imperial Palace, hoping to ride through them. It was drizzling on and off, but it really didn't bother us at all. We finally found the palace and discovered that riding bikes in the gardens is not allowed, so we parked them and walked in. Again, after a pretty short time, I felt done there - it just didn't impress me in the ways that I had hoped. It seems that every thing we saw had been destroyed...if that makes any sense.

Here's a pic Miriam taking a picture of a Japanese couple:

And the Palace Moat:

After the Imperial Palace, we parked our bikes - not locking them to anything, just leaving them on the sidewalk with no fear of them being stolen, which is very very cool - at Otomachi Station and took a couple trains down to Akasaka, in search of a highly recommended sushi place. We're pretty sure we found it, and Miriam definitely loved the sushi. The chefs were very cool, greeting everyone who walked in the door with a loud "irassimase!!"

After lunch, and quick Subway sandwich stop - don't hate me, sushi places don't have much for a veg like me - we headed down to Shibuya to check out this huge store that Lonely Planet said we should see. They do seem to recommend a lot of shopping, I have to say. And their maps suck.

The store is Tokyu Hands, and it is 7 or 8 floors of absolutely everything you could ever want, or not want. Shibuya is an absolutely exhausting area of lights, noise, music, people and more of everything. I don't understand how the Japanese don't go freaking insane in these places.

Here's a tag on a bag we saw. Please feel free to make sense of it:

Oh yeah, I found out I'm a monster. My feet have been killing me from the shoes I brought, and so I went to try and get a new pair. I wanted a pretty standard pair of hiking shoes, lowtops, waterproof - you know the kind. We went into a bunch of different shops, some in the Sporting Good district - there's another funny thing; districts for very specific things - and was told that no store carries shoes in my massive size of 11. Everytime I would check out a pair of shoes, I would ask for my size (Eur 45, or 28.5CM) and would get a curious stare in return. Then a slow shaking of the head. I had hoped to find a novelty store or a clown supply place that maybe could accomodate me, but no luck. Or maybe display pieces for a shoe store, that would have some grotequely huge shoes, the ones that people stare at and say, "wow." I bet they would have been a perfect fit.

So, after Shibuya, we heading back to Otomachi, picked up the bikes and rode back to our ryokan in Asakusa. The bikes were returned (again, best idea ever!)
Us returning our bikes:

We napped for a while, and found a restaurant for dinner in the guidebook. We both were craving Italian, even though we had planned on hitting up some veggie place. We also wanted to end up in Shinjuku (that crazy hectic place in Lost in Translation) for drinks at some bar way up on top of a really tall building.) We found an Italian chain restaurant, Capricciosa's, or something like that, that was supposed to be "reliable" and headed down.

Shinjuku is very crazy. Even crazier than other places in Tokyo, if that's possible. Which it is, so just shut up.
The restaurant is in the basement of Zara, the clothing store. Which brings me to another crazy thing - bars and restaurants on high floors, and in basements of buildings. Just something not so common where we come from.

Boy this train is going fast. The mountains are really beautiful, too. Someone remind me to find out just how fast it goes, topspeed, etc. It's cool when it tilts going into turns.

We sat down to eat, and luckily sat next to a couple of English guys. You'll see why. We checked out the menu, and decided on what we wanted. Somehow we started talking to them, and one of them mentioned that on the back of the menu, it said what is in each dish, in case we were vegetarian. Well, it was only in Japanese, so he translated. It turned out that even the simple pastas we wanted were loaded with meats and fish (remember above about that?) and he helped us choose stuff to eat. The pasta turned out to be not bad, the wine was truly terrible, but the abundance of parmasan cheese helped everything along.

After dinner, we walked to the Keiyo Palace Hotel, and went to the Polestar Skybar, way up on the 45th floor. It was quite elegant, with chairs being pulled out, 50's haircuts on the staff, and Miriam being followed to the bathroom. Where they waited for her to come out, and escorted her back. Huh.
The drinks were expensive, but the view was ridiculous. My ears popped on the way down in the elevator.

A long subway ride home, crowded with people even late at night - though not too too late, cause the trains stop running at midnight, and back to the ryokan for the final night.

On the way home, we saw this door, in the middle of the train station. It goes to another dimension.

Got up this morning, packed, cab-ed it to the train station, and onto the Shikansen. Which is where are now.

Ah.

me and the wife

2006-09-05T19:23:00.000-04:00

aren't we so cute?

the velvet train seats and Nikko

2006-09-05T18:56:00.000-04:00

the second train we rode on for the final leg to Nikko had velvet seats. I mention this in order to make the pun in the title.
Thank you very much.

