robotpolisher

Back from the synth hospital. Shiny, buzz free, factory patches reloaded. Whoo!

2009-08-30T19:02:00.001-04:00

Back from the synth hospital. Shiny, buzz free, factory patches reloaded. Whoo!
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher

Sent from my mobile device. Apologies for any typos.

Why this place lies fallow and why Web 2.0 has taken my publicly expressive and thrown it to the 4 winds.

2008-11-09T22:03:00.005-05:00

I really used to enjoy blogging, and so it's a shame that I've fallen off it so badly. I realize that there wasn't one horrible Moment of Public Discovery say that led me to stop blogging actively. It's that other "web 2.0" sites started filling the needs that this trusty old blog used to and step by step my attentions and my life-tracking started moving there.

I was never one of those bloggers who really poured his heart out on his blog (with I guess a few exceptions). But odds were good that I wasn't going to write anything on here that I wouldn't tell you in person after a few beers and a hug, and I guess since my audience never REALLY extended beyond a few folks I knew here in town and a few far-scattered friends who used it to keep up with me, well it never really became a place to vent to strangers, if you will. On some level I think I'm a little jealous of the folks who could (and still do) pour their hearts out on a blog, but it never felt genuine to me. Maybe it's that steely Swedish reserve. My author voice was a little less... that. When I did want to spit some bile out or mention how happy I was about xyz or how thrilled I was with person ab or c in my life, I generally did it in pretty oblique terms.

So what it ended up becoming was more of a journal of things I did, a track record of weird memes I ran across, shows I went to, parties I went to, elections that happened. Every once in a while I guess I'd rant a little about politics but in general it was mostly maybe a way to document the things that happened in the world around me.

So then I found Flickr. Maybe despite my love for writing, I'm a very visual person. And if something worthwhile and or interesting is happening around me, odds are good that I'll snap at least one photo of it. So in a weird way, starting maybe even 4 years ago when I first got on flickr actively (first photos' from election 2004!) it started becoming the way I tracked the trips, parties, shows, days in the park. I noticed as soon as I started posting a bunch of things there I fell off more and more here.

Well and then there was the "link factor". I'd find interesting and/or weird things across the internet and post them here, in part because I wanted to remember them, and in part because I wanted to make sure that all my friends saw that weird new site I'd just run across. But slowly it dawned on me that as sites like plastic.com (back in the day), and later digg, reddit started agregating the most interesitng or passed around stuff, really I was duplicating, not creating, and that there were better ways for me to keep track of interesting flotsam and jetsam that had come into my life. Del.icio.us actually filed a big gap, providing a way for me to put away things to look at later, things I found interesting & maybe to a lesser extent share them with other folks. But the sharing thing slowly went away actually as a motivation. If I was really convinced someone would love something, I'd just email it to them or bug them over IM.

I used to love writing about the music going on in my life, and hey I still could, but i do that now in person with people, on a very fun small-community music board I'm on, and in a way I keep up with what people are listening to and get a sense of what my own music filter has been taking in via last.fm which I've been a little addicted to since I first signed up back in the audioscrobbler days.

I guess out of all of this, the part that it took the longest for me to find a decent substitute for was the oblique mentions of the good, the bad, the historical. Something textual to tie the whole thing together. And that's where twitter has come in. I was originally skeptical as shit, and I'm still sorta feeling my way around it, but in so many ways that matter, it really has filled a certain last remaining gap in my life that this blog used to fill. It's a place to vent about the small mundanities, revel in the small pleasures, mark the passing of small milestones. Its short contained format in some ways works becuase increasingly one of the things that made it easier for me to just post a photo to flickr of the amazing weekend I had is that I never found enough time to sit down and do it blogging justice, to sit down and write out everything I wanted to say.

Constrained to a small # of characters, you have to get to the meat of the matter, and hey, then at least you (ok I)'ll get it done.

In a strange way, it's also become what my friend-network of blogs used to be. I remember going to a halloween party where two of my friends met for the first time and one asked "oh you're [blog alias]?!" and my other friend responded with "oh, wait YOU'RE [blog alias]". And then there wasn't a lot to talk about. Blogs at that phase of our lives I think gave everyone maybe a falst impression that they knew everything relevant going on in their friends (who blogged)'s lives. I think maybe twitter also keeps some folks from keeping closer tabs on the folks around them than they used to.

On the other hand, maybe it let's use keep up with people we wouldn't have otherwise bothered to keep up with?

The one thing I find that I still lack is a good place to actually practice... writing. I used to write for pleasure a lot when I was a disgruntled suburban teen. I like stringing together not just a few words into a sentence, but a whole thought into a messy arc of paragraphs and and chapters. It's never been the mode of expression I've been the best at, but it's damned satisfying sometimes. Maybe someone will cough up a good web 2.0 project devoted to letting people shoot their mouths off longform.

Well and then there's the music, but that's another story.

So, well that's where my output energies are going these days. If you used to read this and want to keep up with me by any of the bold-faced venues above, get in touch (you know how) and I'll send you what you need.

Beyond that, I think this here blog'll probably fade further away into a nice archive of a certain period of my life, and in my interaction with technology. It was a good run. Thanks Blog!

Now more than ever.

Foods to try before you die

2008-08-19T13:33:00.002-04:00

I picked this up over at Molly's place and thought oooh fascinating. Maybe it's 'cause I'm just off a really good lunch and food is big on my mind right now....

About 55% of 'em down though, I'm pretty happy with that! Living in NY is good for that kind of thing, I guess. Sadly I'm at a bit of a disadvantage since plowing down any of the shellfish on there would probably put me in the hospital. I guess that means I just have to try to make up for it with the rest of the stuff!

So how about you?

-----------

The Omnivore's Hundred is a list of foods the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives.

The rules of the meme: bold those you have tried, strikethrough those you wouldn't eat on a bet.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding (if you try just one "scary" thing on this list, I advise you to try black pudding. Don't let that whole "it's blood" thing freak you out).
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras.... hm.. not sure.
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters (curse you shellfish allergy!)
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (see 28)
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float (blech)
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare ... I think. I'm fuzzy on my definitions here.
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab (see #28)
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish (if the catfish tacos at san loco count)
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor (see #28)
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Things I've done in the last 86 hrs (or so)

2008-08-19T01:54:00.002-04:00

Just to keep you caught up

went swimming and laid around on the beach at Fort Tilden
watched a crapton of Olympics
almost saw 200 guitarists playing at once (damn you rain)
took advantage of a summer friday to go see a 4:00 showing of Tropic Thunder with a couple of beers smuggled out of the work fridge
spent an amazing day with J driving all around New York state looking for just the right place to have our wedding (and maybe even finding it!)
played soccer kind of half-assedly but enjoying it a ton
continued plowing through Mad Men (which I'm enjoying a bunch)
...aaand paid down to zero a credit card that had led to phone calls, lost sleep & general horror. It hadn't been down to zero since college when I first got it but was burdened with all kinds of bad-mojo stupidly aquired debt which I'm beyond thrilled to see the back of. Hey, there's something to be said for getting your financial shit together. Whoo hah.

GrAMPa, Greenpoint & Sub Neighborhoods

2008-07-28T17:44:00.002-04:00

A bit back I was having a conversation w/ some people about how increasingly different the chunk of Greenpoint J & I live in feels from the "main" strip of Greenpoint that hugs the river and is now the home to lots of bars, bookstores and all kinds of other newfangledness. True, the last few years have seen the opening of a coffeeshop over on this side of McGuinness and we do now have a Sushi restaurant AND an organic dry cleaner (which is just odd). But still, I feel typically pretty compelled to explain to folks that I live in something like the Greenpoint Annex, or "Not the part of Greenpoint you're thinking of". It's a quieter, Polisher, more sewage-factory-having part of town and hey, I love it.

Unless it's the middle of the winter and I'm cursing having to walk 15 minutes to the G. But still.

It's got a lovely identity of it's own and so we thought, since every subneighborhood on the planet has its own snappy acronym, it was about time our fair sub-chunklet of Greenpoint had one. A lightbulb went off over my head and thus GrAMPa or Greenpoint Around McGolrick Park.

I don't expect to see it on an official map anytime soon but feel free to use as you wish.

And just as I was thinking about this, a coworker set me Very Small Array's map of Greenpoint Subneighborhoods which makes a genius kind of sense. I mean minus the obvious ommission of GrAMPa.

Good cause for updating the blog for the first time in half a year

2008-04-21T16:03:00.002-04:00

Happiest. Flickr. Posting. Evar.
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher

Heck. Yes.

Because I need one more distraction.

2007-11-02T01:12:00.001-04:00

Twitter. Are any of you on it? Is it vastly more interesting once you have more than 4 contacts on there? Do I really need one more thing trying to get my attention?

I suspect the answer to all of these may be no.

But here's my twitter style update: Work's intense. But... interesting. Many interesting things and trips have happened that have gone unblogged. I'm off tomorrow to Mass for the weekend.

Perhaps I'll blog about that.

Hm.. that's more than 140 characters I think.

I became a citizen 4 years ago today

2007-10-09T10:20:00.001-04:00

It's an exciting milestone, but looking back at the last 4 years of US history, I'm starting to think that maybe I'm a jinx... Hm...

Either way, I'll make sure to have a burger or something equally domestic for lunch today. Like a Bud.

Go Junior, Go Senior!

2007-08-16T23:00:00.000-04:00

Last night before my new job (more on which soon, I promise...) Jessie and I went to go see Junior Senior at the Highline Ballroom. Highline Ballrom is kind of a mixed bag (nice big stage and good lighting, two bars... all that's good stuff. 7 bucks for a Bud though? And a bathroom attendant guy? Er, I dunno.)

But onto the most important part: Jessie and I saw Junior Senior with some other folks at Mercury Lounge 2 years ago and we just blown away. You can tell that a typical New York audience is really fired up if they start maybe swaying a little or start nodding their heads extra enthusiastically. But then every once in a while you get a show like this:

That's more like it.

I am sucky blogger

2007-08-10T17:35:00.001-04:00

Remember that epochal event I mentioned and then didn't elaborate on? Today's my last day at the job I've been at for nearly 7 years. Last time I had a last day at a job it was election day 2000. We all know how that night ended up. I think tonight will be better.

Either way, big stuff is afoot and I will get with the blogging about it forthwith. In theory. New job starts next tuesday. Eep! In the meanwhile I've got that excited giddy feeling you got when you were a kid and you were running off the high jump at full speed. Kinda scared crapless but mostly yelling "wheee!" Now I've just got 800 loose ends to tie up before I leave tonight so no more writing now. But more details soon!

Reasons Life's Purty Darned Good

2007-07-24T11:47:00.001-04:00

Spent an awesome weekend with a large batch of friends in a gorgeous house up in the wonderful Catskills swimming at a beautiful swimming hole and playing wonderful games of kubb and BBQing surprisingly tasty food. It appears I may have picked up some kind of tick-borne disease that forces me to overuse adjectives. Hm... At any rate it was really amazingly nice to be out of the city for a weekend. Just plain did my soul good. And the stars, man. Good god the stars.
Had to head out into pouring sheets of rain yesterday morning to move Karu (our adopted car for the summer) and then head to work. I ran like hell to the bodega around the corner to get an umbrella (as we were fresh out) and arrived soaking. So I ask for an umbrella and the guy behind the counter says they're fresh out. Nuts. Seriously, it's ark-building weather outside. I start looking around and pick up a copy of the Post to use as a temporary umbrella. It's got to be good for something right?

In the meanwhile the counter guy's been looking around the store and he's on the phone. He comes back to the register and says "Yeah sorry I tried looking to see if we had any others and called the owners to see if we had any more hiding anywhere. But hey, I mean, do you just want to borrow mine?" He asks, producing a small umbrella from under the counter. I'm just kind of in shock. "Wow, um, thanks!" I stammered back. "I live right around the corner, I'll bring it back later?" "Sure! No problem." He says. And like that, I'm off for a rainy day, well protected.

I dunno, maybe I've just been in New York too long, but I'm always kind of just astonished when someone who's basically a stranger does something totally unnecessarily friendly and helpful, even if it's just with something like a $3 umbrella. I went back this morning and thanked him profusely and gave him his umbrella back. He looked kind of surprised to see me but thanked me for bringing it back and pointed to the new stock of Chinese umbrellas. "Next time, we got you covered.".
Twisted Mister won the World Series of Pop Culture, which does my heart good 'cause hey man, NYU pride, right? But seriously, I have absofuckinglutely no idea what I would do at that age with $83,333.333333333333333333. Probably something really stupid.
Today promises to be an interesting, possibly epochal kinda day. Of that I can say no more. But yoikes.

Ways in which by time is taken up

2007-07-16T08:32:00.000-04:00

It's summer in New York and there's a million better things to be doing than sitting inside watching TV. I've even made a pretty conscious decision of late to avoid watching just "whatever's on" in favor of ya know, just reading a book or anything else.

That said, I'm not ashamed to admit that I think I could watch 24 hours straight of the World Series of Pop Culture no problem. Okay maybe I'm a little ashamed.

Art of The Spectacle

2007-07-09T01:04:00.000-04:00

This weekend I took in two things which were both intended to fall under the banner of "spectacle".

