February « 2008 « Manifest Density

Last Wednesday’s annual candy heart rumination aside, I haven’t really written much here since getting back from New Orleans. It feels like I’ve gotten worse and worse at recording what I’ve been up to, which is of course unfair both to myself and to the historians of the future. So:

I flew to San Francisco and went to some meetings about a social network for lesbians, where they can be free from the flagrantly heteronormative “poke” frame. Then there was some emergency pre-Valentine’s chocolate acquisition and a business development meeting here with a prospective client. For those unfamiliar with the lingo, “business development” means talking about how great the internet is while the company buys you bourbon. It’s easier than it probably sounds.

Nicco piloted our top-down rental convertible toward SFO in characteristically terrifying fashion, and soon I was sitting in the airport bar, almost exactly 24 hours after I had landed. I chatted with a nice couple who were in town for some sort of trade show. They expressed amazement at my phone and irritation at having to press one to get English voicemail prompts. I opted to pick my battles and focused on getting the bartender’s attention. This proved to be a bad idea.

It didn’t seem that way at first. I got on the plane and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had a whole row to myself. I zoned out, then spread out, then passed out. The stumble to the bathroom went okay, but the one coming out didn’t turn out as well.

My friend Scott is a medic in the Army. He’s got as many mortifyingly hilarious stories as you might expect; some of my favorites are about his training. Mostly these are about doing unpleasant things to goats, but occasionally the trainees just do unpleasant things to each other. In one exercise partners take turns wearing inflatable pressure pants and dosing themselves with vasodilators, then abruptly pull the plug on the pants. If you do this — and I’m not suggesting that you do — all the blood will immediately drop out of the top half of your body and you’ll go into shock (this is still a better gig than being an Army goat).

That’s pretty much what I felt like as I stumbled down the aisle, hung over, sleep deprived, blinded by the lavatory lights and generally out of it. I pawed at some unfortunate passengers’ heads, desperately searching for any empty row that could plausibly be my own. It felt very, very good when I found one and collapsed into it. I woke up long enough to curse the Pittsburgh airport, then got home and slept through half the day.
Also, I had super-birth-valentine’s-day-stravaganza! I turned 28 on Friday, but was too busy being spoiled rotten by Emily to really notice. For Valentine’s we went to Salt & Pepper, where they fed us well and plied us with port and grappa. We went to Southwark afterward and did some self-plying. The birthday-day was even better (probably because I had no part in planning it): we went to Dock Street and ate fancy pizza with some fine folks, saw Jumper, and grabbed a drink at Chick’s. I can recommend all of these things highly (although I admit I may be confusing the actual movie Jumper with the abstract concept of teleportation).

Then: DC! Dave & Buster’s! Giant stuffed frogs! My thanks to everybody who dared venture into what is probably the most hostile environment not currently being considered for hosting an international peacekeeping force. I had a great time, but it turns out that friends are better for talking to than they are for enlistment into ad-hoc anti-zombie strike forces (no offense, guys). So this is perhaps not going to be the first installment of an annual tradition. On the other hand, I still have an awful lot of credits on my Power Card…

I meant to talk about the new evidence that biofuels are a bad idea when Brian first wrote about it, but I forgot. Today Matt mentioned it, and I was reminded that virtually everyone is ignoring a key aspect of the biofuel land use debate. If I may quote the beginning of the cover story in the current issue of the excellent Mid-Atlantic Brewing News:

Blame drought in Australia and rain in Europe. Blame increased interest in ethanol as an energy source.

Even blame the growing popularity of beer in China.

Those—and more—are reasons to expect higher beer prices in 2008, and why some brewers will be unable to make some beers no matter how strong the consumer demand. Craft brewers face what more than one calls “a perfect storm” of higher costs and reduced availability for both the hops and malt used to make their beers.

“Prices are going to go up… there’s just no doubt about it,” predicts Jim Busch of Downingtown, Pa.’s Victory Brewing Co. “And some brands will disappear. Other brands will just totally change in their character.”