So we get into Nikko, a beautiful mountain town, and get our bearings and information from the tourist information booth. The bus takes us up to where the shrines and temples are, and we decline the awesome opportunity to pay a lot of money to walk over a bridge that's about 30 feet long. A missed opportunity, but one we'll get over. Hopefully.
As we're walking up these steps towards the shrine area, a short little man jumps out of nowhere, thrusting a map in our faces. His english is perfect, and we end up buying a map from him, because it has some great details on it. Or maybe he is just a good salesman.

We get up to the shrine area and see lots of different shrine buildings and rooms and stuff. I have to say that shrines and temples all seem relatively the same to me. Sacriligious maybe, but I have to say it. They are cool though, and pagodas are neat looking. Ok, I take it back, these places are cool. The various reliefs, paintings, gold statues, etc are pretty neat.

One cool thing at this shrine is that the famous "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys come from here.

Here's a couple pics of buildings on the temple grounds.

And this guy!

After we hit all the buildings, we managed to find this little Buddhist restaurant on the grounds of a nearby temple and proceeded to have the best meal yet. It was totally traditional, with lots of tofu prepared in different ways, small courses (about 8 of them) and green tea galore. All served by kimono wearing women who kneeled as they served us.
That could have been because they recognized us as foreign conquerors.
We ate at low tables, looking out at a gorgeous little garden.
very nice.

After lunch, we walked down little windy roads till we got back to town. We popped in and out of different little shops, walked off the main road a ways, and just looked around. We were very lucky to go into that guys shop - the woodworker - who loved dressing us up in his clothing. Hot.
He was super nice, giving us a sake cup, and spending a while with us teaching us words for all kinds of Japanese clothing. Good stuff.

We saw a very cool cemetary (Japanese, obvi) and walked through that. In front of all the tombstones there were offerings of different things, like mickey mouse cups and iced coffee, along with incense.

More on all of this later, cause I got to get going.

a post, in more detail

2006-09-05T18:29:00.001-04:00

I think I didn't mention this, but it made quite an impression - the Indian place we ate at on Monday night had no idea what either chutney or raita was. Now you may not either, but you're not Indian. I was disturbed.

We woke up early on Tuesday morning, made the five minute walk to Asakusa Station, stopping along the way at various vending machines to find the perfect iced coffee and picking up some freshly made inari from a small stand. Mmmm.

Went through the usual somewhat-frustrating-but-not-too-bad experience of buying tickets and getting to the right place.

The train pulled up, looking like a train out of the future, which for us Americans, it unfortunately is. Before we could get on, a crew of yellow and blue clad worker drones swarmed the train, turning seats around, sweeping up trash, and literally making the train spotless, so it could make the trip back the other way. Pretty neat.

We get on the train, find our assigned seats and play with all the neat little features at the seats - fold out footrests that warn you to take your shoes off before using (those Japanese always got to get that in somewhere), a little table that comes out from the wall, windows that talk to you ("I am a window") - not really.

Tokyo is, as I've said before, freakin' massive, so a good half of the 2 hour train ride was spent just getting out of the city. Once in the countryside, it was very pretty. Lots of fields, farmers, and fields. Lots of fields in very vivid green colours. One thing I noticed was that there was much more electric wires running everywhere, power towers were a lot more visible, etc. Why did I notice this?

After most of the ride, we change trains somewhere, onto a much smaller local train for the 10 minute ride to Nikko.
Here's Nikko station.

ｑｕｉｔｅ　ｕ～Ｎｉｋｋｏ

2006-09-05T03:44:00.000-04:00

ｉ　write　this　FROM　a　free　internet　connection　in　NIkko，and　thekeyboardis　ｉｎｓａｎｅ．
we　ｍｅｔ　ONE］ｏｆ３ｗｏｏｄｃａｒｖｅｒｓ　IN　japan　ｗｈｏ　ｍａｋｅｓ　the　ｔｈｉｎｇｓ　ｕｓｅｄ　IN　ｔｅａ　ｃｅｒｅｍｏｎｉｅｓ　ａｎｄ　ｈａｄ　ａ　ｇｒｅａｔ　ｔｉｍｅ　ｗｉｔｈ　ｈｉｍ．

ｔｙｐｉｎｇ　ｉｓ　ａｎｎｏｙｉｎｇ．

ｂｙｅ

update: a few pics of Nikko, including the woodcarver guy. More to come after we get back from the baths...

arigato gozaimas

2006-09-04T09:25:00.000-04:00

Update: the Italian brunch sucked, but the view was awesome. Tokyo is a massive freaking city - hard to believe actually.
After the meal, we got our bikes (did we mention we rented bikes? I am told that we did) and rode to Ueno Park, and walked around this shuk-like market, where the whole place smelled like fish. Ech.

Then on to Akihabara, the Electric District, where there are hundreds and hundreds, and dare I say, hundreds of electronics shops, all blasting lights, music and high-pitched voices onto the streets. The stores are many floors of anything and everything electronic-related, from cameras, mp3 players, transisters, LED lights, anime porn, wire - just total insanity. Exhausting.