One was a Friday night viewing of the Transformers movie. I have a hard time deciding whether my standards were too high or too low going in. Honestly I'm still split on the whole thing. On the one hand it had BIG. FUCKING. ROBOTS. Smacking each other around, firing guns, crushing buildings, blowing up busses and (hilarilously) flicking off humans like they were fleas. On the other hand, the second John Turturo's character got copiously peed on by a gigantic CGI robot you kind of had think to yourself that boy, there's a reason Michael Bay doesn't direct comedies. Oddly enough some of the, let's say, "actingy" bits in this movie were actually quite good! Funny, a little affecting... ya know, better than expected. And then you have the star of Barton Fink being peed on by a giant CGI robot.

also, I couldn't stop thinking of this Perry Bible Fellowship comic. My final rating of this movie on a scale of 1-10: It's summer.

Then on Saturday on a whim I decided to see if I could get into the Boredoms 77 Drummer musical piece that they were playing in a park basically under the Brooklyn bridge. Because it was 7/7/07. and the # 7 is very important. apparently.

I got down there about 4:30 and the line stretched far enough that from the front it still took about 10 minutes at a brisk pace to get to the end. Apparently the park had a capacity of 4000 and I would estimate based on how many people didn't get in that at least twice that showed up. Actually I would guess that of the people who were standing in line, maybe 15% of them had ever heard a song by the Boredoms. I'm honestly in the other 85%. But then, New York loves a spectacle and a 77 minute long piece with 77 drummers? come on now!

As it was, I stood in line with Lukasz and another guy I know from Taiko for a good long while before we were basically informed to give up. On the other hand we were told, it was going to be "fucking loud" so if we could find ourselves a comfy grassy spot, we would certainly be able to HEAR the show. So off we went over a small fence out onto a breakwater of big angular boulders. Across a tiny bay, there were a set of fences, some trees and on the other side was where the show was actually taking place. So we set up shop, got ourselves some beers and settled in. And honestly I think we lucked out! Sure we didn't get to see the whole coiled snake spectacle up front for ourselves. But instead we got to sit right by the water watching the sun set, drinking beers, enjoying the company of our friends and listening the music wash out across the water towards us. It was really kind of magical in its own way having nothing to do with the spectacle of the event and everything to do with just a bunch of people getting together just to be and relax and take something in.

And yes, I accept that all of that sounds terribly hippie and frutiy, but what can I tell you, it was that kind of afternoon. More than anything, I realized that although I live surrounded by water and streams and islands, I find myself down at the water amazingly infrequently. And even more than that, as you're sitting around chatting with a bunch of complete strangers at some hugely attended manifestation of weird art-rock with the sun setting behind almost century-old skyscrapers on a random Saturday, it's hard not to say that we don't live in the best city on the planet.

I'm just saying.

Also, it has not yet been destroyed by giant robots.

Poop.

2007-06-21T14:48:00.001-04:00

Looks like the whole Wiimbledon tournament has enough press that I couldn't even managed to register. There were three open windows to register and I tried on on wednesday one whole minute after registration opened but apparently that was one whole minute too late.

Balls.

I was actually really excited about the whole thing, even though i guess there was a pretty good chance I'd get creamed in the first round by some pasty kid just crawling out of their basement after a months long Wii Tennis binge. Since you're supposed to play under a pseudonym, I was even going to be playing in homage to a childhood tennis icon as Mats Wiilander.

Bah.

So now I guess I can go on Saturday and watch other folks play (or hope that perhaps I'll get one of the walk-in slots) but who knows, maybe I'd just sit around feeling jealous that I couldn't get in there and kick ass. Either way: bummer. Good thing the rest of the weekend is shaping up to be packed with really fun things, not the least of which is Midsommar in the park tomorrow.

Horny

2007-06-09T17:03:00.001-04:00

Horny
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher

Hello my name is totally sweet set of mounted horns martin bought at a stoop sale this morning.

Wiimbledon

2007-06-04T22:50:00.000-04:00

Wiimbledon: Brooklyn's first Wii tennis tournament. Sure, sounds a little goofy, and who knows if the whole thing will actually end up happening, but give 'em credit for a catchy pun at least. Looks like it's time time to get training. Maybe I can convince heatha and mike to come up to Brookland and show off their skills.

my first gamefly delivery.

2007-05-17T20:19:00.001-04:00

my first gamefly delivery.
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Warioware. 'cause i decided that damn if don't just have too much disposible income! i mean my wii might get lonely, right?

Achieve The Honorable

2007-05-14T16:35:00.001-04:00

Achieve The Honorable
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Up the Empire in Hollywood. Just got back from spending 4 days out in
California with these goofy bastards playing shows, driving long
stretches, discussing anatomical functions and discussing anatomical
functions while driving long stretches. Good times, good times.

Being back at work is proving amazingly painful.

oh my we are all going fucking loopy

2007-05-10T18:45:00.000-04:00

last night's show was a crap ton of fun and once again i've gotten to see a city almost entirely from the confines of a show venue... spent all of today driving to LA and with an hour left, evryone's starting to go slightly insane. but hey, it's a social, memorable kind of insane! Man I've missed touring...

California all the way... Packing

2007-05-09T01:12:00.001-04:00

California all the way...

Packing up for a four day trip to go play the rock with Up the Empire. Kind of awesome.

testing

2007-05-08T19:01:00.001-04:00

Mazel Tov!

2007-05-07T09:47:00.000-04:00

Had an amazing time at the (second) wedding of these two lovely people yesterday. A couple of folks were back in town who I hadn't seen in a while which was nice. Also the pair's extended families were kind of awesome to meet (for some) or to behold from a distance (for others). But generally the whole thing just had a really fun, relaxed happy vibe to it. Maybe I'm just getting more used to weddings? But really percentage wise, relatively few of the weddings I've been to are of people who are really close, active, most-likely-to-bump-into-them-every-week-or-two kind of friends so that made the whole thing really kind of amazing too. Plus I think somehow oddly I've managed to get comfortable wearing a suit. Yikes.

It was interesting though to have a wedding that started at 11, meaning that you're at the reception--in this case at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden--by noon. One would think it an odd time to start hitting the open bar and munching on spare ribs, sushi and gravlax appetizers especially if like yours truly you'd had to run out of the house sans breakfast. But one would be wrong. It were lovely. And that's when it (cockamamie money making scheme I'll more than likely not follow through on #30253) struck me:

A breakfast joint. Prix fixe. Open bar. No or few tables. Food consists entirely of hors d'oeuvres carried around by waiters also carrying small cocktail napkins. Formal attire suggested.

Afters some discussion with my fellow minglers, it was decided that naming the place Wedding Reception might be a little too basic, so we upgraded to Shotgun Wedding. I think it's got genius written all over it.

How to have the best birthday of your life and then put off writing about it for 3 weeks

2007-05-04T19:23:00.001-04:00

Allow Me To Introduce: The Best People Ever, originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Step 1: have best birthday of your life.

So I did a lot of dithering about what kind of thing I actually wanted to do for my birthday. Small informal gathering, big blow out shindig, fishing trip, solo sulking? In the end I settled on having a big ol' BBQ and full on Kubb tournament in prospect park followed by some proper drinking, pool-shooting and taco eating at San Loco. Brilliant.

So then of course in the week leading up to the whole thing my nervousness is mounting. Will the thing work? Will people show up? Can I actually get my slacker friends organized into a for-real tournament? Would it stop snowing and actually be nice enough to be out?

But when I got up on the 14th the snow was gone, the sun was out and much to my surprise my knees only creaked a little more than they had when I was 30. Finally after a stressful morning of getting all the required BBQ ingredients together with Jessie, Jeremy & Sarah, we ended up in the park which was nicer and warmer than it had any right to be and blessedly kind of empty. I was a little worried at first that we'd shown up 30 minutes late and nobody else was there, but seemingly I'd forgotten the rule that nobody I know shows up to anything less than an hour late.

But soon the whole thing was in full swing, beers being rapidly consumed, stuff grilling, me yelling at people through a bullhorn to get the whole tournament started. Which, I'm proud to say, went off really well. It ended up being whole fairly complicated double elimination tournament of randomly assigned teams and other than the fact that my team got utterly spanked, the whole thing was really fun. At the end of the day after a stirring Kazoo rendition of The Final Countdown and the Canadian National Anthem, Kubblic Enemy were presented with the Hello My Name Is Kubb Championship Trophy which they get to hang onto until next year, Stanley Cup style, they have to pass it on to the next winners.

All the kubb stuff aside, it was just really humbling to have that many people (the picture above's just a portion of them) showing up on your account. My sister and Milo came from Jersey which was great. lots of people I haven't seen in a while crawled out of whatever rock they'd been under and out into the spring. At one point I was walking back down from the picnic house towards where we were all set up and I seriously had this taken aback moment seeing a whole milling around crowd of people having a good time and basically realizing how lucky I am to have such a large mob of awesome friends.

(I later proceeded to by the end of the evening get drunk enough to tell everyone how awesome I think they are. But hey, it was from the heart.)

All of that over, most of the folks trekked up to Williamsburg to San Loco which has worked its way up to being just about my favorite bar in Williamsburg on account of the pop punk soundtrack, 50 cent empty pool table, margaritas and of course the catfish guaco loco. Once there, I proceeded to play a lot of fun pool, engage in by turns insightful or idiotic conversations... basically it was the perfect capper to what had already been the best birthday a guy could plan for himself.

Basically I'm screwed next year as it's gonna almost certainly have to be a notch down..

Step 2: Put off writing about said best birthday for 3 weeks.

It's really starting to piss me off that things both wonderful and awful are passing by without me at least making some kind of note about them here. I guess I'm just rusty enough at even writing that I keep feeling like I need to give myself the time and space to get it all out properly. But of course then it never happens. Having a blog kind of half-on like this is pretty sad so who knows, maybe I'll just put an end to the thing, but at least I've gotten this event down. So there.

I have 7 hours left of my 20's

2007-04-13T16:53:00.000-04:00

I have 7 hours left of my twenties, which feels kind of momentous when you look at it that way. To be honest it seems like less of an occasion for any kind of freaking out or anything (I did that about a month ago) and more of a time to sit back and say hey, my 20s were pretty fucking fabulous. I mean for what it's worth, I vastly preferred them to my 10s. But but thinking back, I've done a hell of a lot in those years, been to a hell of a lot of places, played a lot of music, met a LOT of people, turned many of them into great friends, managed to both start and stop smoking. It's been full of love and heartbreak and highs and lows and regrets and all of that good stuff. It's almost never been boring.

I think it's safe to say that it was a span of ten years where I definitively made New York my home and I think probably the place I'll always think of as home base.

And hey, for what it's worth, I think it's the time when I really came into my own as a person and figured out who I am more than maybe defining myself in opposition to a lot of the things around me I disliked.

So anyway, I'm not going to be 10 years older tomorrow, just one year, or hell one day really, so no need to get melodramatic about it. But I guess every time I get a little cranky about my twenties being behind me, I guess it's worth reminding myself that I did make the most of them and now it's time to get on with making the most of this day and this year and this minute and all the rest of it.

I would like to be a boss because I like to make rules.

2007-03-22T18:51:00.001-04:00

I would like to be a boss because I like to make rules., originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

At the Greenpoint YMCA the other day Jessie pointed out this piece of genius hanging up with a bunch of other kids' drawings about what they wanted to be when they grow up . You really gotta see it in detail to get the full-blown effect of how awesome this thing is.

Personally I think this has "oldest sibling" written all over it. Be careful, your kids are one day going to end up working for this girl's kids, I promise.

Victory!

2007-03-07T16:57:00.000-05:00

U.S. Mint Goof Creates 'Godless Dollars'

Well ok, so it was only a mistake, but still!

I'm not going to lead a protest march over it, but I also don't think you need to be a cranky atheist like me to think that having "In God We Trust" is anachronistic and wrong in a country with as many flavors of religious belief and disbelief as the US. I'm just sayin'. There's something about a wall.. I forget how the saying goes.. hm.

Why have my parts of the week reversed?

2007-03-05T20:15:00.000-05:00

Somehow it seems that the parts of my week have reversed. Last week it seems I spent pretty much the entire work week staying out too late, having too much to drink and coming home with some level of hearing loss. Or a new bowling high score. This weekend I was left just wanting to lie on the couch whimpering and catching up on a bunch of movies and TV and when energy presented itself cleaning. Now the week's starting up again and I'm off in an hour or so go see the Thermals at the dance club / occasional show venue Studio B which I predict may leave me a little incoherent tomorrow morning. If everything goes according to plan. I'm to old for this shit.

Actually thankfully as it turns out I'm not, but thoughts of aging and all that fun stuff are ever-present these days, since I've got roughly a month left of my 20's. The benefit of having friends that span at least five years in age either direction is that one half gets to call you names and point out the stray gray hair in your beard and the other half gets to tell you to get over yourself and just relax. So hapilly I think I'm falling in somewhere in the middle and not getting too exercised about the whole thing.

Actually more than anything I think my biggest headache at this point is figuring out proper ways to commemorate the whole thing. I've kicked around all manner of ideas but none of them seem to have quite the right balance of not-a-big-deal / big celebratory occasion/ doable in mid-april. Why couldn't I have been born like a month later for weather purposses? It all reminds me of the one time I tried to do a birthday bbq and half the guests freezed their privates off. Litterally! It was ugly.

Either way, for my birthday or not, I predict that there will be a big, highly organized invitational Kubb tournament in a park somewhere in say, a month or two. You heard it here first.

And hey beyond that, as much as I'm kind of loathe to hit my parents up for anything (at this advanced age) certainly this seems like a prime opportunity to squeeze the folks for a little parental largesse! In what manner should I abuse their good will?!

