Fruit-y goodness

Made the wontons for some Catholic Worker friends tonight. We haven't made them in a couple years, but eating them made me remember what a damn good recipe it is. The fresh fruit is key--the peaches were stalked and killed just this morning.

It was good to spend some time with these folks. I'm not sure if we'll ever be all that close, but I'm starting to get a sense of community with them--and it is an intentional community, after all.

Anyway, the fruit filled wontons with the plum sauce remain a summertime favorite.

Urban Planning and Bananas.

So recently TechnoBiblio mentioned that librarians need to carry a heavy backpack with them so that they can provide reference services on the go. And It's all good (sorry it's such an old post we're talking about here) rightly points out that Starbucks has started to fill some of this need in our culture.

First off, I ain't carrying all that stuff around. It's heavy. And the outfit would cost at least $5,000 to setup. (But hey, superheroes tend to be reclusive millionaires in their spare time, so maybe that shouldn't be an impediment.) Then there's the problem of a business model. Again: superheroes don't charge for their services, but Jonny's gotta pay the mortgage.

Second, one of Oldenburg's key points is that third places (and the original work, by the way, is The great good place : cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day
, Celebrating the Third Place was a follow-up) tend to be free and/or locally owned. He spends a lot of time talking about bars, front porches, and parks. Bars tend to be locally owned (and frequently, the owner is actually behind the bar--a fact not ignored by Oldenburg). And you can't spend a huge amount of money in one--you'd be shitty drunk and you'd get kicked out. So if you want to hang out, you've got to spend money moderately (and drink moderately too).

Starbucks noticeably doesn't fit in here. Although I will agree that it does fill some of the need. The fact that it does probably enforces Oldenburg's argument that America sorely lacks such places. (To be fair, Starbucks doesn't aggressively chase folks out, but the owner is most definitely not making your latte.)

Libraries may fill part of the role, but they will always fail because they are a place with 2 specific purposes: finding information and lending books. The buildings and their services are not specifically designed for hanging out. Starbucks is. Your neighborhood tavern is (or was, before the invention of the $5 beer and video crack). Border Books, god help us, is.

There is another characteristic of the 3rd place that is missing from the discussion: it's in your neighborhood. There is a much better book, the name of which has been eluding me for months, that details how American cities have been designed for cars instead of pedestrians. The author goes into exhaustive detail about the decline of walkable neighborhoods and connects the trend convincingly to the rise of car culture, national chain stores, and shopping malls. Put his book and Oldenburg's together, and you've got a pretty good summary of the current state of affairs.

And by the way: why does an OCLC staff member search Amazon instead of WorldCat when looking for Oldenburg? Does that say more about the goodness of Amazon or the lameness of WorldCat?

Here's the banana bread recipe you've all been clamoring for:

2 sticks butter
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 eggs
3 over-ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups whole wheat flower
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup yogurt
1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts.

Mix butter, sugar, honey. Add eggs and bananas and mix till smooth. Mix in the dry ingredients a little at a time. Finish by folding in the yogurt.

Bake in a lined 6" loaf pan at 325 for about 70 minutes.

Librarian at DNC

I am trying to ignore it, really I am, but I hear Barak's speech rocked.

From Jessamyn:

"What's it like? It's like Burning Man for Democrats, without the nudity or the drugs. Everyone is walking around grinning like they've just had their first threesome."

'Terror dry run' article debunked.

Snopes.com has labeled last week's Women's Wall Street article an urban legend. Follow-up stories to the article (none of which are linked from the WWS site, hmmm) confirm that the men were indeed in a band, one of them is very widely known in Arabic music circles, and that the Federal Air Marshalls on board believed the woman to be over-reacting and "was in danger of panicking other passengers and creating a larger problem on the plane."

Salon has a follow-up story, which includes this: "Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover? ... Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee."

I'm sure there's loads of other commentary going on today, but I'll leave it with the Snopes link and instead go catch up with the Ballard Locks guy.

Time flies on the map.

I think I've lost 3 days this week to working on a GIS project.

It's a lot of fun, but it's not in my job description. All of a sudden I'm feeling underpaid.

OK, I'd probably do it for free. CAUSE IT'S A LOT OF FUN!

Although it does have it's drawbacks. Yesterday, at one point, I suddenly felt a little stiff sitting in my chair. I got up to walk around and realized it was two hours later than I thought it was. GIS is a time suck.

It's also been a bit frustrating because I really don't understand the guts of ArcMAP. Why, sometimes, will a newly imported layer not get reprojected on the fly? Is it the order in which you add layers? Is it evil demons in my computer?

It's been two weeks since the big camping trip to Steens. I've got the photos, but I'm still writing about the experience. It's turning into an epic saga, so you all will just have to hang in there for a while until I get a bit more spare time to write. At the rate I'm going, expect it sometime around Christmas.

Fishy tatt

Some of you are well aware that I work at a major center for zebrafish research. Today, I realized how serious folks are about their danio rerios: a patron currently sitting in the library has on her bicep a zebrafish swimming through the school logo.

Very dedication.

Leaping to conclusions

A conversation a couple days ago made me interested in watching blogdex again.  This morning there is a story near the top about airline passengers being really paranoid on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles.
 
She obviously spent a lot of time and effort on the story, but there's a couple things wrong with it, and a very plausible explanation.  She says the men on the flight kept acting in unison and kept looking at each other.  Well, she acknowledges that they were all in the same band, so wouldn't that be a pretty casual explanation of nodding, giving the thumbs up, making facial expressions across aisles?  I've been on airplanes with college athletic teams, and even though they don't always sit with each other, they're always moving around the plane and making faces at each other.  Why should a middle eastern band be any different?
 