Then we rode through the Sporting Goods district on our way to an Indian vegetarian restaurant (eating veg is a lot harder than you would think over here. Fish is everywhere.) The place was in Ginza, known as the 5th Avenue of Tokyo, all high-end shops and people. Pretty good food.
After dinner, we rode all the way back to home to Asakusa, about 45 mins or so, maybe more. It was raining on and off, so we got wet.
We're exhausted, tired and worn-out, and planning on taking a day-trip tomorrow to a place about 2 hours outside of Tokyo called Nikko.

night.

Sake Karaoke

2006-09-03T22:24:00.000-04:00

Last night we had a true lost in translation moment as we had an amazing dinner with Zack's aunt's friend and fiance where they ordered everything for us, and we learned that the way to do it is to drink beer first and then sake. Then we did karaoke! It was really so fun. Now I am hungover but Zack's not becaue he puked last night after we got out of our $50 cab. We're going to an Italian brunch. I hope it's good.

Oishii

2006-09-02T04:30:00.000-04:00

This morning we went to the fishmarket, where we almost got run over thousands of times by men (not one woman, I noticed) driving these wierd go-cart type cars with boxes on them and a bizaare steering mechanism where you stand up and turn a big wheel like you're on a ship. Then I dragged Zack to Daiwa sushi where, as the guidebook promised, the line snaked around 5 or 6 times but actually moved much faster than we expected--some guy from Dallas named Tony told us that some other person told him that the line would take an hour. I suspect the guy that told Tony that was in cohoots with the owners of the sushi place next door that Tony defected to upon hearing this. Sucker. I finished my sushi breakfast of champions (and Zack his Kappa Maki and miso soup) the same time that Tony finished his. We then took the subway back to our neighborhood with Tony and another Daiwa sushi line defector--Mark from Austria, who now lives in Germany. But we ditched them so I could get my sunglasses from the hotel. Once in the hotel, we had to fight the urge not to sleep, which we did.

I then convinced Zack that it would be a good idea to rent bicycles. Everyone in Tokyo was riding them all over the place, including old people who usually had at least one basket attached to theirs, and middle aged women who usually had at least one child seat attached to theirs (plus baskets). Zack resisted in much the same manner as he had resisted letting me drive the little electric car I convinced him we should rent in San Francisco. A fight ensued, but was resolved; I think what settled the matter was when he realized how ineffectively slow and rickety these bicycles were and that we weren't really riding at a much faster pace than we were walking.

We lit candles and got fortunes at the Shinto shrine next to our hotel. The way you get fortunes is by pulling a stick out of a box and then matching up the Japanese characters on the stick with the Japanese characters on this set of drawers and then opening the drawer that matches and taking out a piece of paper. Then you're supposed to tie the fortune onto these metal rods. I got a really bad fortune, actually, which I'm still upset about. Seriously bad. It said things like "People will hurt you. Sick loved ones will not be healed. Your lost articles will not be found."

We checked out the Tokyo National Gallery, which had a great overview of Japanese art in ten rooms on the second floor. Really beautiful stuff. Then we bought some prints in the giftshop. I still have a lot more shopping I feel I need to do here.

Speaking of "checking out," when we ate dinner last night at a restaurant that had no English menu despite the fact that the sign outside read, "We have English menu," a waiter said he didn't speak English that well but when I asked what kind of sashimi he had he said "I'll check it out." Zack said, "Unless this guy learned his English from 90210, it's pretty good." I still think that's hilarious, and I've been laughing about it since last night.

My dad gave this speech at KJ that said everything in Japan would be persistently similar but strangely different. So far that's true. I can't wait for more fish.

Japan : 3 : Miriam made a friend!!

2006-09-01T09:29:00.000-04:00

We hope to make many more like her along the way.

Japan: Post two

2006-09-01T06:45:00.000-04:00

we're here in our Ryokan (traditional style bed and breakfast), getting upacked and cleaned up, getting ready to go out.
It's really awesome, the neighbourhood is beautiful, and we're really excited.

here's a picture of our room.
going out for sake and other stuff, so that's all for now.

Japan number one

2006-09-01T05:32:00.000-04:00

After a cancelled flight out of Boston, and being re-routed through Chicago, then a 13 hour flight to Tokyo, we're now on a train from the airport (Narita) to Tokyo proper.
We met a nice guy on the plane, and he's basically helping us get to Tokyo station.
It's pretty trippy so far - why can't we have a good train system in the US?
It's a bit rainy, kind of muggy, but at least it's not cold.
The cars are small, and there's more english signs that I had imagined.
Bamboo groves are cool - all along the way, we pass a bunch of them.
Lots of houses have the cool-looking roofs, just like you want them to.

This place really is just like a foreign country.