Big questions, all. That said, it's now time to get heading and go hop up and down at a show with an audience that will no doubt make me eat all of my big words about feeling well-adjusted about pushing 30.

YouTube Can Remember It For You Wholesale

2007-02-26T14:09:00.000-05:00

Never mind the weird old commercials or grainy home video footage of people getting pegged in the nuts with sporting equipment. With all the old videos, weird live clips and other bits of musical pop culture, YouTube is crack for music junkies like myself. And every once in a while you just find something that makes your jaw drop.

There's an upcoming Yo La Tengo show at Webster Hall of all places, and Jessie and I were discussing whether we should go or not. It ain't cheap, but then again (I was telling her) every time I've seen them live, they were absolutely amazing. Except for the first time when I saw them as an opening band in high school and I thought they were the absolute worst thing I'd ever heard in my entire life.

It was 1994, actually 13 years and a week ago today. I was 16 and I was beyond excited to be going into New York to go see Teenage Fanclub (on the 13 Tour) at Irving Plaza, my 14 year old little sister in tow. It was only the second "real", in-the-city show I'd actually been to. Opening were a band I'd never heard of called Scarce and Yo La Tengo from whom I'd only heard the song "Double Dare" which a girlfriend had put on a mixtape.

Scarce turned out to be awesome. Noisy, playful. Good stuff. I bought a 7" of theirs which had some great songs on it. If you can ever track it down, the Red EP is great stuff, but a brain hemorrhage and a major label flop later they (as far as I know) disappeared entirely.

Yo La Tengo took the stage and proceed to unleash what I remember as two and half hours of skronky guitar, endless keyboard drones, thin-voiced singing... I was horrified. For some reason this just wasn't clicking with my 16 year old sensibilities, although of course now my almost 30 year old self would have eaten that up. The worst part however was that every minute YLT played was one minute less I'd get to see Teenage Fanclub: my mom was coming to grab Camilla and I from outside at midnight or so, to cart us back to suburban NJ. Hey I was thrilled enough that she'd been okay about driving us into the city while she cooled her heels at some coffeeshop around the corner for 3 hours, so I accepted midnight as a compromise, but damned if I didn't hate Yo La Tengo at that moment.

But finally the horror show was over and Teenage Fanclub came on, and although I'm absolutely viewing this through the awestruck eyes of a 16 year old, it was an amazing show. One thing that was really weird about it though (and this is where YouTube finally comes in) is that there was a whole bunch of camera men all over the place, and even a camera mounted on a big boom that would occasionally swoop over the audience.

At one point I remember Normal Blake stopped to explain something along the lines of "We're taping this show for Japanese TV. We're huge there. No seriously. We're talking millions". Or something like that.

So I'm relating all this to Jessie and a light goes off in my head. And Lo and Behold:

and

I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but there it is. Presumably if you freeze frame at just the right time, you can see 16 year old me hopping up and down and checking his watch every 2 seconds to see if he can squeeze in one more song before he has to leave. One day in the future, I suspect everyone's public memories will be archived on YouTube in some form. Either way, it was one of those amazing moments when the internet coughs up something from your past and makes it feel like it was yesterday.

Related: some guy at Columbia's description of the same show. Ahhh internet.

Today's Movie Recomendation

2007-02-21T18:45:00.001-05:00

The Lives of Others

I'm usually a big fan of foreign movies, but this is the first time I can think of that there have been two nominees for best foreign language film that both feel as strongly about. The Lives of Others is set in an East German 1984 that somehow looks like the West's 1974 and does an amazing job of bringing to vivid life what the day to day of life in a totalitarian state was like. From the small fears, to the everyday bending of the rules and the omnipresence (imagined or not) of the surveillance state it follows both the lives and fears and motivations of people on both sides of the hidden microphone intimately and humanely, often with not a little bit of humor.

I don't have the kind of energy or attention to detail required to put together a personal best of the year list, but I'm pretty certain that it'd be on there.

Then again, I somehow found myself at a showing of Flyboys this year, so I'd take anything I say about movies with a grain of salt.

How to Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance

2007-02-14T11:07:00.001-05:00

I mean okay, even I'm not so nerdy that I'd take dating advice from Wired magazine, but I guess it's the flickr addict in me that found this valentine's day guide to turning your flickr crush into a real romance kinda fascinating.

Well and then again, I'm not much in the market for dating advice as I happen to have the coolest girlfriend ever. Neener neener. As neither of us are rabid "valentine's day people", tonight's plans include a combination of cheap mexican food, pool, a good show at the local polish nightclub/occasional good show venue and perhaps a long overdue vicious Halo throwdown. Whoo and also Hah.

Educating Rudy

2007-02-08T15:03:00.001-05:00

Last night I had a very weird dream in which I was part of an informal round-table of folks questioning Rudy Giuliani about various issues, most of them weirdly tech related. In this particular dream world (perhaps a nightmare world?) Rudy was still mayor of New York. Somehow it came around to my turn to ask him something and I decided to tell him all about how I had gone to NYU to become a high school history teacher, presumably in New York. But, I explained, by the time I'd gotten through a year of observation in schools and student teaching I decided that I'd rather go full time at the cushy overpaid dotcom era programming job I'd been working than work worse hours at a more stressful job burdened by an insane bureaucracy for a vastly smaller amount of money. Rather than expressing that basically, I'd punked out, I was about to spin this into a heartfelt request that the city actually take a serious look at teacher salaries and try to retain some of the many people who burn out of the system each year... and then I woke up.

I'm left thinking the Giuliani angle probably came up because of a worth-reading Crooks Liars article about what the rest of America Should Know About Rudy. I'm always kind of baffled when he's held up as and ideal candidate for president and reading stuff like this at least reassures me that he's probably got enough negative baggage that his campaign won't get too far off the ground. At least that's what I'm hoping.

The weird education angle kind of confused me at first, though. I hadn't really thought much recently about my alternate-timeline self that went into teaching. I haven't really thought tons about the problems in New York's education system, either. Then I got on the G train this morning onto a car full of junior high kids with their teachers underway on a field trip to somewhere in Manhattan. In between joking with his students and trying to keep them from getting out of hand a teacher who was, now that I thought about it, about my age would mention "Hey, this is the stop where I live " pointing to the Greenpoint stop as it whizzed past. I looked at the students being obnoxious but funny and obviously happy to be out of class, bunches of them gathering in various corners to play multiplayer PSP games. And I just kind of flashed back to dealing with kids their age and how much better it feels to get one kind of nod of recognition out of a student than it does to get a bunch of stupid computers to do your bidding.

So maybe the universe's message for me this morning is that I'm in the wrong line of work. Hell that could also be why everything technological I touch today seems to turn to poop.

All Skiid Out

2007-02-06T18:41:00.001-05:00

All Skiid Out, originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

This weekend I went skiing with these fine folks at Pennsylvania's "fun sized" Blue Mountain Ski Area. Shockingly I managed to not get up on a pair of skis at all last year so hey what can I tell you, it was fucking wonderful. I was a bit rusty at first but after a while I got it all back, and considering what a crappy winter it's been and well, the fact that it's Blue Mountain, the skiing was actually really good! So I'm now massively hungry for more.

Also, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of seeing it, bask in the glory of my gigantic puffy ski jacket, inherited from my dad and now in something like it's 20th season of ski usage. Rock on, puffy coat. Rock on.

Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life

2007-01-31T13:31:00.001-05:00

I've been seeing all of these news reports everywhere about Sweden opening up the first official diplomatic outpost of a country in Second Life. On one level it's exciting to see one of my home countries taking a bold new step forward in communicating and branding itself and all that. On the other hand, Second Life is pretty amazingly lame. Now granted, I've only spent a couple of hours toying around with it, and maybe those weren't even at peak times or anything like that. But the whole thing struck me as kind of a ghost world half built projects, empty stores, meeting areas with nobody to meet and lots of cheesy little ways to get people to fork over a small quantity of money in return for nothing in particular, just so they can feel the thrill of being part of an amazing new online economy. Which as it turns out, may be kind of a scam.

Otherwise, the couple of places I did find other people trucking around, they were engaged in talking about the one avatar that looked like a dancing midget Hitler (yep), or standing around in circles chatting like a bunch of (45 year old men pretending to be) horny teenagers in an old school AOL chat room. At one point I actually checked out a "night club" area and found one big room with some cheezy disco ball effects, some generic euro dance piped in via streaming audio and a bunch of avatars who had selected one of their pre-programmed "dance" motions standing around like a bunch of big-titted raver versions of the anamatronic bears at chuck-e-cheese. Except to the extent that it looked like some kind of weird Kraftwerk robot fever dream, the whole thing was kinda tragic.

Anyway, I'm sure lots of other people get a lot out of the whole Second Life experience, and I'm sure there's tons of wonderful adventures I'm missing out on, but for now I'm not sold and suspect that all the recent anti-hype backlash is pretty well justified. It's an interesting idea, but at least in its current form it's not exactly "The Way Forward".

Which I guess brings it all back to the embassy. Sure it's clever to hop on board with something getting a lot of press, but hey The Metaverse it ain't and I can't imagine how much more of a pain in the ass it would be to, say, find out where to get a passport application from as opposed to just going to their website. But maybe you can hang out with dancing midget Hitler?

Beckham, eh?

2007-01-11T16:23:00.000-05:00

Although people are probably getting their hopes up a little bit too much, the signing of David Beckham by the LA Galaxy certainly can't hurt Major League Soccer, or the sport's standing in the US. Even for Americans who only know him as that guy who's married to that Spice Girl, at least they'll know the name of a single American soccer player, which I guess is something to be thankful for.

I've only ever been to two MLS games. The first one was when the league was still relatively novel and so there were parents with soccer playing kids and a bunch of skins with dreams of being English soccer hooligans and doing a pretty half-assed impersonation job. But still it was all pretty empty and under-attended, to the point where you could just get up and opt for a closer seat (one that would have cost you a pretty penny during that other football season) and actually be close enough to hurl insults at the players that they could actually hear. And this was at Giants stadium, mind you. I also went last year to see an exhibition game between the New York Red Bulls (shiver) and European club powerhouse Bayern Munich. Except for a lot of sauced Germans, it was kind of amazing to see a stadium that empty.

One of the movies I enjoyed most last year was the documentary Once In A Lifetime, an amazing documentary about the rise and fall of the New York Cosmos soccer team during the 70's. Fueled by huge infusions of cash from its enthusiastic owners and more importantly the importation of past-their-prime stars like Pele, the Cosmos became a national phenomenon to the point where the film shows beautiful saturated 70s footage of that very same Giants stadium packed with a sold out crowd going apeshit over a soccer match. Watching it on the heels of weeks worth of World Cup fueled soccer obsession, I swear that seeing that footage gave me goosebumps. A reviewer described those scenes as a kind of potent look at a what-if world where Americans gave a rat's ass about the sport. Even more than that what gets me is that that it did happen and yet 25 years later almost nobody remembers and soccer teams play in empty arenas.

So will Beckham coming to America lead to another exciting but temporary bump in interest, with sold out games and some actual media coverage. Or has the MLS turned a corner and turned into something resembling an actual respectable soccer league. I guess even if it turns into the retirement home for former superstars to do a victory lap, that would be pretty exciting.

When I think January, I think BBQ

2007-01-07T15:45:00.000-05:00

We woke up on saturday to discover that not only was it kind of sunny out, it was actually spring-ishly warm. Down the street at McGolrick park, the playground was full of screaming kids, and people were walking around everywhere in T-shirts savoring the 72 degree weather. The only thing to be done obviously, was hit he park. The night before we'd hatched an emergency "the weather is beautiful, let's Kubb" plan, but Ben and Kate stepped it up an extra notch by suggesting we grill some stuff too. So there we found ourselves in the afternoon in the middle of January, firing up the grill and laying down picnic blankets and kind of unofficially starting up the kubb season.

It took a little while to get over how freakish it was to be lying in McCarren park, soaking in the sun and staring up at the blue sky but right through the naked branches of trees that hadn't had a leaf in months. Everywhere people were just walking around in kind of a daze it seemed. And I guess the other thing we hadn't counted on was the fact that since, ya know, it's the middle of the winter, it gets dark a hell of a lot earlier.

The first thing of course that everyone jokingly says is "Oooh ahh, global warming" and although I make the jokes myself, it's the kind of thing that's important for people who actually care about the environment not to get confused about. As this interview on NPR explains, yesterday's weird weather doesn't exactly prove global warming any more than the blizzards in Colorado disprove global warming, despite what Fox News might have to say on the matter. It's all much more complicated than that. I guess all I'm saying is that keeping straight what's the real deal and what's just awfully freaky, well, that helps when you're trying to convince people whose heads are lodged up their asses on the whole matter.

But either way, even though it hasn't been much of a winter so far, it still felt like a mini-vacation or a recess right in the middle. Now if it'd be kind enough to get cold and snow, I'd like to not spend an another entire winter without skiing once, if that's quite alright.

Possibly the largest cost/weight ratio of anything I've ever bought

2007-01-03T16:00:00.001-05:00

Possibly the largest cost/weight ratio of anything I've ever bought, originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

This practically weightless tiny cardboard box which contains presumably just a couple of scraps of paper set me back an astonishing $315 for three years of service. It's one of those things you tend to class as "an investment" but I better hope my laptop starts having problems pronto to justify all this.

oy.

2007-01-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

This is easily the most hung over I've been all year.

