Wherein The Author Takes A Brief Political Detour

Work’s been aggravating me lately, in the sense that I more or less spend 45 minutes in the morning doing the day’s essential work and spend the rest of the day asking people for information or otherwise being ineffectual. The cure for the workday blues: The Interweb, of course! I’ve become acquainted in detail with the contents of the New York Times all week, and found this little gem (it’s in the comments):

What interests me most about Romney is the thing he has to such a great degree in common with Ruldolph Guliani — that being, folks who actually spent time as their constituents are not jumping into the spotlight as enthusiastic backers, but rather offer warnings with near every breath.

— (someone named) Damian in Pittsburg

I’ve got to say, he’s got a point. I don’t really know anyone in Massachusetts who’d endorse ol’ Mitt for President. After all, the guy only spent about 150 days here in 2006. I think basically we feel used…the guy comes back here, gets elected governor, spends his entire term shifting away from the positions he took to get elected in order to establish his conservative bona fides for a Presidential run, and then goes so far as to start trashing Massachusetts and distancing himself from the only real accomplishment he had as governor.

I wonder if Hillary Clinton’s constituents feel the same way.

My 5 Favorite Technological Devices

I’m a geek. If you know me (which is most likely the reason that your reading this), you know this. After all, I’m not too proud to admit it. By which I mean that I kind of shout it from the rooftops. When I’m not watching Doctor Who (and if any of you purists get peeved because I linked to the new series, it’s just because that’s what I’ve been watching lately…Tom Baker will always pilot the TARDIS in my heart).

OK, actually this is getting a little embarassing. Below are my five favorite technological devices. Because it’s my blog.

5. iPod
Back in the dark ages, the most pressing question on any trip was which batch of CDs to bring with me. I had to consider mood, length of the trip, what I’d listened to lately…not to mention the cases or wallets to hold them, the liner notes, a bulky player, etc. More than once, I had to hire Sherpas just for a weekend away. The iPod changed all that. Sure, I had previously started compiling my music electronically during my brief sojurn on the Windows side, but Apple brought the whole package together with the iPod, and for the first time, all my music could come with me everywhere. It’s life-changing, in a small way.

4. DVR
Watch TV when you want! Don’t be a slave to the networks! Fight the power! I like the DVR because it gives me control. I actually feel that having it ultimately results in my watching less TV, and only the TV that I want.

3. Wii
Officially designated “The Funnest Device Ever Created By Humans” by The S. Brendan Short Academy of Stuff in 2007, the Wii is revolutionary. I don’t think we’ve begun to see the ways in which this will change things. It’s not a new sentiment, but Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world: they innovate, while everyone else just sits back and wonders…or just doesn’t get it.

Of course, it helps that I need Zelda games like addicts need their smack.

2. Macintosh
My first Mac was a Quadra 605 that my father got at a discount through his employer. At the time, what most impressed me was the fact that it had a hard drive, and thus didn’t need to be booted up with a specific program to run. Just seeing the desktop when it started up was a marvel to me. I went over to the Windows side for a brief period in college in a misguided attempt to “get more for my money”, but switched back after graduating, and I haven’t looked back since. Things are just better over here.

1. The cell phone
The cell phone is one of the more maligned pieces of technology out there. Just about everyone has one, but many claim not to like it, saying it makes them “too reachable” or some such. To me, the cell phone is a technology with no downside (possible brain cancer excepted). It’s much like the DVR: Why should I have to be home to get a phone call? If I don’t want to be reached, I don’t answer it, or turn it off. But I just can’t imagine being shackled to one place just to make or receive a call.

Medium and Message

Had an interesting conversation with John on the way home from work Monday on the subject of blogging, partly brought on by this article in the New York Times. To summarize: It describes people in serious debt who use blogging as a tool to help get out, disclosing the intimate financial details of their situations on the web in order to, among other things, create discipline for themselves in sticking to their budgets. One blogger claimed that she was tempted to buy an LCD TV, but refrained, since she didn’t want to disappoint her blog readers by backsliding. It seems quintessentially American in a way to solve your problems by exposing them to an audience…we seem to have an idea that fame (no matter how limited) is a sort of panacea, despite ample evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, John compared it to AA, where the subtle pressure not to let down the group helps deter falling off the wagon. Interesting either way.

EXTENDED PARENTHETICAL
As I wrote the above, the idea occurred to me that the idea of fame as a generalized good thing, despite the cost, is hardly a new theme. Achilles chooses a short life with an immortality of fame over a long and obscure life of peaces, telling his mother: “I’ll lie in peace, once I’ve gone down to death./But now, for the moment, let me seize great glory!” Perhaps it’s a Western idea…I’m not going to do the research now, but it still seems uniquely American to ascribe to it a therapeutic value.

Well, it seems I’ve digressed again. What occasioned the above conversation was the fact that I had finally posted again after an extended hiatus, which got us talking about the mechanics of writing material on a regular basis, writing as a craft, and so on. But I’ll leave you with this thought: How true is the old chestnut that the Internet is a self-selecting medium? Given that all of us Internet-enabled folks have roughly the same level of access to the same information, will the collective discernment of the masses really ensure that the cream rises to the top? Or at least that frequent posting means getting noticed? If I keep writing whatever comes into my head on a frequent enough basis, will I eventually get an audience by the law of averages? An audience I didn’t go to college with? Do the last sentences sound like I’m whining for attention? How many roads must a man walk down? How much wood could a…

Well, you get the idea.

Left Coasting

Ok, ok. It’s been a long time. I acknowledge that. I’ll try to make up for it moving forward. With luck, things will be a little bit more standard around here.