- Zack

too much email

2006-07-25T15:01:00.000-04:00

i think i'll need to go on an email hiatus after the wedding.

there's just so many, and keeping them organized is a bitch.

wedding update

2006-07-17T12:24:00.001-04:00

it's going to happen!

soon!

i have a suit, she has a dress, we have a rabbi.

and a sweet apartment in brooklyn, so that's exciting.

if you want to get us gifts, please do so.

wedding update

2006-07-17T12:24:00.000-04:00

it's going to happen!

soon!

i have a suit, she has a dress, we have a rabbi.

and a sweet apartment in brooklyn, so that's exciting.

if you want to get us gifts, please do so.

I have never seen the movie Slacker

2006-07-05T14:40:00.001-04:00

the Linklater movie, but I really want to.

Have you seen it?

I have never seen the movie Slacker

2006-07-05T14:40:00.000-04:00

the Linklater movie, but I really want to.

Have you seen it?

and so it goes

2006-04-24T23:37:00.000-04:00

sometimes I won't post for a long time.

other times, I will post sometimes.

otherwise, my times will be posted on time.

it's freakin' awesome here!

2006-02-26T21:36:00.000-05:00

what a country!!

monday, late afternoon, a corner in downtown San Francisco

2006-02-22T00:33:00.000-05:00

I had just left my class for the day. About 3pm, or so. Closer to 315, really. I wanted to go see the flagship Apple store, so I did. Only about a 10 minute walk up Market and there it was. Terribly unimpressive. I'm not sure what I wanted to see, but this store looks just like the Soho store, but not as nice.
Maybe you know that that's the deal, but I had no idea,
and was a little disappointed.

They also didn't have the new MacBook Pro, which was lame.

I called my mom who had spent some time out here in the distant past, and talked about that and different places around the city. That was neat.
I spent a good while calling different people that I knew, trying to find out if there was anyone I knew, even by a degree or two, who lives here, maybe to hang out a bit or whatever. I remembered that my cousin Sebastian lives here, and gave him a call left a message.
Meanwhile, I'd been walking down Kearny towards the water - maybe west? Up a huge hill, which I can't imagine having to go up on a regular basis. I saw a cable car go by and asked someone how you get on and all. I found where to get the one that went straight down this big hill to Fishermen's (man's) Wharf and after a short wait, got on.

Wow.
Hanging off the side of a trolley car that looks like it's from the 1800's, being driven by this guy pulling on huge levers that do I-don't-know-what. I will be finding out, cause I plan on looking it up. They do some cable grabbing, I know, but that's all I know.

Got off at the wharf, lots of tourists, it being President's Day, so it was crowded. Lots of seafood places, crappy stores, etc.
Looking out accross the bay is really beautiful. There's these mountains that are just incredible, and Alcatraz is right in the middle of the water. Old brick buildings on a hill surrounded by high cliffs down to the water.

Walked down along the water, saw the sea lions on pier 39. They're pretty cool.

Jumped on a trolley (not a cable car, a different thing) and took it down to Embarcadero. That's another thing about SF that I like - the names of places and streets.
Spent the next hour and a half or so walking down Mission St all the way back up to 21 and Mission. Interesting walk, I guess. It took longer than I thought it would.

Met up with Dara, and that was fun, seeing her here.
Went back to Jonas', chilled, and went to bed.

stay tuned.

Reader Questions: San Francisco Edition

2006-02-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

so the most popular, interesting and only question I haven't gotten asked about my trip is, 'hey zack, what are you doing in San Francisco any way?'

my boss told me back in January that I had to do some training for the present fiscal year. It seems that everyone is supposed to take some career enhancement classes every year. Me and J had been talking about an SF trip for some while, and based on some almost plans we had, I got this SF trip approved - flight, training class, meal allowance, etc. Crazy.
sadly, J's schedule wasn't going to let her come at the same time.
Turns out, we have lots of miles and can get flights for 10 bucks a couple weeks later. We'll be going for about 5 or 6 days, vacation style, around the first week in March.

Anyway - so I'm here taking an Apple course, to teach me how to officially troubleshoot Mac desktops. They brand us on the third day at G5 o'clock.
I know a bunch of the stuff already, but there's definitely a lot that I've learned.
The class has six of us in it, me and these five stereotypes. Which, as I hate to think about, means I

The guy teaching the class loves him some Macs. Boy oh boy does he ever.
He knows a hell of a lot about them too. Not even such an old guy, seemed to me.
It gets a little tedious, but there's always the internet.

more san francisco, please!

2006-02-22T00:15:00.000-05:00

OH YEAH! so jonas has this car that I drove when we went out for a lounge and pizza on sunday night.
It's a super fast car - a track-equipped(?)BMW M3. Now, I guess I've just never driven a car anything like this. Well, actually, this summer in Montana, we rented a Mustang for the day, and that was fun too. It was an automatic, but it was still very fun.
It's just a very intimidating car to drive. It's expensive, first of all. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it. That would suck. Then, it's also super sensitive and twitchy. I stalled out a bunch of times - yes,lame. I felt very embarassed every time. The hills don't hurt either.
The power that I could feel was just wild.
Well, I'm going to be driving out to the beach house on Friday and then to Muir Woods on Saturday for some hiking in the redwoods. Maybe a drive down Highway 1, depending on what happens. That would be cool.

san frantastic!