Happy New Year, people.

Worst Ads of the Year

2006-12-27T11:11:00.000-05:00

One of the many blessings of having a DVR is that I've only seen most of the ads in Slate's worst TV ads of the year in the form of a digitized blur. Some of them like the Visa automatons commercial are truly terrifying. And that Intel ad is truly one of those moments when you see an ad agency grasp at hipness and miss by a mile. I do resent the gratuitous dig at high school ska bands though ("What are these people wearing? Denim culottes? Green velvet suit vests? A snap-brim hat with a feather in the band? They look like they're in a high school ska band.") Man we're never going to live down that era, are we?

Still I happen to think that the Traveller's ad with the shark-cage is one of those few ads that perfectly hits my particular dark sense of humor right on, kind of in the same way that I would laugh uncontrollably the first couple of times I saw that Fed Ex caveman ad. I'm kind of hoping for more of that next year.

That and that a large block of hashish (preferably without legs) accompanies my next pizza delivery.

Go West

2006-12-26T14:08:00.000-05:00

I'm lucky that I moved to the U.S. and started learning English at an early enough age that I managed to obliterate any trace of a Swedish accent. Well I don't know maybe that's unlucky. Might have seemed sort of exotic to still have a twinge of it hanging around. I will say that getting rid of it seemed like a survival imperative when I got forcibly dropped into the Anglophone world in second grade.

Still I guess the real blessing is that of all the accents I could have ended up with, I didn't get saddled with a hardcore Joisey accent. Instead, I've got just kind of a blandly non-regional thing going on, that every once in a while leads people to ask me if I'm Canadian which hey, isn't the end of the world.

So I was kind of fascinated to take this "highly scientific" what american accent do you have quiz. I guess the results sort of bear out what I already knew, but still I'm amazed that I've picked up as little "northeast" as I have. Apparently.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you're a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta.
The Midland
Boston
North Central
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The South
The Inland North
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Things I Totally Missed in Movies I Watched and Loved in the 1980's #25917

2006-12-19T11:23:00.000-05:00

The part in Innerspace where Dr. Canker and Mr. Igoe (the henchman with the various snap on robotic hand replacements) are having a romantic evening and as the camera pans away you see him snap on what appears to be a large silver vibrator which then proceeds to start buzzing as Dr. Canker laughs with pleasure and the screen fades to black. As a young lad, boy howdy, I sure did not pick up on what was going on there back when that movie was on HBO all the time.

Shiver.

That said, I had a lovely night of hanging out with Jessie, Jeremy and Sarah drinking white Russians, watching the aforementioned film (which has held up surprisingly well) and making decorations for our new houseguest Piney McGhee. I also got some advice on how to make Swedish christmas tree ornaments from my sister in Jersey over an iChat video chat which was so kind of weirdly the-future-is-now that I think I'm still trying to get my head around it.

Ah life on the G train.

2006-12-16T13:12:00.001-05:00

Respect.

Recreating New York in Sim City 4

2006-12-12T10:36:00.000-05:00

Via A Brooklyn Life, I stumbled onto this fascinating project to recreate all of New York City in Sim City 4. The guy's done some really amazing work and I can't wait to follow it as it develops. I think like anyone who's ever been sucked into Sim City (and I got hooked real early on), I can't wait to see what happens when he unleashes that Godzilla knock-off on the city. You know, the one that heads straight for sources of pollution and... Well I guess Greenpoint's doomed.

Still, for someone as in love with this city and all of its neighborhoods as I am, having a pocket model of the city like this to zoom around through sounds amazingly cool, even if I don't think I'd ever have the kind of obsessive dedication it would take to put it together myself.

On a related, lo-fi'er note, check out Sean Kenney's Brick Apple, versions of New York city landmarks and neighborhoods in Lego.

"Haven't you ever taken a shortcut?"

2006-12-11T13:09:00.000-05:00

For any of you who were fans of the brilliant zombie comedy (zombedy?) Shaun of The Dead, the trailers for Hot Fuzz are definitely worth a look.

Sweeeeeeedes Iiiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaaaaaaace

2006-12-10T02:53:00.000-05:00

(to be said in the "pigs in space" voice).

See, of course one day after I post this whole thing about how human spaceflight as we're doing it now is a waste of time... well of course I'm on the edge of my seat and reading the news awe and wonder. Why? As of this evening, Christer Fuglesang is the first Swede in space. Which rules. The hometown papers are all agog with big full page pictures of the space shuttle blasting off into the Florida night, and hey, the enthusiasm is kind of contagious.

So how to square this with the fact that I do still kind of think that we're wastin our time and money on the shuttle and the ISS... I don't know, honestly. Any and all answers are welcome.

In the meanwhile, heja Sverige!

No moon for you.

2006-12-08T18:20:00.000-05:00

As much as I'm an enormous geek for space exploration, I can't help agree with Gregg Easterbrook that there's no point to building Bush's moon base, maybe beyond saying "Hey, look at us! We have a Moon Base!" I mean for what it's worth, the idea of a Moon base conjures up all kinds of fun pop culture images from 2001 to Austin Powers, but once we managed to get everything all set up we'd pretty soon discovered that once again we'd sunk tons of money into the pockets of aerospace contractors with nothing much of value to show for it. Space shuttle, international space station: They're both pretty gee whiz things that were sold on overblown premises and have delivered on almost none of it. If they do get their way and end up adding "Moon Base" to the list, I kind of wonder what the public's appetite for further exploration that will actually mean something (like a trip to Mars for example) will be.

As unsexy as sending a robot on wheels to do our work for us, it's hard to argue with the results. Just this morning for example I ran across this picture of the sun setting on Mars taken by one of the Mars rovers. I found myself just staring at it and saying "Damn, that's cool".

Sigh then again, I guess if you plopped an astronaut waving to the camera into the picture...

"Yeah, let's sing it now!"

2006-12-08T10:34:00.000-05:00

For your confusion and amusement, the Chipmunk Christmas Song played at the actual speed at which it was sung. I first ran across this last year on Toby's blog if memory serves. But hey it's a classic and oddly it's been coming up in conversation a bit for the last week.

Enjoy.

On a side note, what I hadn't realized about the song is the fact that one guy did ALL the voices on the song. Which for some reason kind of fascinates me. Yes, when you start blogging about things that fuck with sacred christmas traditions, you know the season has truly begun.

The future is then

2006-12-06T16:47:00.000-05:00

I think I'm not the only person who sometimes says to themselves "Holy crap, I just signed a check with 12/06/TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SIX! It's totally "the future". But man it doesn't look a damned bit like what I pictured it would look like. Every time I think that, I kind of have to pause and say that for what it's worth, I'm gainfully employed in a field that barely even existed when I was in high school, but still, all of the cameraphones and ipods and whoosits and blogs and whatnots don't quite stand up to jetpacks and robot butlers.

What HAS stood up remarkably well however is this set of
AT&T commercials about the future which Andrew Sullivan dug up, where else, on Youtube. If you're of a certain age, you'll no doubt remember these Tom Selleck narated ads which feature such futuristic technology as... EZ Pass? Hm. Either for the most part it's pretty uncanny prediction for 1993, except as Sullivan points out, that AT&T didn't imagine that they'd have very little actual impact on those technologies coming into play.

I'm still very happy I've never been put to bed via videophone from a phonebooth, however.

On an interesting side-note: The ads were directed by David Fincher, of Se7en, Fight Club and, well, Alien3 fame. I was somewhat surprised to discover, however, that he's also the man who brought us the videos for Paula Abdul's Straight Up. Who'd a guessed.

I call bullshit

2006-12-05T17:59:00.000-05:00

This article, while very interesting, was totally not what I thought it was going to be about: Probe's powerful camera spots Vikings on Mars.

How you can help

2006-12-01T20:36:00.000-05:00

So by now you're probably tired of me going on and on about my damned mustache but at the same time wondering "Now that we know you're serious about this whole thing, how can I actually contribute some money to this very worthwhile cause." All goofiness aside, the donations collected for Mustaches For Kids New York are going to The Children's Hospital of New Orleans which needs all of our help more than ever. If you have even $5 (or hell $1.53) to contribute, it's very much appreciated.

If you'd like to contribute, there's two ways to do it:

1) The Super Legit Way (tax refundable!): Since this is all going to a for really reals charity, donations made by check are actually tax deductible. From the official mustaches for kids website: "Checks should be made payable to the Children's Hospital with "Mustaches for Kids" written in the Memo portion. All proceeds from the Mustaches for Kids Mustache Growing Contest and Fundraiser go to the Children's Hospital of New Orleans, which is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to providing healthcare to young people of New Orleans and Louisiana. Donations submitted by check are tax-deductible." The one caveat is that the check won't be cashed until around the new year, just so's you're aware. To get me a check, either see me in person if you're one of those folks lucky enough to know me not-just-through-the-internet. Otherwise, just email me and I'll get you my mailing address where you can send the goods.

2) The Schnazzy Internet The Future Is Now Method: Just click the picture below and donate money (again, seriously ANY amount no matter how piddling is very very appreciated) via Paypal. True, it's not tax deductible that way, and Paypal does take a tiny cut, but if you think that you're unlikely to get it together an other way, I really really encourage you to use this option. For real. Besides which, I spent a whole 5 minutes on this graphic, so make it worth my while, huh?

Oh hell yeah

2006-12-01T01:50:00.000-05:00

Oh hell yeah
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Hey there!

Mostly Im' just posting this photo 'cuase MAN I look fucking scuzzy. But you know, in a good way. And it's for the kids and what not. But more on that in a moment.

More importantly: I'm feeling a deep level of shame that just now at the finish line I've fallen down badly on my whole one post a day thing. Really, what the hell is up with that? I was doing so well for a while. Really I blame the great tragedy of my 9000 word essay on the state of contemporary cinema being eaten for discouraging me. But no more, I will ride out the rest of this month with... oh wait. Crap. It's the last of the month.

Well maybe I'll just keep going, how about that? A post a day it is. I can take it if you can.

As for the picture over there to the right, tonight was Mustaches For Kids 2006 checkpoint #2. After a few beers, numerous games of moon patrol and (gaaah) a Jaeger shot at Barcade, it was off to the fairly sketchy Bushwick Country Club to meet my fellow growers and join in the Mustachy love. Really I'm kind of in love with the whole organization and for what it's worth, I actually forget for most of the day that I even have a sleazy looking mustache on my face. Until I see a mirror whereupon I spend a few minutes making skeezy faces at myself, give a chuckle and go on with my day. Really I think Jessie's got it a lot worse as she's got to actually look at me on a daily basis trucking around like this. I'm sort of curious what tomorrow night's birthday party for mr. pretentious will be like with "the Awesomemaker" (don't ask).

Either way, I will conclude by saying that a) you can trace my growing progress here and b) check back soon for details on how you can donate money to support the cause. After all, for all the frivolity here, I'm growing this damned mustache because I'm raising money for the Children's Hospital of New Orleans. I just haven't hit you with the hard sell yet 'cause I figured I should actually have a proper stache kicking before I started bugging you for money. That time... is now.

The worst thing about a 4 day weekend

2006-11-27T01:36:00.000-05:00

The worst thing about a 4 day weekend is the way on sunday you feel like going back to work even less than usual. And the way your grammar apparently deteriorates. But yeah, here I'd all gotten all used to you know, doing things I enjoyed doing, that kind of crazy thing. Makes the whole heading back to work thing feel even more dire.

So yeah... Not much more to share than that and oh, yeah: The Wii is even more fun than I'd thought it was going to be, and now I'm having all kinds of really ugly money planning issues. Maybe nobody gets christmas presents this year? hm.

Ah well, off to bed. After all there's work tomorrow. Wheee.

Ohhh ja, mustache.

2006-11-26T01:34:00.000-05:00

Ohhh ja, mustache.
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

For tonight's update, we'll just go with a bit of a mustache update. As some of you may know by now, I'm growing a mustache as part of a charitable organization called Mustaches For Kids that once a year challenges folks like yours truly to walk around with a creepy ass mustache for a whole month (this ordeal ends December 14th) as they solicit donations from those around them. Its like a walkathon except that it takes a whole month and in the intervening time I get to get dirty looks from people who think I'm either a) some type of brooklyn hipster trying to pull the ironic mustache thing or b) a child molester.

Either way, I'm only a week and change in and I'm starting to feel a little weird about the whole thing. So far the "Awesomemaker" (don't ask) is only kind of a light dusting of nastiness on my upper lip. For this we can blame both the fact that I'm swedish and thus am blessed (?) with not much in the facial hair department AND the Jessie-provided closest-shave-of-my-life I had last week. But actually I mean besides the fact that it looks kind of idiotic, I'm sort of finding myself getting into it. I find myself making joking dandy-ish faces into bathroom mirrors. I find myself speaking in fake french accents. And well, I guess I sometimes think that people are looking at me funny. maybe I'm just imagining that part.

Either way, it's so far an adventure, and we'll see how things get later on in the month. Either way, I've already collected $28 in donations! It's not tons, but after giving a halting, slightly drunk half-swedish, half-english speech at thanksgiving dinner, I'm pretty proud of it, even if I don't know if everyone knew EXACTLY what it was that they were donating to. But really it's a good cause. I'll be hitting you up for money soon.

Also coming soon, a list of my mustache inspirations. It'll be exciting.