“Brewer owners are going to have to raise their prices,” agrees Russian River Brewing Co. founder and brewer Vinnie Cilurzo in Santa Rosa, Calif., “just to stay in business.”

“I think this year will be, to use the Chinese curse phrase, ‘interesting,’” comments Hugh Sisson, president of Baltimore’s Clipper City Brewing Co.

The threat is real, people. You know Tupper’s Hop Pocket, right? Well, not this year you won’t — ingredient prices have made it not viable to produce.

So, to summarize: changing global climate; baseless biofuel enthusiasm; and the terrifying prospect of a nation’s worth of people who look different from use dragging themselves out of poverty — all of these forces are conspiring to make your favorite brand of beer marginally more expensive and/or taste a little less like pine needles.

And what are our prospective presidential nominees doing about this looming crisis? Nothing. There was only one man prepared to stop global climate change, approach biofuels with appropriate skepticism, and exact merciless economic punishment upon the Chinese for drinking beer (instead of attending to human rights). That’s right — it was Dennis Kucinich: the Beer Candidate.

Unfortunately for our nation’s future, this truth has become apparent too late. Hell, I would’ve done my best to support a Department of Peace with a straight face if only he’d explicitly pledged to keep beer prices low. I used to think it was just the former that couldn’t occur without the latter; now I see that it works both ways.

candy heart delectability by color

(In descending order.)

White
Orange
Pink
Yellow*
Purple*
Green

Note that the odds of me eating myself sick when presented with candy hearts approaches unity for all colors.

* Ranked position is within margin of error.

2.13.2008 / 1 comment

a stipulation

Ezra and Matt are talking about chain versus independent bookstores. Ezra says:

I keep trying to figure out a reason I believe bookstores will survive into the future, but it seems pretty clear that books will eventually be as mercilessly digitized as music, and most bookstores will close, just as most CD stores were shuttered long ago. Tell me why I’m wrong.

I agree with Ezra, so I don’t really have anything to add except the suggestion that any answer to his question that includes the phrase “the way books smell” or variants thereof should be immediately disqualified.

2.8.2008 / 5 comments

George Bush isn’t the only one

If you’re making a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic and are having trouble budgeting for the outdoor shots, I have a suggestion.

So, as I mentioned, EchoDitto just got back from our annual retreat. This year we did something different and scheduled a service project for our first day together. The idea was to start things on a positive note, get everyone working as a team, and hopefully do some good. Being a company forged from the remains of a liberal presidential campaign, we naturally decided to accomplish this by destroying a church.

Of course, it was pretty well destroyed to begin with. The church in question was located in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward, close enough to the water that you could see the levees from the front door. I don’t know how high the water got there, exactly — twenty feet? twenty-five? — but it was high enough to engulf two floors of a church sanctuary. Three years later, much of the mud was still wet.

This was all set up for us by ACORN, an organization that not only lined up the opportunity but also provided the equipment necessary to keep us from dying (or getting sick, anyway). So we donned our allegedly-Tyvek suits, gloves, goggles and respirators and set to work.

First up: destroying pews. Ben came up with a pretty good system for demolition, and soon we had dragged them all out to the curb. That left us faced with the mud. Oh, the mud.

Although there was plenty of wet, shoe-grabbing muck conveniently located near the doors, most of it was like this: thick, caked, dry. The clumps were easily an inch thick, and hard to break. It was like enormous pieces of pottery had been shattered and precisely arranged into a plane. Shovels and wheelbarrows arrived just in time.

Under the mud there was a layer of carpet stubbornly clinging to life. The less said about the ensuing struggle the better. In the end we got it done — the place was stripped, ready for ACORN’s lead and mold remediation measures and then, hopefully, for a congregation that’s ready to rebuild.