2006-02-20T23:47:00.000-05:00

so I'm having a great time here in California.
First time in San Francisco, and first extended trip to California.

Got in late on Sunday night, about 1030 or so local time. I was tired from the weekend and the flight, of course. My friend Jonas had sent a car to the airport to pick me, and that was nice.

The ride was interesting, it was dark, but seeing the bay was cool.
I think it was the bay at least.

anyway, we got to the place and went up to the loft, walking through this killer courtyard with gardens and all. The loft is incredible - huge, open, and just awesome.
I missed a big party at the loft the night before, and the dj stuff was (and is) still set up in the corner.
The most obvious and striking feature of the loft are the original beams and supports. They are these sturdy-looking things, stripped of their paint in a very cool, raw way.
I guess it's not totally done yet, cause there is not a lot of furniture or furnishings, but what is here is really tasteful. go Jonas.

so - I was hungry and Jonas was all set to go get some food. Turns out we were going to meet these French girls in a lounge somewhere, and there was good pizza accross the street. I'll admit I wasn't so ready for a oom-tseh oom-tseh place, and we didn't end up staying too long. The pizza wasn't the greatest.

shaaaabus

2006-02-10T14:52:00.000-05:00

we're making shabbos for lisa a friend.

how exciting.

amen

so what's new?

2006-02-10T14:45:00.000-05:00

hm.

lots I guess -

ben and shira are in the far east for 4 months which is freakin' awesome

I'm turning 30 on the 18th

I'm going to San Francisco on the 19th for a week for an Apple training course - first time there and I'm stoked

I'll be going back to SF on March 3rd for 4 days for vacation with J

Wedding plans are coming along, got the invitations done, band is signed, things are moving along

What do I want for my birthday?

superhandz

2006-01-27T00:07:00.000-05:00

not a part

2006-01-18T20:29:00.000-05:00

i know, right. terrible.

i put part one down there, and rather than continuing like a decent person should,
i talk about something i want.

it's this thing

now it's not that i'm so crazy about tv or anything, but this is such an awesome thing.
truly.

you plug it into your cable box/dvr/whatever and your high-speed internet connection, by way of a router is fine, of course.

then, while anywhere in the world that you have a high-speed connection,
you can watch any channels you can watch at home and control the box in the
same way as if you were sitting in your living room.
whether you're in a hotel in Australia, or in your back yard; at your friends and you all want to watch something you have on your DVR.

wow.

now, i've never used one, so i don't have any personal experience with this thing, but i've yet to see a bad review. the only negative at this point is the lack of a Mac OS X compatible client.
however, at MacWorld a couple weeks ago, Sling announced that one would be available in the 2nd quarter of this year. sweet.

this thing has been around for a couple years now, and i've never been able to understand why it hasn't blown up in a massive way, considering the amount of tv watching that goes on.

it might have something to do with legal issues that could come up, but they've made it pretty far with nary a peep from "Those Who Like to Sue."

oh yeah - they call it place-shifting, like a dvr is time-shifting.
maybe that covers their asses?

trip to the UK part 1

2006-01-05T12:12:00.000-05:00

ok, ok. I'll get started on telling you all about the trip to Ireland and London with the fam-in-law.

we left Philly on x-mas day, on an evening flight. We were flying to London on British Air and then to Dublin on a connection Aer Lingus flight.
The flight was almost totally full, though we lucked out with the person next to us changing seats, so we had a row to ourselves. sweet.

Got to London at like 6am, next flight at like 9am, got to Dublin around 11am.
Met up with Lisa in the airport, then found the guy with the Tauber sign who was waiting for us. sweet.

the drive through Dublin was cool, driving on the wrong side of the street was a first for me, and a little disconcerting.
luckily, they don't have a brake pedal on the passenger side.

got to the Fitzwilliam Hotel, overlooking St. Stephan's Green, right in the center of 'downtown'-ish Dublin. It's a very modern hotel, a chic sort of place, if you will.
A room for Mikey and I, and a room for J and Lisa.
Free wired internet in the room was a pleasant surprise.

So let me see...this was Monday. I think we just ended up walking around the area a while.
Right outside the hotel is where Grafton St starts. Pretty much a pedestrian area with stores and the like.
Ben Yehuda-style.
People are really nice in Dublin, but the accent almost makes everyone sound depressed. The sentences all kind of turn down at the end. Of course, the weather does suck most of the time, so it's not surprising.
Went for pints of Guinness (the national pastime) with M, L, R, and J. It does taste different (better) over there, by the way.
Something to do with the soft water or something.