With the turkey and the what not

2006-11-22T19:51:00.000-05:00

Not tons to report today, except a joyful happy feeling that I'm assuming stems from not having to go to work for the next 4 days. Man that rules. Actually that rules more than usual, especially if you take into account that I had the most awkward at-work political/race conversation I've ever had the pleasure of with a bunch of my coworkers at lunch today. Just gotta shake it off...

Well tomorrow it's of to the Jersey compound for a long day of eating and drinking and then some more eating and probably some more drinking and lots of taking pictures of Milo. And as we pause to sink our teeth into some yummy yummy turkey, can we please ponder how the whole Pardoning of The Turkeys thing just feels creepier and creepier every year? And when your own publicity staff presents this as the best picture of you from said event, maybe it's time to purge the ranks of non-believers.

Incidentally, tonight is the first time I'm gonna shave everything down to the mustache. Here's hoping it doesn't look too ridiculous.

A place to lay my weary head or, The Mattress Industry Can Fucking Cram It

2006-11-21T19:23:00.000-05:00

Once the initial giddiness of deciding to move in together and then the protracted irritation of dealing with New York City real estate had passed, it was time for Jessie and I to decide more important things like "Which bed are we keeping." Sure mine was bigger, but it's not much to look at, and the mattress kind of sucked a bit. Actually, it sucked quite a lot. But our new place was going to be (from what we remembered from our walk-through with our very rad real estate lady Agnes) flippin' huge by Brooklyn standards, and certainly the bedroom would seem kind of empty with anything less than a Queen in it.

So we went with mine, on the theory that soon enough we'd get ourselves a new mattress. In fact my kind folks had even offered some help in that department for my last birthday that I'd entirely failed to take them up on.

Fast forward to today: The place is still as enormous and wonderful as we'd hoped, the initial giddiness shows no particular signs of wearing off and man does my back kill 90% of mornings when I wake up from sleeping on the same damned mattress. Jessie's is no better. Both of us are close to just sleeping crammed in on the couch. We've been trying to track ourselves down a new mattress of course but as soon as we started looking we discovered just how mattress shopping actually sucks a bit. Actually it sucks quite a lot.

Maybe our first mistake was to take a swing by a Sleepy's in Queens with Jeremy where we were instantly terrified. Worth noting that every mattress I've had in New York's been either bought used (yeah yeah I know), someone else's, bought for me by a landlord after a ceiling collapse, or scavenged from my parents place in Joisey. Thus I was amazed how much the experience of buying something as (to my mind) simple as a mattress resembled the worst caricature b-movie used car buying experience. Leaving aside for a minute the fact that my mind is still having a hard time coming to terms with how much a queen mattress actually goes for, I was wholly unprepared to actually go into a brightly lit showroom on Northern Boulevard and be expected to have a haggle-off with a fucking mattress salesman. Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel like of all the things in the world that I'd expect to have to haggle over, this ain't one of them. Besides which haggling is completely against the Swedish portion of my nature. How undignified.

So Jessie sending me this Slate article gave me some hope that I'm not the only person on the planet who finds the whole experience mystifying and suspects it's all a big scam. Seriously, read it. It's way more interesting than an article about mattresses has any right to be. The reason I couldn't find any comparison prices for the models we actually liked at the creepy Sleepy's Mattress lot? The exact same thing is named 14 different things at 14 different places to prevent that kind of thing. Bastards.

It all makes me want to just sleep on the couch anyway to spite the mattress industry. Although speaking of domestic bliss, it's time for me to head home where I'll be greeted by Jessie and our lovely houseguest who'll be keeping us company for the next 2 weeks or so. Full house, in a good way.

I got nothin' ...

2006-11-20T19:23:00.000-05:00

... except maybe a slight twitching, and I attribute that to the ungodly amount of coffee I've had today. As much as I've been enjoying my return to blogging (much as I'm sure you've been enjoying it yourself!), last night's eating of my would-have-been-fantastic movie post has left a bad taste in my mouth and quite frankly I just can't quite work up the energy to work up the energy to post something insightful.

Let's leave it at this: I don't think it's just the coffee that's making me so excited to get my hands on one of these here Wii things that I'm, well, twitching. Maybe it's all the rapturous and/or insightful reviews I've been reading. Or perhaps the 2 seconds of watching streaming video of a guy who's playing a wii for a whole week I could watch before I got creeped out.

Either way, I want one of those fuckers, and I want one bad. On the "bright side" it appears that the the thing has beat sales expectations and will probably be hard to get a hold of like an [insert metaphor here] for the foreseeable future which means I don't even have to contemplate the relative wisdom of blowing $350 on a video game system vs. paying my bills, paying of debts or say buying Christmas presents for those I love. Thank goodness.

Mustache update: Having now accumlated some stubble since thursday, I'm beginning to fear that my options for Thanksgiving (the first actual day I'm required to do some everything-but-the-stache shaving) with the family are going to be either putting off shaving until after I get home having a face full of kind of nasty looking stubble or showing up with a laughably pathetic my-first-moustache looking thing. Maybe that will get sympathy donations?

dammitalltohell

2006-11-20T01:37:00.000-05:00

So here I spent a whole lotta time writing a really long post full of wit and insight about my weekend and the wonderful movies I'd seen (except for the one movie that was one of the worst things I've ever seen) and my fucking computer died on me. I love this computer but the battery's been all kinds of fucked up and so apparently this kind of shit is what I get. Lovely. Dammit. GAAAH.

I'm going to blame this all on the same person I blame the movie on, Akiva Goldsman. 'Cause why not.

Bah.

And There Went Your Friday Afternoon in Puff of Nostalgia

2006-11-17T14:47:00.000-05:00

Please to be enjoying this amazing compendium of 80's cartoon opening credits. Holy Crap. M.A.S.K.? Silverhawks?!

Now am I the only one who remembers some show where this teenage kid turns into like a Camaro? Seriously. I can't have made that up.

I think it's pretty amazing watching these though and remembering that at some point, somewhere, some session singer had to pick up a piece of sheet music and belt out "All through the forest they sing out in chorus, marching along as their song fills the air... GUMMI BEARS!!! BOUNCING HERE AND THERE AND EVERYWHERRREEEE!!!!"

And then I would guess get very very drunk on the paycheck to drown his sorrows at what his career had come to.

Happy Friday!

You Know... For Kids

2006-11-16T14:48:00.000-05:00

Today I start an exciting month long adventure into a shadowy world of men's grooming. For charity. Perhaps the best way to explain is to reprint an email I sent of to my family last night:

Hey everybody,

Just wanted to give you a fair warning as Thanksgiving is approaching that I may be showing up for dinner with.........

....

A MUSTACHE!

Allow me to explain: Every year there's an organization that runs a charity event called "Mustaches For Kids". The idea is that people in various cities commit themselves to growing an (unironic) mustache from November 14th to December 14th and collect pledges for children's' charities from folks who support them in the effort. In this case, the New York branch of Mustaches for Kids is raising money for The Children's Hospital of New Orleans, which even a year after Katrina still needs a lot of help. This is an actual organized national event (like a jog-a-thon or a bowl-a-thon) except instead, well there's mustaches. A whole group from my office are doing it (we actually help them put their website together every year as well) and a few other folks I know as well.

For one thing I just wanted to give you a heads up so that you're not shocked (or ashamed) when you see me. We'll have to see how Milo [my nephew] reacts, I guess. But also, if you can find it in your heart to write a small tax-deductible check (I'll give you all the info!), that would be stellar and as goofy as the event is, it's really all for a good cause.

Also, I was getting very tired of my beard and have always been curious to see what I'd look like with a mustache, so this looked like a good opportunity to give it a whirl.

Hope everyone's well!

Kram,
[me]

So there you have it. Today is "Shaving Day" and as of a few hours ago, my face is whisker free, smooth as Milo's tuchis (ehr...) and smelling faintly of some kind of kind of sandalwood I think it is. You see Jessie in her infinite cool-girlfriendness not only (grudgingly) supports me deploying the mustache. No she also gave me the gift of a fancy pants straight-razor & hot towel and face lotion and all that jazz shave at a place specializing in just that up on Madison. After I got through the initial terror at having a complete stranger holding a sharp razor at my windpipe, I gotta say that my first professional shave was, well, really awesome. I mean it's not the kind of thing I'd do on a weekly basis, but still it was a nicely ritualized way to loose the scruffle.

Now though, I'm feeling very naked and a little alarmed every time a breeze hits my face. At least there'll be a sweet, sweet mustache on there soon to keep my upper lip warm.

Oh, and hey, just as a note, any of you loyal readers out there who either a) feel like contributing to this most worthwhile cause or b) feel like joining in the mustachy fun, today is day 1, so if you shaved this morning, you're all set. Kick off meeting is tonight at Ace Bar (of all places).

Wish me luck.

Oh I can't help it...

2006-11-16T14:18:00.000-05:00

Seems like as soon as I posted something about the Zune, i can't help running across interesting (or at least damaging-to-Microsoft) articles about it. So I thought I'd share.

First off, apparently the picture of the "happy" couple dancing around in the East River wasn't the only Zune screen to raise some eyebrows. Although unlike the East River shot, that particular screenshot features (possible) hottt lesbian action!

(did we get your attention?)

On maybe a less "this thing is doomed" note, there's this actually kind of fascinating article about how the Zune got its name. Maybe I'm the only one, but I've always been kind of fascinated by the firms that just sit around and come up with names for things... Also, you can't make shit like this up:

The buzz of the sound "z" makes it one of the most energetic in the language. Lexicon's studies of sound symbolism, conducted with hundreds of people in a variety of languages, have shown that word-initial "z" scores very high for communicating attributes like "lively," "daring," and "fast."
The letter z's current popularity in respellings like "boyz" and "antz" lends a youthful irreverence. Even though it isn't obviously derived from any real word, Zune could pass for a casual abbreviation, in the same way that 'zza stood in for pizza with some people 10 years or so ago. Zune is clearly a fun kind of name.

Okay, gotta stop... But if you want more, well here it is.

But is the Zune Waterproof?

2006-11-15T16:15:00.000-05:00

When I started at this job (that's 6 years and 1 day ago, for anyone keeping track), I was finally dragged kicking and screaming into the aggravating yet ubiquitous world of Windows computing. Up until then I'd done work on using languages (perl, php and PL/SQL (!)), databases (weird ass old Oracle versions) and unix-flavored machines (of the particularly balky kind) that didn't care what kind of an OS you were on as long as you accessed them through the same ugly terminal window. But alas, 90% of the tools I'd need to work here were PC only and my days of being the only mac-guy in the office were officially at a close.

Since the my first Apple //c, I'd been a rabid Apple- and later Mac -partisan even (or maybe especially) when being one left you looking like some kind of an idiotic zealot, berating the rest of the world for missing out on something great that's right under their nose, goddamit. A little bit like being a season one Battlestar Galactica fan, I'd guess. But as I slowly made the transition from being a graphic-designing geek (I know it's hard to believe) to a fully 100% dyed-in-the-wool robotpolisher it was slowly starting to look inevitable that I'd have to join the PC using hoi polloi.

Seems like a horrible compromise to have to make, I know, but hey I widened my skill-set a little bit and taking this job allowed me to get off a sinking ship, learn lotsa new skills, work with friends and weather the whole dot-com explosion with nary a care in the world. So maybe that's why i've been here 6 years. hm...

At any rate, I've grown to accept--if never love--using a windows machine. And I think unless you have a particularly twisted kind of mindset, you don't ever really grow to love a PC, you just accommodate yourself to the way that it expects you to work and then get on with life.

Man does THAT sound like a dismal relationship metaphor.

But let me take this one step further: Microsoft makes the software that makes 90% of the globe's economy and day to day computing happen, but to at least some degree large or small, everything they touch turns to shit. Until you figure out how to accommodate yourself to working around it. Or in my case figure out as many ways as possible (Firefox & Thunderbird come to mind) to avoid using their horrible horrible products.

The reason I bring all this up is the Zune, Microsoft's just released "ipod killer". Or maybe iPod "tickler"? Now I'm as weary as the next person of one company having an exclusive monopoly on a particular chunk of the marketplace in the way that Apple have set themselves up with the ipod/iTunes combination. But maybe in this instance it's one of those things where you have to stop and consider the alternative.

I'm not going to go into all the myriad BS things that are wrong wwith the Zune or that make it an even more customer unfriendly proposition than even iTunes' annoying DRM. There's enough of that going on elsewhere and frankly, I've gotta get back to work. Instead, first dial up the schadenfreude with this clip of the entire CNN American Morning cast giving it a drubbing. Then ask yourself this: Are Microsoft actually encouraging people to wade in the East River?!

I've seen this official product snapshot everywhere and my recurring thought is "Is their target market people who ain't smart enough to know not to set foot in that polluted shit?" Is that supposed to somehow look romantic?! And how much did they have to pay that model to splash around in the muck over downstream of the Brooklyn Bridge? No wonder that poor girl's hanging on to his back looking terrified! I knew someone back in college who "fell" into the East River and ended up having to have his stomach pumped and a bunch of shots to keep himself from dropping dead. Or maybe that was just a rumor? And am I all wrong and the East River is now a magically swimable vibrant ecosystem? Regardless, there's no amount of free Zunes you could give me to get me to set foot in there.

And I wonder if maybe the East River isn't just a little bit more polluted for its secondary contact with Microsoft's marketing department. Thanks a lot, a-holes.

Work Is For Suckers

2006-11-14T12:47:00.000-05:00

Today marks the sixth anniversary (hexennial?) of me showing up just slightly late for this frickin' job. Which is really kind of astonishing. Yeah, we'll go with "astonishing".