Throughout the experience it was hard to know what I should be thinking and feeling. Would anyone come back to this building? To this neighborhood? There were no residents watching us work; no church members on hand to choose what to save. We might as well have been excavating an archaeological site. It was easy enough to imagine the despair the deacons felt upon first entering their ruined church, but whatever sorrow might have remained in the place had turned stale and seeped out of the hole in the wall. It was empty.

Plus, reality was being a bit over the top. I mean, c’mon: ladies’ shoes? A destroyed organ? A waterlogged Bible? Mud encrusted children’s toys?! It was all very maudlin and, frankly, unbelievable. That sort of lack of subtlety would never fly on HBO.

But once we had finished the ACORN folks gave us a tour of the lower ninth ward, and the enormity of the situation became apparent and more immediately striking.

These markings mean that the house was searched on 9/12 by a crew identified as “TFW”. They found zero bodies, but the “NE” stands for “no entry” so that number’s actually meaningless. Looks like they found a dog, too. Three years later, these spray paint markings are still on nearly every house.

This is the new levee. It’s three years later, but this structure, allegedly temporary, is all that has been rebuilt. It’s built to the same flawed design as the one it replaced, and built badly at that.

This used to be someone’s front stoop. Three years later, the missing house is one of the few visible signs of deliberate progress, if you want to call it that. Whether the owner paid to have it torn down or whether the city did it for them because they were deemed not to be maintaining the property — who knows?

I don’t mean to imply that the situation is hopeless. We met a gentleman named Mac who says that God told him to build a community center, so he did. It’s an amazing thing. The ACORN volunteers were awfully inspiring, too. But there’s still so much to do, so few people, so little attention paid. It’s taken years just to accomplish what anyone could reasonably expect the world’s richest country to accomplish in weeks. We should all be ashamed.

All photos belong to Jason or Michael

2.6.2008 / 5 comments

vindication

At the start of the Superbowl I found myself defending Joe Buck from Charles’ and Spencer’s insults, and complaining that Troy Aikman is an idiot and a terrible color man. Well, I was right (not that anyone disagreed with me about Aikman).

Via Megan/Matt/everybody.

2.5.2008 / 2 comments

re-up as in upload

I won’t pretend to be a devoted Clipse fan, but Spencer and Matt’s excitement over We Got It For Cheap Vol. 3 has got me intrigued. But I didn’t really want to keep my browser open for an hour while I listen to it.

So! Turn on the Live HTTP Headers plugin in Firefox. Reload the streaming page. Capture the conversation between my browser and their server and search for “mp3″. What comes up?

http://www.mp3asset.com/xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480
GET /xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480 HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mp3asset.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
BAR: foo
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 286
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:55:28 GMT
Server: Apache 2.4.0

What lives at that mysterious
http://www.mp3asset.com/xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480 URL? This does:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<playlist shuffle="0" autoplay="true" color1="231C24" color2="ED2311" color3="984537">
<sound src="http://www.archive.org/download/Vol.3_734/01Track1_vbr.mp3" stream="true"><![CDATA[We Got It For Cheap Vol.3 Re-Up Gang Records EXCLUSIVE..]]></sound>
</playlist>

Sure looks like an XML playlist to me. Follow that archive.org URL and what do you get? The complete downloadable MP3.

Security through obscurity: its track record is at least consistent. Use one-time URLs if you want to keep something semi-private, kids.

2.4.2008 / 2 comments

it feels like the big easy wasn’t

Hi there. Have you been wondering where I am? No, probably not. But look, I was gone: to New Orleans, with the rest of the EchoDitto crew for our annual retreat, which this year happened to coincide with the beginning of Mardis Gras.

Prior to this trip all I knew about New Orleans came from Hard Target and that one Radiohead song with the clarinet. Both proved to be reliable guides, although anyone preparing for a similar trip would also do well to review the scene at a frat party — ideally one attended by several hundred thousand people.

I have lots of stories to tell (two!), and will get to them as soon as I can. At the moment I’m too busy grappling with the fact that I enjoy and am inspired by something affiliated with the Black Eyed Peas; also, pleasant exhaustion.

2.4.2008 / leave a comment

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