Had dinner with everyone in the hotel dining room.
The food was very good.
What sucked was the wedding planning talk that was so insane, it became pretty much impossible for me to keep any sense of decorum (Europe voices everyone!) and I had to take a little break in my room.
Yes, I walked out of dinner, but it was for the best. When I came back, there was a much nicer tone of compromise in the air.
It was actually at this point that the food was very good.

rough.

After dinner later, we went for a longish walk over to Temple Bar, which is the popular pub and hanging out area. What with it being St. Stephan's day or Boxing Day or whatever they call it, there were almost no pubs open.
But the walk was nice, even with the brief foray into sketchy Chinatown area.

What I really like about the whole trip was the awesome history that is all around.
It also was really clear (to me at least) that the Irish really were fucked by the British for hundreds of years and that it was really terribly brutal at times. The English just seem to have had this sense that they were the absolute pinnacle of human development and anyone else was just terribly uncivilized.

prigs.

boy o'boy!! auld eire!

2005-12-22T20:44:00.000-05:00

and awaaaaaay we go!!

hey! sign this

2005-12-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

the letter from Rep. Conyers to Bush declaring intent to try to pass a motion to censure he and Cheney.

please sign.

Damn!! David Brooks gets apocalyptical!

2005-12-21T23:08:00.000-05:00

!

and apoplectic!!

will it lead to apoptosis??

I don't even know what to say

2005-12-20T20:24:00.000-05:00

except that I'm very happy that this shit is going down.

I'm talking about all the shit about Bush that's coming down now.
He said a year ago that he doesn't wiretap without a warrant, and now he said that he does.

I know, I know, it's no big shocker that this administration lies like all-get-out,
but hopefully, this'll be the straw that finally gets stuck in the camels eye and then it gets
infected and then they have to amputate at the neck.

bring it, bitch.

2005-12-18T11:38:00.000-05:00

i love this essay by Kristof in the New York Times.

war-on-christmas-o'reilly-bullshit.

read it.

cold. so cold.

2005-12-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

so very cold.

I guess if it gets much colder,
I may have to take shelter in my freshly killed Ton-ton.

no big deal, though.

I've got a lightsaber.

yes, I remembered I can post pictures

2005-12-11T00:34:00.000-05:00

hey - you'd be in the spotlight too, if you had a name like that.

damn she's cute

2005-12-10T12:22:00.000-05:00

we start 'em young,
and we start 'em on macs.

oh yeah - she's my niece

what'd you say? I'm what?

2005-12-09T16:37:00.000-05:00

much too cool for you?

oh.
that's what I thought you said.

mmmm...summmmmmer

2005-12-09T16:27:00.000-05:00

I miss it.

A Conversation in Context (Philadelphia, 2005)

2005-12-08T19:55:00.000-05:00

< Con

and when those days come, the days of the apocolypse
- not the jesus one, just regular worldwide catastrophe, I truly feel like I will be among the useful.

but listen to me well,
those of you with skills only useful in this 'advanced' society of ours,
if you try to fuck around (cover YOUR back?? why should I cover YOUR back?? maybe I won't!)

then I won't hesitate.
I won't be able to.

sorry.

text >

the write stuff

2005-12-08T09:16:00.000-05:00

So you know how when you’re in a bad relationship with some guy, he’s totally going out, being beligerant. He had come into the whole relationship seeming like a good guy, really compassionate. Like he wanted to help you clean yourself up, stop hanging out with those guys, put on some nice clothing and get your hair and nails done.
So you go for it, and he seems relatively harmless for a bit.
Then some bad shit happens that affects a lot of people and all of a sudden he seems to get some kind of hero complex; like he’s supposed to go and help all these people. But weird-like, not in a red cross kinda way, but more jesus-on-a-cross kinda way, you know? So he’s getting all strange and and negative and stuff, and after all kinds of different shit happens,

you meet a new guy.
He seems like a pretty good, upstanding guy. Really couldn’t say much bad about him. You know a lot of people who’ve been friends with him for a long time, and they all have nice things to say. So you start hanging out with him and it turns out you like what he has to say. Turns out he says a lot of the same things that you think would be good for you – and he wants to be with you real bad.

So he starts wooing you, flowers, dinners, concerts, the whole deal and you’re thinking about this new guy. But
then the old guy comes back into your life. He just wants to keep you safe, he says; that’s all he was trying to do before, he swears. And you know what?, he says, that other guy just won’t be able to keep you safe when it comes down to it. He just won’t. When you go to the other guy, he just doesn’t seem to be able to find the words to say that it’ll be ok with him, that he’ll be able to keep you just as safe – even though you have a feeling it’s true.

What’s a body to do? You gotta trust words, and so you go with mr safe. Hey, at least you can always say, you said you would; I trusted you.