Sigh.

In honor of this auspicious (sigh) occasion, I decided to cobble together a little spur-of-the-moment mix on the theme of employment, and so it is my pleasure to present:

Work Is For Suckers (Stream It!)

Sicko - On The Clock - Okay, granted I don't get paid hourly... actually maybe that's for the best.

Fembots- A Million Dead End Jobs

Palomar - Work Is A State Function

fIREHOSE - Slack Motherfucker (Live) - cover of the Superchunk classic about (as the man puts it) working for an asshole.

Honey Is Cool - Early Morning, Are You working? - by Karin Dreijer's (in my opinion) much better pre-The Knife band.

Descendents - This Place - Nobody does disgruntled quite like Milo

Stevie Wonder- We Can Work It Out - Not specifically about employment, but hey, it's an awesome cover and it's got "work" in the title and the line "life is very short". Good enough for me. It's my hexennial.

The (International) Noise Conspiracy - Abolish Work - 'Cause it's for suckers. You tell 'em Dennis.

Blur - Yuko & Hiro - Feel-bad dot-com/sallaryman anthem of the 90's? No contest.

Enjoy! Comments welcome. Anything else super obvious I missed? "Working For The Weekend" just barely missed the cut. Maybe I'll even whip up some cubicle inspired cover art later :)

And for the record, I actually really don't mind my job much. I mean hell there's a reason I've been here for 6 years!

But it's all enough to give a feller some pause.

How To Fix (shows like) Lost

2006-11-13T14:22:00.000-05:00

You may already have seen this but if not, this New Yorker article on how to fix shows like Lost is worth a read. Actually it's a nice surprised to discover that apparently I'm not the only one who wonders why the hell they even watch the show any more. I think back to when Jessie and I got the first DVD of season one from Netflix on a whim and then all of a sudden looked up to discover that a whole week had flown by and we'd devoured the full season 1 box set that we'd bought somewhere along the way.

When season 2 premiered, we were all caught up and excited, but a little worried that maybe the experience of having to wait for a whole week to find out what happens next might kill the experience a little bit. As it turns out, it wasn't so much the waiting that started to kill the whole thing as much as an increasing feeling that I just didn't give a damn, or that it was hard to get invested in the mysteries presented when it started becoming pretty apparent that I was going to have to wait forever to find out anything interesting.

At this point, I'm not even sure why exactly I'm watching. I find it mildly diverting and hey, it's nice to see Nathan Fillion on the screen again but when this half-season-finale nonsense happened I was left with more of a yawn than a burning desire to find out how it's all going to resolve, because I figure probably not much of anything is going to resolve. If it ended with a bang tomorrow, I think I'd be just fine with that.

The pisser of it is that I'm starting to feel like that a little bit about a number of the arc-ey shows including sadly, Veronica Mars. The one wonderful exception to all of this has been Battlestar Galactica, a show which probably has no right to be as good as it is and which I'm almost starting to resent because it makes the rest of the TV I watch look really half-assed by comparison. By this point, I'm guessing you either watch it like a drooling obsessive or you're tired of drooling obsessives telling you how great it is and have gotten scared off. If that's the case, your loss and I guess there's no point going into all of it right now. Tellingly though, in one Television Without Pity writeup, the author answers himself on a possible plot hole by saying that "If I wanted to be yanked around like that, I'd watch Lost, y'know?" They've managed to keep me wanting more for three seasons by regularly throwing out the whole rulebook--last season's finale maybe being the best example--but in a way that makes sense and doesn't feel like it should have some ABC voice-over saying "You won't believe what happens next!"

So hell, maybe shorter runs for shows is the answer, or maybe it's just better writing? I don't know, anyone else have any thoughts? I think my main question is, when the hell did I start giving such a damn about TV?

"If that's what makes you happy, what am I supposed to do?"

2006-11-13T00:18:00.000-05:00

Okay, I am officially changing the rules of NaNoBloMe: the "day" in "one post a day" is henceforth defined as anything up until the point at which I lay me down to have dreams about being a viking. I'm way too much of a night owl to try to squeeze in a post before midnight. Which is probably a bad thing but hey, there you have it.

But it's been a really fantastic weekend. Friday night I left work feeling yet again like my soul had spent a long week being sucked out of my fingertips and into some useless Coldfusion code. But soon I was down at Zum Schneider with Jessie and a bunch of great folks having beers and potato pancakes and discussing China, jobs, mustaches (for kids), Guns n' Fucking Roses and starting bands. The GNF'nR came up because Brad and a few other lucky souls had managed to score tickets to the show at MSG and were about to head over. Well I don't know if you can call something "Scoring" tickets when they're $140 each for non-floor tickets, but hey, I was jealous.

Jessie and I were off to another show on the direct opposite side of the spectrum however. After a pit stop at Parkside Lounge for vicious competitive foosball action we went over to Sin-e to catch Right On Dynamite. Essentially, we went for the hell of it, in part to fulfill a just-before-new-years-resolution I've made to myself which is to go see more bands just kind of on a whim and based on very scant information. CMJ this year pretty much flew by in a blur, but I spent one night just show hopping and although not cheap I ended up having a great time and seeing (among some less interesting bands) a few really good shows. And I realize that I spend way too much time going to the occasional friends' band or to a "big" show I've been looking forward to for months. Time to switch things up a little. Fine, talk to me in a few months and I'm sure I'll have given up after sitting through my 50th "mistake", but for now, it seems an exciting prospect.

And the Right On Dynamite show at least left me feeling vindicated. I just tried about 3 different sentences of explaining their sound and realized I was doing a lousy job (there's a reason I don't write music criticism), so instead I say you go listen to "Who Invited You" and sort of imagine that being played live a little drunk and a little sloppy and a lot of awesomely. It was just a fun, unpretentious good time and hey it's not Guns N' Roses at MSG but it was exactly what I needed. It reminded me that 90% of the bands I see try both simultaneously too hard and too little and--I'm not gonna lie to you--it made me wish I was about 6 years younger.

For the hell of it we walked back across the Williamsburg bridge and looked out at the city and took goofy photos and hey, it was the kind of night friday nights should be.

11:45

2006-11-12T01:23:00.000-05:00

Picture002.jpg
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Well I goofed. There we are at The Pencil Factory, Jessie, Ben and I and I realize that crap, it's 11:45 I hadn't blogged anything today. silly I know but I mean if I really was going to keep up this whole post a day thing, I mean... once you start making excuses here and there, well you might as well not bother. So I took this snap of a candle at the table we were sitting at on my phone and (I thought) send it off to the whole flickr post-to-blog thing. Apparently I'm a little out of practice 'cause it ONLY went to flickr.

Well I suppose it's the thought that counts. I tried. I tried. I guess I never would have been in the running for the embroidered handkerchief anyway...

Regardless, fantastic weekend so far and you know what? I'll get you all caught up on that when I post tomorrow. So there.

Ronja is a Communist

2006-11-10T15:05:00.000-05:00

Last night Jessie and I watched Ronia The Robber's Daughter (or more properly Ronja Rövardotter), the movie version of Astrid Lindgren's children's story about the strongwilled daughter of a medieval robber cheif and her adventures. Man that's an awful description, but it's a great movie. I always catch a lot of flak for the fact that up until last year I'd never seen The Never Ending story, but I'm going to bet that you've probably never seen Ronja Rövardotter, so there! And in a way for me I think it kind of fills the equivalent fantasy story movie niche in my childhood. Or at least the book did. The funny part is that doing a little reading up on it today, the movie version came out in 1984, which is when I moved to the states, so I'm not sure when exactly I would have seen it. But still, I remember seeing the Harpies flying around and the dark mysterious woods and the Rumpnissar who make off with her hat. Stupid failing-me memory.

Either way it was great to see it again and get to have Jessie see it too. Hapilly it's held up really well, even if it's an oddly paced, talky and rather melancholy movie, especially for something aimed squarely at kids. But then that's kind of a lot of Astrid Lindgren's stuff for ya in a nutshell.

From my looking around today, I also discovered that the child actress who played Ronia/Ronja was later elected to Sweden's parliament, and as a member of the former-Communist Left Party. Which kind of makes me want to go on a whole spree of looking up the stars of various childhood fantasy movies. Like what ever happened to the baby from Labyrinth? Or that kid who played Atreyu? Or the kid who played Rasmus in Rasmus På Luffen for that matter...

Clearly research needs to be done.

A Hip-Hop Tribute to Def Leppard

2006-11-09T15:01:00.000-05:00

A late entry in the race for this year's most inessential album?

Make sure to check out a song sample or two.

Oh, I see.

2006-11-09T11:09:00.000-05:00

So here I'm all excited about my return to blogging regularly and a big fan of Beth's excellent posting once a day thing and a little proud of myself for giving it a whack and what do I discover? It's NaBloPoMo, that's what. NaNoWhoWhat? National Blog Post Month, kind of an offshoot of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) although instead of writing a novel in a month, people are signing up to blog every day for the month of november. It's even got a snappy logo and everything. With a bear on it.

Ah well, not the end of the world and it doesn't change my plan any, although I guess it does rankle me that had I discovered this 9 days earlier, i coulda been on a big old list AND been in the running to win my name embroidered on a hankerchief! Curses.

Perhaps I shall have to declare myself the sole participant in NaNoBloMe (The National November Blog Mending) and just leave it at that.

Incidentally, I've been spending a lot of time this morning pondering the inner life of Calvin.

Throw the Burns Out

2006-11-08T14:57:00.000-05:00

Besides the fact that it means that the democrats will probably control both houses of congress, I'm delighted to hear that Conrad Burns has almost certainly lost his re-election race in Montana because the man has no respect for the swedes:

Also during Thursday's hearing, Burns asked
witness Matt Andersson, senior aviation consultant for CRA
International, about the spelling of his name. Andersson said it's the
Swedish spelling.
"Oh, ja," Burns replied in a mock Swedish accent.

Sheesh.

Kind of Hard To Believe

2006-11-08T14:37:00.000-05:00

The Eventual Crash
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

It's sort of hard to believe everything that's changed in two years since I took this picture of the last sad three folks leaving the election night boozathon at me and Tony's old place. For starters, I'm going out (and living with!) one of the folks in this picture! Whoo hoo! Second of all, I'm not quite as anxoius to put my head in an oven as I was when I realized that we'd all have to put up with another 4 years of Bush as president. Why today I'm actually feeling sort of hopeful! And in what may be his first good decision in 6 years, Rumsfeld's resigned!

Minus the hangover and the crappy weather and all the work I'm not getting done, this is shaping up to be my kind of day.

Hej Själv!

2006-11-08T14:32:00.000-05:00

You know you've sort of fallen off the whole blogging game when a whole month full of big things and fun happenings and stressful things and an honest to goodness election can whiz right by without a single post. I wish I could say that it was because I've been tied down being amazingly productive every time I'm near a computer but I think we both know I'd be lying. And as sad as an entirely abandoned blog is, I think a fitfully updated shell-of-a-blog is even sadder. Either keep this thing around, or don't. That was sort of my thinking.

So taking some inspiration from Beth's plan for quantity over quality, I'm going to try to fill this thing up with some (hopefully interesting) prattle on a daily basis. Well unless it's the weekend in which case maybe I'll give myself an out. We'll see how that one works out.

In a fit of inspiration, I attempted to kick this plan into gear last night. But well, as it turned out I was drunk and could only manage a scattered (if multilingual) shot at conveying my "I'm back"ness. It's probably for the best I only got that far.

So! Look forward to breath-taking insights, hair-raising tales of what I had for dinner last night and me cleaning out my old backlog of links that I meant to post about. This could be fun.

Hej du

2006-11-08T01:49:00.000-05:00

Jag saknar dig också...

I'll be back very soon.

Aw nuts

2006-09-18T14:44:00.000-04:00

Looks like the socialist coalition lost and the conservative alliance has won the Swedish elections. I guess I'm not massively surprised. I think what DOES surprise me is how happy it seems to make various right wing commentators all over the world, as if Sweden had somehow seen the error of its dastardly socialist ways and made a complete 360*.

A few things argue against this: first off the final tallies have the center-right alliance winning by something like 48% to 46.2%, in the closest election in years. So perhaps not a massive swing there. That said, the main engine of the centre-right's victory was Frederik Reinfeldt's steering of his rechristened "New Moderates" party towards the center, backing off previous elections' platforms of steep tax cuts and massive privatizations and promissing to fine-tune rather than dismantle the welfare state. Another reason for massive voter defection had less to do with the bright new future of a liberalized Sweden than it did with exhaustion with the current government and after 10+ years of the same increasingly out of touch prime minister, I think that's also pretty understandable. Then there's the fact that the center-right coalition may be "center-right" but they're center-right of a point that's far further left than the center we're dealing with here in the states, leaving the New Moderates looking like kind of a softer, cuddlier lefty version of the Democrats.

All that said, this is certainly a huge moment for Sweden with people talking about tectonic shifts in the political landscape and so on. And as much as it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, I can actually still see a change of power being good for the country, if only to shake things up a bit. I'm just wishing the American right would stop crowing about it. Honestly I'm getting enough of that from my parents at the moment and at least in regards to Swedish politics they know what they're talking about. : )

As a tiny silver lining, at least The Greens had their best election yet with 5.2%. Then again they're now in the opposition so that's a little less good. Ah well. Will be interesting to see what happens.