The author of the story was also freaked out by the men 'getting up in unison' and going to the bathroom.  And also thought it odd that someone that was very polite to her on the jetway stared passed her a little while later (while several of the men were "congregating."
 
Let me suggest this:  she states that the plane boarded at 12:28pm.  The flight to LA was 4 hours.  Devout Muslims pray on a schedule that depends on time of day, date of year, and position on earth.  A 5 minute Internet search tells me that today, Duhr (an afternoon prayer) is at 1:39, and Asr (late afternoon, what in the Catholic Liturgy of Hours would be evening prayer) is at 5:40 pm.  Note that these times are about 4 hours apart, and roughly the same times as this lady's flight.  Could it be that these men were simply confused about how and when to pray in an airplane?

More on the locks

The Stranger article is out. And it's not bad.

There was also a Seattle Times article yesterday.

Really--check out Ian's blog. It will raise your blood pressure.

Secrets of the Locks

Huh. I've just learned of a photography student being harassed (sorry, that's the only word for it) by the Seattle Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security for taking pictures of the Ballard Locks.

What the hell? It's a tourist destination. Hundreds (during the summer I imagine it's thousands) of people take pictures there everyday!

Anyway, I think I found this whole trail via boingboing. A day of photography is planned as a symbolic nose-thumb to the authorities. Apparently the original story is this, and the victim of the harassment is keeping people updated on all the happenings around this incident on his own blog. Another Seattle blogger has some good comments (and relays a story from someone else about getting flipped off by George W). Apparently there will be a Stranger article about the incident this week.

This whole thing reminds me of when I was preparing to travel to Poland ten years ago. The Lonely Planet guidebook took great pains to remind people that photographing 'government installations' in communist (or rather formerly communist) countries was illegal. Such installations included powerplants, airports, and dams, in addition to what you would ordinarily think a government wouldn't want you taking pictures of: military bases, warships heading in and out of ports, etc. If memory serves, Lonely Planet suggested that the rules were only enforced if the government wanted to harass you. Others speculated that in Eastern Europe the ban was enforced so that pictures of decaying infrastructure wouldn't be circulated too widely. Anyway, the take-home message of this paragraphs is: Look what we've become.

Finally, I can't help but compare this to the prisoner abuse photographs. When is the government going to figure out that they can't abuse or harass people without the information getting out? We all have our own printing presses now, and they all talk to each other. It will continue to become harder to keep secrets.

Tree pictures.

The first batch of tree pictures are now available here.

Damn you Jerry's!

When checking out tonight with everything I thought I needed to hang a door, the clerk couldn't find the code on the header jamb. "What department did you get this in, I'll call over."

"Moulding." I said.

Blank stare. "What department? Like doors and windows? Hardware?"

"Moulding. You know, trim and baseboards and stuff."

Blank stare.

"It's a door jamb." I say, pointing to the computer.

She types in "DOOR JAM"

Nothing comes up.

"They're all part of the same thing. One's the left side, the other's the right. They should have similar numbers. They were all sitting next to each other in the moulding aisle."

"Sir, I'm trying to help you. There's no such department."

She gave me the hand and got another checker.

"It's from millwork. It's a jamb header. Primed. Interior. 4 and 11/16ths." She then looks up the missing piece and rings it in. 3 or 4 keystrokes total. I notice the new checker is a little butch. The original one is sort of a cutesy high school girl.

She looks at the computer, then at the two sides. "Hey, you know you've got two left sides there. I'll call back and have them bring up a right sided one."

A guy (the same one that said to me a little while earlier: "You've been in this aisle so long you're getting a little mouldy." Maybe that's why I couldn't come up with the word millwork.) comes up a minute later. "804." "Right, we've got 2 803s." We trade pieces. They send me on my way.

"Should be a lot easier to hang that door now," the butch cashier says.

Thanks a lot. Until I cut the first piece tonight, slide two shims in, drive a nail and hang a plumb bob. "This is a piece of cake," I'm thinking. Hanging a door the first time I did it was an incredible pain. Watching Kramer do it a few times back in Chicago gave me a clue.

I measure the second space, transfer the measurement to the opposite jamb and cut it. I'm five feet away from the doorway when I realize the punster put a duplicate in my hand. I pull the first piece off. Sure enough: they're numbered wrong. They are the same piece, but with different numbers. FUCK!

Now the thing about Jerry's is, a similar thing happened a couple weeks ago with a plumbing part. A teenage guy put the piece in my hand and it didn't fit. I went back, semi-furious, and picked the old, worn out piece out of the garbage can they conveniently have in the aisle. A nice, (sorry, but I'm judging the book by its cover) extremely butch, woman spent 10 minutes completely stymied by the piece. I thought at one point she was going to have to smoke a cigarette and sit down and think about it. It turns out to be a completely non-standard, threaded differently on either end. It took about 20 minutes, but she set me up.

The moral of the story? You can only trust the lesbians at Jerry's.

Hunger

Just returned from an evening packing food at Food for Lane County. I was tagging along with the Molecular Probes people, who were granted a paid half day off today to participate in any number of volunteer activities.

We started by breaking 50 pound squares of butter into hand-sized pieces, which were then packed into empty salsa containers. Another group did the same with 5 gallon tubs of sour cream. Then it was 500 pound boxes of cornflakes (2 scoops per plastic bag) and 1200 pound boxes of frozen corn (15 pieces per bag).

At the end, I pushed a prep table back into the warehouse. That's where the scope of the problem hit me. Lane County's not all that big. This warehouse is. They give all this food away and they need even more. People still go hungry, even with this much charity.

What's wrong with us?