Sigh.

I guess in the end, that’s what it came down to. The guy with the right stuff on the inside was pushed away for the guy with the writers staff on his side.

But you know what makes me smile? That even though I rejected him, he still sends me emails. Little notes to let me know that he’s still around, still cares, still hopes for our future together, and still needs money.

God bless John Kerry.

hey, here's a thought

2005-12-07T16:19:00.000-05:00

who gets up in the morning on a frigid winter day, shivers as they get out from underneath their nice warm down comforter,
looks out the window at the snow on the ground, sees the breath billowing out of bypassers mouths and

PUTS ON SHORTS!!

maybe it's 'cause I spends my whole day on a college campus, and it's just another one of those crazy college kid fads, but honestly, what the fuck.

jeopardy

2005-12-02T11:21:00.000-05:00

have I ever mentioned that I watch this show every day?
or if I don't watch it, I record it and watch it later.

I love jeopardy and there's a decent chance that I'll kick your ass at it.

thank you Alex.

weddings, classes, and more

2005-11-30T12:16:00.000-05:00

so this is pretty final - August 24th at the Palm House in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
should be a smashing time.

as it will be in a glass house, please don't throw stoned.

about classes, I'm trying to sign up for a creative writing class that will teach the sort of writing that is along the lines of Woody Allen and Mark Twain.
Coupled with my burgeoning improv career, I should have a 4 movie-a-year contract in no time.
and likely making movies as good as Woody's recent offerings.

and the more?

I'm hungry.

tap for it

2005-11-28T08:57:00.000-05:00

what a time.

so we went to new york on tues eve, saw a bunch of wedding venues on wednesday - thanks to R for letting use the car. really did make the whole thing easier.

thursday morning, M, J and I took the train up to CT for thanksgiving day - hectic as always, lots of people, food and
noise. noise. noise.
was J's first time with the mass of humanity that makes up the extended.
of course it was M's first time, and both handled it beautifully.

a night's sleep and we were off to Providence for the weekend.
a rented car and a few hours later, it was sundown.

I do love seeing interaction between J and the parents - not sure why, but it makes me pretty happy.

very nice times were had over the weekend, lots of heated discussion on all things, from holy to unholy.
fear not - abortion, belief in god, homosinuality, and any other controversial topic were all guests.

plenty of warm discussion too.

J learned how to tap for just about anything - very cool.
near to cured her insomnia.

saturday night's alright for fighting, but we decided to go out for a drink instead - worked out better in the end. hung
with shy, and that was cool.

sunday was taking M to the airport, saying bye to B and Maia.

a tour of Slater Mill was quite cool. very wild that they could see what was needed to get from A to Z and could build a machine to do it.
turning cotton into thread into cloth into money.
it's like magic, using gears.

the train home - decided that was better than flying early Monday, and truly it was.

I'm pretty sure M and J had a nice time,

and the gluten ribs were great.

wedding balls are stinging

2005-11-21T11:49:00.000-05:00

yep.
going on Wednesday to look at a few venues for the biggest wedding of my life (our lives).

should be interesting, looking at these places with the sharp and trained eye of a professional venue-looker.
I'm sure I'll see all kinds of small details, both positive and negative, that will both excite me, as well as cause great dismay.

I'll be looking for such things as: are there toilets? how many? is toilet paper included in the price? double roll, or single? do we get bathroom attendants, or will guests be expected to turn the sinks on themselves? how about drying their own hands? do we really want to go there?

if you've been married before, you know that these are some of the things that weigh on the mind of the wed-ers, right up until the caterer doesn't show up.

then your priorities change.

well that was fun

2005-11-21T00:12:00.000-05:00

what a weekend!

friday night dinner
an entirely fun time
then a bike ride home in the cold.

waking up and brunching
found a new place around the corner.

playing ball (one of a few times in the last 8 years)
stretching and exercising for a little while.

meeting up for pizza bagels and beer
first time in that place since j was in college
and then to smoke's, where I've never been.

seeing a play at the kelly writers house
and what a play it was. dan put out some
pretty wild stuff.
the play was very good.

on to lt's for drinks and people talking
my neck hurt so I went home.

we chilled till late night and went to sleep.
the bed broke. in the morning, I went to the couch for
the extra room.

then for the second time in two days, we
went to brunch. at that point, we all went home
and hung around.

we went for coffee, after a while.
I went off to my class, and everyone came
for the show. it was pretty good, actually, and I
was definitely happy about it.

back to the house, and chinese food
with lots of talking and tv watching.

more talking and then everyone left.

we updated our ipods and went
to bed.

there's something missing from this picture...