* Hell I even saw one commentator arguing that this was yet another success which could be attributed to inspiration from the Bush administration's shining example, which I have a hard time imagining even they think.

Stalkers, Update Your Notes!

2006-09-15T19:16:00.000-04:00

I'm beyond excited to say that Jessie and I have nailed down a new fantastic, big-ass, newly redone, totally sweet place to hang our hats. Now begins the process of perhaps contemplating if we should have gone with a cheaper place and if our new landlords, while nice, will be way in our business and slowly drive us insane. I don't know, I'm just beyond happy and excited though.

Plus the place half a block from my old one. No, really.

This is easily the shortest in the annals of my New York city moving history. On the other side of the scale was probably my move from alphabet city to fort greene back in 2000 or whenever that was. But this is seriously preposterous. Add to all of this the fact that Jessie actually only lives about two and a half blocks away as it is, I'm sorta getting the feeling like maybe this won't be the first move where I get to be all growed up and use actual mover type people as opposed to a bunch of my sweaty hung over friends. I feel as though movers would scoff at me. I feel as though the closest parking spot to our new apartment may very well be in front of my old one!

But anyway, exciting times. We move in on October 1st. Really the best part about all of this is that for as much as finding a place and figuring out money and all that kind of nonsense has been pretty stressfull, I haven't had a single moment of doubt that moving in with Jessie isn't going to be great, which is certainly a relief.

Oh and through the whole application process, I discovered that in complete contradiction to all good sense and the financial facts, I apparently have "excellent credit"! Who fucking knew?! I'm utterly baffled. Makes me really wonder what it would take to have completely shit-ass, sending a guy to break your knees type credit. Makes me want to go out and take out a car loan or something.

Votin'

2006-09-15T15:02:00.000-04:00

So I got to vote last weekend at the Swedish Church in midtown for the upcoming Swedish Riksdag (Parliament) elections. The actual voting in Sweden is happening on Sunday, so I guess it feels a little premature but still, it feels nice to be connected to the political life of my home country. I've been swimming in articles and online newscasts and all kinds of propaganda materials from all the parties and I like to think that I'm as up on the issues and the options as I can be. But it's certainly impossible for me to say that living here, I'm as tied into the pulse of what the average Swede wants for the future of their country.

Based on a lot of the chatter I see bouncing around various Swedish American groups, things here can be neatly broken down to folks who wish Sweden was a little more like the U.S. that they've come to know and love and the folks who wish America could be a little more like the Sweden they miss and have a rosily idealistic view of. I suppose it's pretty safe to say that I put myself in the latter camp and almost certainly a little further off to the looney green fringe than even a lot of Swedes. I suppose when the largest party of the Center-Right opposition alliance sounds like a slightly cuddlier leftier verson of the New Democrats here, it couldn't go THAT bad either way.

While a lot of Swedes might find this assertion kind of hilarious, I actually find looking over Swedish politics and parties kind of a breath of fresh air when compared to its American counterpart. Having a choice of 7 major parties and any number of smaller often single issue parties is a nice change to having two equally embarassing options here in the US*. The parliamentary system also means that these smaller parties have an important, though some might say disproportionate, role to play as opposed to their voices simply being marginalized. And although you could classify some of the immigration talk along these lines, the debate is blessedly free of anything resembling culture war issues or the kind of wedge issues like abortion, church-and-state sepparation, gay rights and capital punishment that at least in my mind keep us from discussing more important issues here. I dunno, the whole thing just seems just slightly (to the extent this is every the possibility with politics) more dignified than the issue-free circus of bullshit US politics has become. Then again there have been some dirty tricks and even a case of full blown computer hacking going on so hey, what do I know? Just taking a breif dip in a sea of issues entirely unrelated to the War on Terra feels like a nice cleansing bath though.

Regardless, this year's election is shaping up to be a statistical dead heat coming into the weekend, so the votes of expats like yours truly might actually make something of a difference. I guess we'll see what happens. For those truly curious, there's kind of an FAQ and a list of the two bloc's various proposals.

* I know there's more than 2 parties here and I habitually vote Green, but let's be honest.

Having Your Luggage Labeled

2006-09-07T16:02:00.000-04:00

I have to say that I'm kind of miffed that it's taken me this long to find out that the lovely folks in Hell on Wheels have a music video starring animated heavy-machinery-operating pandas.

Shocking, I tell you. Bow to your Panda overlords.

There, that feels a little more official

2006-08-31T10:12:00.000-04:00

What The Hell, Spin?

2006-08-29T14:32:00.000-04:00

What The Hell, Spin?
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

So Spin Magazine, what's up with you totally ripping off my Bling Kong band photo for the cover of your little so-called "nationally published magazine"? Well at least I can console myself with the fact that I'm vastly better looking.

With the Newsing and the Whatnot.

2006-08-28T01:24:00.000-04:00

I've become a particularly half assed blogger in the last half a year or so. Major life events have gone unchronicled. I've seen lots of movies, read books and gone to shows that certainly desrved at least a passing mention but have gotten none. I went back to the motherland with the ladyfriend fercrissakes and even that didn't get much of an entry (even though it was flippin' amazing, I tell you). So kind of a failure on the blogging front.

But to the extent that this thing serves to notify people I don't speak to nearly often enough of events in my life, and perhaps to the extent that it'll be fun for me to look back and say "oh THAT's roughly around when this happened:

Me and Jessie are moving in together. Pretty soon actually! The whole D-Day informing our landlords/room-mates thing actually happened a bunch of weeks back and everything but now that the last rent check's been paid and we have ourselves a month to find our perfect lil' ol' dreamshack to move all of our hopes, furniture, neuroses and javelina salt and pepper shakers into, well it feels nicely real. I'm fucking stoked. I go around in alternate modes of excitement and thinking about what it's going to be like and how much fun it's going to be the place set up one minute and the next I'm shitting myself about money and brokers' fees and finding a good enough place and all of that kind of stuff. But I guess anything really worth doing's going to have some stress going along with it.

That said, if you hear of any place magnificent and cheap opening up in presumably the Greenpoint area, lemme know! One day perhaps I wouldn't mind moving back to Carroll Gardens, but at the moment I'm in no big rush and to be honest, my budget probably couldn't take it.

But yeah, so exciting things are afoot. Wish us luck!

Your friend and mine, the giant inflatable union rat

2006-08-24T15:50:00.000-04:00

Like many (perhaps most?) New Yorkers, I'm a huge fan of the Giant Inflatable Union Protest Rat that makes its appearance in various incarnations on sidewalks across our fair city. So I was happy to see that the New York Metro decided to get the full story on the lovable rabid icon.

“We’ve done cockroaches, skunks, bulldogs, even a corporate fat cat wearing a striped suit, smoking a cigar and choking a union worker,” said Mike O’Connor, owner of Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights, the Plainfield, Ill. company that designed and sells the rat.

O’Connor designed the rabid pest back in 1990, when a Chicago union man called asking for something his members could picket with, suggesting a “dirty rat kind of thing.”

The first rat O’Connor designed was “basically a cutesy rat, but he wanted something mean, with fangs. So I went back to the drawing board and made the rat how he looks today.”

Sweet.

As a side note, last night's show at Mercury was an awesome time and thanks and big sloppy kisses to all of you who came by and drank and applauded and whatnot. And of course muttered grumbling and guilt-trip laden stares to all of you who said you were coming and didn't. Bwahaha.

Irritants From Beyond The Grave

2006-08-21T20:26:00.000-04:00

I sorta hate to have my first blog post in forever be about work, but It's truly astonishing how much pain in the ass guess work irritation and recoding one lazy, sloppy, asshole coder can cause. This particular chucklehead left here of his own accord under some of the most bizarre and childish circumstances I've ever witnessed in my brief professional life and quite frankly it's taking a bit of effort not to smear his name all over the internet. But hey, I gather he's got enough problems of his own at the moment. His shitty code, however, is now my problem. Lucky me.

That said, things over all have been pretty damned peachy Chez Robotpolisher. More actual catching up later. I've missed you.

Incidentally, while we're talking geek, I tried out writely to post this particular entry. Always really nice to see well thought out, feature rich software like that that's entirely web based, although the web posting ended up kinda looking like garbage. One of these days I'll have enough energy to get this thing offa blogspot to a slightly more "respectable" home base.

Your New Plans for August 23rd

2006-08-15T15:11:00.000-04:00

You're coming to see my band play at Mercury Lounge with Mobius Band! Lucky you!

Fear The Otter

2006-08-11T12:07:00.000-04:00

From Sploid:

The government does nothing. The national media shamefully ignores the crisis. Police would rather bust a harmless hippie for smoking a joint -- because there's little danger a hippie will rise up and chew off the cop's arm, or eat the K-9 squad's German Sheppard alive.

Related (and kind of awesome): Stupid Pandas

Raising a valid point...

2006-08-11T10:13:00.000-04:00

If the liquid could be explosive, why are you dumping it into a trash can in the middle of a crowded airport?

Some day we'll look back at some of these things like a really dark version of this article about what it was like to fly in the 1960's...

Oh, and sorry for the blog silence of late. Things here are 100% great. I've just been a drag-ass about documenting any of them. Will resume shortly with a tid bit of exciting news...

A Century of Covers - A Free MP3 only compilation of Belle and Sebastian Covers

2006-07-27T11:54:00.000-04:00

The net label Kirsten's Postcard has posted a superb free 20 track album of Belle and Sebastian covers. I'm only half way through it so far but there's already some really superb stuff on there including an Italian cover of Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying and a very dark cover Dog on Wheels by (appropriately) Hell on Wheels, of whom more soon.

But definitelly worth checking out.

Best thing about listening to Belle and Sebastian is remembering the days when I used to hate them. Or maybe it was just their fans? Hm...

A Return To Smart Financial Planning

2006-07-26T13:38:00.000-04:00

So I'm back from Jessie and I's amazing, wonderful, relaxing-and-rockin' trip to Sweden and having to be honest a very hard time adjusting. But what can you do.

Either way, there were so many great things that happened, and so many wonderful things worth going into extended detail about that rather than sit down and spend 4 hours writing some insanely long post nobody's going to read, I'm just going to post little dribs and drabs here and there for your amusement. You'll love it, I promise.

But in the meanwhile, there's always the photographic evidence.

But if there's one thing a weeklong trip to Europe is not, it's good for the wallet. So what's one of the first things I do when I get back? Buying myself one of these sweet ass Micro R/C Helicopters. Maybe I'll just have to skip eating for a day or something but it had to be done. I can't wait until it gets here.

Annnnnnd I'm off!

2006-07-15T12:42:00.000-04:00

Site launched, crappy sci-fi inflight reading purchased, bye bye drinks had.... Me and the lady friend are leaving in a few hours to go spend a week in Sweden traipsing around Stockholm, watching the sun set for a few hours from the shores of an old fishing town out on the coast, meeting relatives, rocking out and tracking down the fabled Bilar McFlurry. I'll be damned if I'm going near a compuer if I can help it so I plan to be entirely 100% out of touch with all of you until I return. I'm sure you'll cope.

While I'm awa you can instead keep yourself busy with this amazingly addictive online multiplayer asteroids
game. No need to thank me.

See you soon!

Pushing the poor defenseless bird out of the nest

2006-07-13T18:13:00.000-04:00

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

Today, the site I've been working on for a half a year, the thing which has kept me at the office to all kinds of ungodly hours and eaten up many a weekend afternoon.... is launching. in theory....

Actually it's now looking like it won't be until tomorrow morning. But still, I'm feeling a pretty wonderful sense of relief and hey--I'll admit it--pride. The damned thing turned out pretty nice.

I assume.

God Only Knows

2006-07-11T13:28:00.000-04:00

Toby wrote about this earlier and I'm sure you've probably already heard it but damn if this Petra Haden acapella version of God Only Knows isn't one of the most sparkling, beautiful things I've heard in years. Almost too perfect.

I've been absolutely crazy for Haden's voice (well and violin playing) since her Rentals/That Dog days and it seems like every time I manage to forget about it, something else comes along to remind me. Her version of The Who's Sunrise is also pretty amazing as are a bunch of the songs she did on the album with Bill Frissel.

Hm... I could have sworn I had a copy of the Queers cover of "God Only Knows" lying around here somehwere. I guess you'll be spared for today!

Anyhow... sigh...

Well that's that...

2006-07-10T18:28:00.000-04:00

The World Cup is over and like many, I think I'm in a little bit of denial. But I guess it's time for all of us whose brains were eaten by soccer for a month to get back to work and for the rest of you who find couldn't care less to go on being American. Or Michael.

But man, what a way for the whole thing to end! You gotta hate deciding a game that important on penalty kicks. Although I suppose it'd be a little ghoulish to make them keep playing until someone scores. Although perhaps kind of entertaining? Hmm...

Regardless, the whole thing's probably going to be remembered most for Zinedine Zidane's perhaps not-so-well-thought-out headbutt of Materazzi. Not that it looked like the French would have scored in those last 10 minutes anyway but man what a way to go out. Thankfully someone has already gotten around to making a slapdash, midi music backed video of the whole event, looping it a number of times. This keeps me from having to just hit replay over and over again, for which I'm thankful. Of course we're all really waiting for someone to finally leak what it was that the Italian said to get ol' Zizou so all fired pissed off. One groupl claims it was "dirty terrorist" . Which seems about as plausible as anything else.

Scratch that, Le Headbutt has now also truly made it: it has been glamorized in Nintendo format.