Just got back from my fourth-ever jaunt to the west coast, and by “just got back”, I mean “got back on Tuesday and have been sick ever since”. Well, it’s an imperfect world, and if I had to choose between being sick on vacation or sick during the work week, I’d take the latter, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I do, but I shouldn’t.

In any case, I was out on the left coast this time to visit Sheryl. Lots of fun all around.

FRIDAY: DAY AT THE MUSEUM (BEN STILLER NOT INCLUDED)
The great thing about flying out to the west coast is that when you leave, for example, Thursday evening, you get in on, well, on Thursday evening. On account of the time change. This means that you can go right to sleep when you get in, wake up the following morning, and pretend you’ve never heard of jet lag.

With that goal in my mind, and after grabbing a refreshing breakfast of eggs and such, Sheryl and I headed for the BART and crossed the bay to San Francisco to visit the Asian Art Museum. I’m a fan of art from all corners of Asia, but I have to say that the AAM is a little overwhelming. The organizational scheme is neat…it follows the spread of Buddhism through Asia; but there’s so much here that the first trip really seems like a process of just getting acquainted with the collection. Perhaps any subsequent trips can be a little more focused. There was a cool exhibit of woven bamboo that Sheryl really dug, though.

That evening there was a little party thrown in my honor for some of Sheryl’s friends. Nice people, and I got to indulge my misanthropy towards non-New Englanders to its full extent. I will say, thought, that people in California seem to stay later at parties than they do here.

SATURDAY: RECORD OF LODI WAR
(sorry for the geeky anime reference)
To get to the Lodi wine region east of Berkeley, you have to go through the Altamont pass. It’s like being on another planet, surrounded by the relics of a long-gone civilization in the form of the 6000+ wind turbines that stud the hills around the road. There’s no sound but the hum of your tires on the road, and that, combined with the turbines slowly turning with the wind or standing still waiting for the breeze to catch their blades lends the scene an otherworldly beauty. Reminded me a little of Myst.

Lodi is an up and coming wine region known largely for their Zinfandels, although the real reason we were there is because Sheryl is a rabid chocaholic, and the Lodi Wine & Chocolate Weekend happened to be going on. Short summary: Long on wine, a little short on chocolate. I have to say, though, that Lodi wine is worth a look. Good stuff, and a pleasant excursion, despite the rather bizarre weather patterns we ran into all day, as we drove through alternating bands of rain and sun.

SUNDAY: MUD SURFING AND PORK
Morning featured breakfast at Guerilla Cafe (By the way, is it normal for a restaurant to have a MySpace page instead of a real website? Am I just not Web 2.0 enough to know this?), which apparently features award-winning waffles. Well, I had the waffle (you only get one), and it was good, but I’m honestly not certain I’d give it an award. Also, my drink (a combination of lingonberry, lime, and lemon juices with soda water) was tasty, but they hadn’t filtered the seeds out, and I kept having to fish them out of my mouth, which is unattractive at any time of day, but especially in the morning.

Following breakfast and a quick tour of spots in Berkeley I hadn’t seen on previous visits, we headed out to Tilden Regional Park, which, despite being within the Berkeley city limits, is freaking huge. The scenery is lovely, but the rain of the previous days had made the paths a little treacherous. There were a few anxious moments going uphill, but the real fun was going downhill, when I spend a few heart-pounding moments surfing the mud down the path on one foot. I still maintain that I knew exactly what I was doing the whole time.

Having had enough of the great outdoors, we ended the day with dinner at Oliveto, which was featuring a menu described to us as “75% pork” (they had recently been featuring a menu that was 100% pork). Despite the fact that it no doubt sent some of my ancestors spinning in their graves, it was delicious. Possibly the most interesting part was actually dessert. It’s my experience that many great restaurants can fall seriously flat on dessert, throwing together an insipid custard or tiramisu in an effort to fill out a section of the menu that they feel obliged to populate. Instead, I was treated to a rosemary creme caramel, which sounded just unusual enough on the menu that I decided to go for it. It was a unique combination of flavors, but I have to say that I enjoyed the hell out of it, and it paired nicely with a pear brandy that I ordered on a whim (possibly in an attempt to feel sophisticated).

MONDAY: FRAN(cisco)’S LABYRINTH
Monday started with two long-awaited treats: Meeting up with my dear friend Bonnie, and lunch at the Ferry Building. Two half-lunches, a loaf of cinnamon-currant bread, and three truffles later, we set off to find a movie theater, determined to see Pan’s Labyrinth. Well, we found what may be the best-hidden movie theater in America, but no dice. Maybe they hate Spain there or something. One of Bonnie’s friends was gracious enough to spend about 20 minutes on the phone with her searching for other movie theaters that might be showing it, but as it turned out, the nearest one was a ways away, and we gave up on the idea in favor of investigating the ruins of some turn of the (last) century baths located down by the ocean (the sudden transition to sunshine having given us confidence). We swung by Bonnie’s apartment (which is all kinds of big) to grab her car for the journey. The mercurial weather of the Bay area played us for fools, though, as the sunshine of the outset turned to a lowering sky and then to pouring rain. Happily enough, by the time we drove down to where the baths were, we were mere blocks from what was apparently the only theater in San Francisco showing Pan’s Labyrinth, so we availed ourselves of its nearness and sat down with about four other people (one of whom was clearly dancing with Mary Jane) to enjoy an intense, violent, dark fairy tale of Franco’s Spain. I enjoyed it, although it’s certainly not for everyone.

The movie over, we bid farewell to Bonnie and caught the BART back to Berkeley (alliteration is fun for the whole family), with just enough time to grab some decent Chinese food for dinner before I headed to the airport. Somehow, JetBlue flew me back across the country in less time than it would take me to drive to New York from Boston…just in time for me to call in sick to work, but I’ll spare you all that.