2005-11-17T08:57:00.000-05:00

you remember the book 'goodnight moon', right?
so check it - they've removed the ashtray from the illustrations in the book and taken the cigarette out of the author's hand in his picture.

while i'm all for people not smoking, even annoyingly so at times, i'm not so sure that this is good.

at the very least it makes me feel wierd.

i think of that movie 'basic instinct' where they had to manipulate the video in order to see the woman leaving the room where she killed the guy -
that might have been one of my first realizations that

reality (like realty),

unless you see it with your own eyes, is very suspect.

best tv show cancelled

2005-11-16T15:45:00.000-05:00

so, if you are a regular around here, you may or may not know about the best show on tv these days.
i say 'these days' because it's not going to be around for much longer.
yes, i'm talking about
martha stewart's version of the apprentice.

hahahahahahahahaha.
no, not really.

what i'm talking about is Arrested Development (note the caps to denote supreme importance).

fox, as is their habit, develops great shows and then cancels them.
they let them win all their emmys, bobbys, critic's awards and what have you and then cancels them.

wicked brilliant, if you think about it, because...
well, i'm sure it is, 'cause they keep doing it.

well, it's too bad.

so - here's a good article about it.

support your local

2005-11-14T08:51:00.000-05:00

that's what we're supposed to do, you know.
buy locally, buy from your mom&pop neighborhood store - not from the behemoth big-box stores that are stealing business away, forcing shops to close.

well, i tried.
i needed a socket wrench set, so i went up the block to the local hardwear store.
now, i understand they are small and can't stock everything a person might need, but the only socket set they had was of the crappy variety. you know those crappy tools you can find at the dollar store or where-ever; they just fall apart or don't work for the job they are meant.
i must have gone to 4 or 5 other small, local hardware stores, finding the same crap in each one.

so now what, i ask?
i could have them order me a set, and wait a week until it comes in.
i could go online and order it from a (big-box) website like Amazon and have it in a day or two.
or i can just ride down to WalHomeLowesSears and have my choice of quality brands at a low price.

i went, i bought, and i feel bad.

but not as bad as either having crappy, unreliable tools or no tools at all.

this title is informative

2005-11-13T18:57:00.000-05:00

that's what they say a 'title' should be, you know.
it should give you the flavour, a little taste of what's to come in the post that follows.

so, i believe i've achieved my goal.
thanks for listening.

dearth of comments

2005-11-03T22:22:00.000-05:00

so - i've been told that what i post here doesn't exactly lend to commenting.

is that true?

denver, eh?

2005-11-02T11:59:00.000-05:00

that's what i'm talking about.

up to an ounce is legal in denver.

check it

lord gym

2005-10-27T21:36:00.000-04:00

i need to work out again. i say again, because i have now recognized that i don't work out, not that i'm on a break from working out.

that being said, i need to get back to the gym.

well this is exciting!!

2005-10-24T13:10:00.000-04:00

i'm going to yerp!

yep - yerp!

i ain't never done been to yerp really, not least for mor'n a few hours.

sick.

cool stuff for people

LA

Awesome Name!

iPhone thought

holy crap

Cool stuff for people

Port Hawkesbury

Pics from today

Canso - day 2

pics posted

Halifax pt.3/Canso pt.1

Halifax pt.2: last night

Halifax pt.1

off to my roots

garden part 3

garden part 2

ok, so here's something to write about - my garden

Spring, Sprung, Sprang

last night

An idea for Google Reader

This is pretty far out

Philly and so on

here we are, and better than ever

jesus. i mean....what?

yeah, yeah

it's a french, french world

from brooklyn to paris

a great joke

here's a pretty awesome interview.

and the whole thing smelled like smoke..

So here's a freakin' cool story

?

starting a new job, and jobbing a new start

it's sunday and it's dark

livin large

my cousin marv was visiting

she drives me crazy sometimes.

moving forward

Annnnnndddd we're back.

boy is it nice here

Some Enchanted Evening

On an island, somewhere off of Osaka

My gezaimas are killing me!

Imperial, shmimperial, I'm the freakin' Shogun!

Here's some random videos

Commodore Perry very merry

now with video!!

Last train from Tokyo

me and the wife

the velvet train seats and Nikko

a post, in more detail

ｑｕｉｔｅ ｕ～Ｎｉｋｋｏ

arigato gozaimas

Sake Karaoke

Oishii

Japan : 3 : Miriam made a friend!!

Japan: Post two

Japan number one

too much email

wedding update

wedding update

I have never seen the movie Slacker

I have never seen the movie Slacker

and so it goes

it's freakin' awesome here!

monday, late afternoon, a corner in downtown San Francisco

Reader Questions: San Francisco Edition

more san francisco, please!

san frantastic!

shaaaabus

so what's new?

superhandz

not a part

trip to the UK part 1

boy o'boy!! auld eire!

hey! sign this

Damn!! David Brooks gets apocalyptical!

I don't even know what to say

bring it, bitch.

cold. so cold.

ｑｕｉｔｅ　ｕ～Ｎｉｋｋｏ