Of course it's also possible that something in Zidane's head just snapped. This was after all the man who claimed he came out of retirement at the urging of a mysterious apparition. On Baddiel and Skinner's very very amusing world cup podcast, it was earlier theorized that it might have been the ghost of Napoleon, or perhaps Zidane's brother in a sheet. Either way... kinda bizarre.

I'm going to miss going out to bars and watching the game surrounded by other folks who actually give a damn about the sport, although this certainly wasn't an issue where Jessie and I went to watch the final. On the advice of some complete strangers (good move!) we decided to watch the game at K & M in Williamsburg, on the theory that Iona--which had been a lot of fun and filled with knowledgeable fans--would be packed out the door by the time we even woke up. Also they serve pirogies which sounded like it had potential. Getting there, the scene wasn't too bad. Not overly packed, interesting looking space, big screen.

(warning, grumpy old man-ness ahead)

But things slowly went to shit as the bar got jammed with an irritating post-brunch crowd of the kind of Williamsburg people I spend most of my time trying to convince my south Brooklyn friends aren't representative of the neighborhood. Rude, shovey, loud (not in a cheering way, more in a bad mystery science 3000 kind of way) and maybe most irritatingly very very clueless about even the basic mechanics of the game. I'm happy to see people who apparently have only read the wikipedia article on "association football" try to get into a game, and you sure shouldn't have to take a quiz to get in the front door, but don't scream red card every time an Italian falls over after a bit of contact. They do that all the time. I think I realized that things were truly dire when in th second half the Italians knocked the ball in, only to have it recalled seconds later when the nice man on the sideline signalled that the Italian had been offside. But everyone in the bar kept celebrating for easily half a minute, yelling their fool heads off while the folks who actually knew what was going on tried to yell over them to tell them to cut it the fuck out. Things carried on like this for most of the game until eventually it seems a lot of the worst offenders got bored and wandered off somewhere to buy an expensive t-shirt with a leaf stenciled on it.

(okay, grumpy fit over)

Either way I'm proud to say that France losing means that in order, every team I've been pulling for has lost (Sweden -> Argentina -> Brazil -> France... I think there were one or two more in there...). So next time around, anyone looking for betting advice, ask me who I support and pick the other team. There's a lot more to say about the Cup but since I gotta post this thing before it ends up being 1800000 words long, I'm going to conclude with just a smattering of the lovely Zidane related things that have filtered through my inbox today:

1) Zidane Nintendo Soccer
2) Zidane: The Flash Game
3) a critique of Zidane's headbutting technique
4) A Compendium of Materazzi's greatest hits
5) And the most amazing thing ever (source, unfortunately unknown):

What the!

2006-07-07T15:21:00.000-04:00

What the!
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

met my fellow Eiffel Tower band members at Hurricane Hopeful in Williamsburg last night and they pointed at the tree right above their table, where there were (no shit) 4 Racoons basically sitting on top of each other. Damndest thing.

Now THIS would look killer in my apartment:

2006-06-30T10:49:00.000-04:00

For sale on eBay: Kraftwerk's first vocoder.

Weekend wrap up (on a tuesday)

2006-06-27T16:03:00.000-04:00

Calling Home
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

This was a weekend in which
a) Sweden rightfully had their asses handed to them by Germany.
b) Our street hockey team held its own impressively but still rightfully had its ass handed to it by the #1 team in the leauge. Oh and I cursed at our captain and told him he was playing like shit right on the court. Oops.
c) I got to celebrate Midsommar with a bunch of great friends, my wonderful family and my half-brother who was in town with some friends. Plus I finally got to visit this mysterious 'The Patriot' bar I've been hearing about, although I'm not sure that's a good thing.
d) I got to see my sister in town from D.C.and give her some presents.
e) I got to give Milo a "Somebody in Brooklyn Loves Me" onesie, which hey, just kind of cracks me up.
f) Axl got arrested in Stockholm for biting someone
g) I watched a movie about figure skaters.

So... it's been one of those kind of weekends. When NOT blogging in the middle of the day, I've actually been working my fool ass off, spending lots of late nights at the office, that kind of nonsense. And I'm kind of starting to get a frigthening feeling like the summer's slipping away before it's even begun... But still plenty of time to fix that...

Haw.

2006-06-27T15:50:00.000-04:00

From the NY Times blog coverage of theSpain - France game: "Anthem time. I’ve heard all 32 at this Cup and still nothing touches “La Marseillaise.” To the barricades!
Prince Felipe of Spain is on hand. There is no French royalty here. (I refer you once again to “La Marseillaise.”)"

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post about the World Cup and indie rock to bring you:

2006-06-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

BUNNIES!

The best one is easily the dude with the cookie hanging out of his mouth.

Sigh... man I needed that. What a shit week. On the upside, tonight's Midsommar Afton! whoo hoo!

And one more for the road (and the Ghanians)

2006-06-22T18:26:00.000-04:00

Since I'm on a kick of posting World Cup related mp3s AND talking about Ghana, it occurred to me out of nowhere that I do actually have a favorite Ghanian song! Thus, I present to you the not-at-all-soccer-related Simigwado by Gyedu Blay Ambolley & the Steneboofs from the very cool Ghana Soundz comp.

Booftank!

Another Sunny Day

2006-06-22T17:13:00.000-04:00

Well there goes the U.S. out of the tournament. Kind of a painful thing to listen to over web-radio but presumably even harder to watch. Although I don't personally know anyone who would cop to having the U.S. as their favorite team in the Cup, especially after the bruising,ugly yet hard fought game against Italy a lot of people at least seemed to have gained some measure of respect for them. Not a lot, but at least a little. It is kind of saddening that they managed to only score one goal (of their own) in all of three games, but at least today's was purty looking and watching Dempsey play, I got this kind of feeling that maybe there isn't something in the U.S. tap water that prevents Americans from having some decent ball handling skills.

I think my favorite USA related memory of this Cup is going to have to be standing in a massive, enthusiastic crowd at Iona in Williamsburg and all of a sudden finding myself shouting the traditional redneck "USA! USA! USA!" chant. I'm not going to lie, it kind of creeped me out for a sec. But then it felt so right.

It might not help the game's spread in popularity in this country that a lot of times -- whether it was true or not -- the fate of the American team seemed to hang on various cards or dubious calls by the refs, espeically at the last 2 games. Which just makes me think of the following lines from Belle and Sebastian's "Another Sunny Day" which just happened to be running through my head anyway.

Another day in June, we'll pick 11 for football (Pick 11 for football!).
We're playing for our lives, the referee gives us fuck all (ref you're giving us fuck all!)

Now just cross your toes that Sweden doesn't get trounced by Germany on Saturday. And that one day I'll blog about something other than the world cup.

Future Fan

2006-06-19T16:05:00.000-04:00

Future Fan
Originally uploaded by robotpolisher.

In a moment that made me truly proud to be his uncle, Milo crawled over towards the TV and sat up so he could get a better view of the Brazil - Australia match. Not even a year old and he's already got his priorities straight.

Much to report from a week that has contained all manner of insanity, some of which was not even RELATED to the World Cup. But er, for now, this should hold you over.

Rupert Murdoch, Ronald Reagan and the Old Peanut Farmer

2006-06-14T10:38:00.000-04:00

So my quest to find a place to listen to World Cup coverage online has finally borne fruit, although admittedly it's kind of a wrinkled strange looking fruit. Perhaps it's a fruit roll up. Either way, there's something not quite right about it.

After dinking aroudn a little bit with proxies and various other means, I finally stumbled onto Ruper Murdoch's British tabloid The Sun's "off tube live commentary". In what I have to say is a pretty clever way of getting around FIFA's international broadcasting liscensing agreements, the Sun's team of commentators aren't somewhere in Germany in a press box commenting on the match. No, they're (by the soudns of it) in a London studio somewhere, watching the live TV coverage with the sound off and commenting on that. With a tape loop of crowd noise in the background.

It's the tape loop of crowd noise that really got me at first. When I first loaded up the stream, I heard the sounds of a loud world cup audience, a little yelling, the indistinct murmurring ebbing and flowing as the attacks retreat and fade... and then I realized that it's just a stock soccer stadium loop whose ebbs and flows have no relation whatsoever to what the two guys sitting around a TV in London somewhere are commentating on. At first I felt a little cheated, and then I thought, is the crowd noise even neccessary? But in the end I realized that whether it's canned or not, it works, and it works for all the reasons that the ESPN Soccernet Dot-on-Dot playback's don't work.

You can hear a mass of people yelling, you hear the tension rise in the commentators voices as they relay what's happening in front of them (on the tv) and if you close your eyes for a second, you can kind of almost imagine you're there... watching the game on TV somewhere.

All of this made me think about what I'd read about baseball commentators of the 1940's "reporting live" from away games by just sitting around in their home studio, reading a wire report as it came in, and filling in the blanks as required. I think maybe it was Neal Stephenson who wrote about it. Either way, I stumbled onto this article by the improbably named Dick Meister, which is really worth a read.

Like every other baseball announcer of the time, he stayed behind in a radio studio when his team was on the road, while at the far-off ballpark a Western Union operator tapped out a pitch-by-pitch summary of the action in Morse Code.

Another operator in the studio typed up a terse running translation and tossed it in front of the announcer as he leaned into a fat black microphone emblazoned with his station's call letters and maybe a jagged streak of lightning or some other racy symbol of the marvel of electricity.

"S1C [strike one, called]... S2 [strike two, swinging]," the studio operator's summary would report, "B1L [ball one, low]... double to right...."

Through Macdonald's voice, S1C became "a wide-breakin' curve that sure didn't look like it went over that old platter from here, folks ... c'mon, ump, give us a break."

S2 was "an air-shatterin' ripple at the horsehide that coulda ramycackled that pill right outa here!"

Macdonald thanked the umpire when he called the B1L, a pitch so low "it dang near bounced off'n old Frenchy's toe." And that double, what a wonder! It went "back, back, back," a sure homer through Aunt Maggie's window -- until it inexplicably sailed down at the very last moment and "banged like a sledgehammer off'n the fence," as outfielders ran themselves dizzy trying to catch up to the ball, and Frenchy Uhalt of the Seals went "a-churnin' like a freight train" into second base.

The cryptic symbols passed to Macdonald were all he needed to put us in the ballpark. That and recorded game sounds swelling up behind him, fans roaring, fans heckling, vendors singing out -- "hey cold beer, gitchyer cold beer here" -- and other noise appropriate to the action he was describing, including people calling out the names of particular players.

Macdonald was helped, too, by his own strong belief in poetic license and that of radio technicians, like the sound engineer who blew a factory whistle exactly at 10 p.m. during the broadcasts of night games in Portland, because just beyond the centerfield fence of the ballpark there stood a foundry whose shifts changed exactly at 10 p.m.

Macdonald also made a lot of his own sounds. He'd strike a pencil on a baseball bat hanging beside him and -- crack! _ someone had smacked out a hit. He'd pound his fist into a glove and, slap, someone had made "a really sensational catch." Or at least "a great catch." Routine catches were almost as rare as left-handed shortstops. So was the hitter who didn't step from the batter's box to wipe at sweat pouring down his face, who didn't glare at umpires.

...

Ronald Reagan -- he was Dutch Reagan the broadcaster in those days -- used to brag about having a batter foul off 40 straight pitches after the telegraph wire broke down during one of the Chicago Cub games he re-created in the mid-1930s. Even Macdonald never went that far. His favorite, anyway, was a dog loose on the field. He'd have cops, players, umpires, fans, everybody but the Old Walnut Farmer himself chasing little black dogs all over the diamond for the longest damn times.

Anyway the commentators are certainly not the top in their field, but they do a good enough job and at the en dof the day with a little bit of suspension of disbeleif, it works like a charm. Thanks Rupert (you scary scary old bastard)!

Well this gives me hope...

2006-06-13T16:30:00.000-04:00

Via Toby, Why fascists can't score--at the World Cup:

Social democracy delivers more championships than the juntas--six in all. And even the worst social democratic teams--Belgium, Finland--win more consistently than their authoritarian peers. To understand this success, one must understand the essence of the social democratic economy. Social democracies take root in heavily industrialized societies, and this is a great blessing. No country has won the World Cup without having a substantial industrial base. This base supplies a vast urban proletariat, which in turn supplies players for a team. Industrial economies also produce great wealth, which funds competitive domestic leagues that improve social democratic players by subjecting them to day-to-day competition of the highest quality. And, while the junta mindset nicely transposes itself to the pitch, the social democratic ethos is a far neater match. Social democracy celebrates individualism, while relentlessly patting itself on the back for its sense of solidarity--a coherent team with room for stars.

Sadly reading the whole article requires a subscription, but then that's why they invented BugMeNot (ahem...). I really should just give up and turn this into a full time World Cup blog for the next month, huh?

Youch

2006-06-12T16:09:00.000-04:00

Not a ton you can say about the US losing 3-0 to the Czech Republic other than ouch. Well I guess there IS a lot you could say but I'm busy at work so I'm not going to say it. It is a damned shame though. I feel like every time the U.S. national team completely chokes despite their highest FIFA ranking ever it just feels like the whole cause of soccer in this country gets set back another step.

This Simpsons clip kinda captures the US attitude towards soccer in a wonderfully sad kinda still funny but boy the Simpsons used to be actually funny kind of way.

Despite the US's lackluster performance today, I feel obliged to post the following musical snippet: Kasey Keller by Barcelona. Certainly in a whole 'nother dimension from most World Cup tunes, by which I mean it's actually pretty good.