“Swim across the Atlantic Ocean” 3,462 mi

There’s probably a better way to link to this, but I don’t know it. It’s a post from a blog called The Consumerist, which notes a Google Maps direction advising you to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. Here’s the post.

I ran “get directions” from Portland, OR to London, England and got the same thing, coming ashore somewhere in NW Franceand taking a “slight right at E05 0.5 mi” before finding the toll road to Calais, and then (I presume) chunneling it to England (“Slight right at Dover-Boulougne-sur-Mer, 30.1 mi”).

Now, if Google only listed the mid-Atlantic truck stops …

Bumper Sticker du Jour

When I lived in Oklahoma, I was continually oppressed by the bumper stickers:

• “WWJD”
• “Real Men Love Jesus”
• “1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given”

… holy cripes, talk about purgatory! (Er, sorry. Couldn’t resist.)

It’s not that I minded the holy rollers or their bumper stickers. What I minded was when they were smug and humorless. Consider how good the bumper stickers could have been:

• “God please grant me chastity, but not just yet. – St. Augustine”
• “Compassion is difficult to give away because it keeps coming back”
• “The High Holidays have nothing to do with marijuana”, etc.

I came close to making my own bumper sticker: “Real Men Love Cheeses” … but it was an only-in-Oklahoma sort of thing. And who knows, I might have had to endure righteous road rage from some pissed-off evangelical who wanted to get biblical on my rear bumper.

Then, this morning: “Non-judgment day is near.”

Aaahhh. Nice.

Merde Compared

Turns out you can judge a book by its cover. I walked by this at a bookstore and literally stopped in my tracks. Bought it a couple weeks later, and finished it last night.

Good read! The review blurb on the cover calls it “un-PC and mostly hilarious,” and they’re right on both counts. It’s the story of his year living in Paris, mostly as a marketer working to open a chain of British “tearooms.” It’s also about the work environment, the girlfriends, the contradictions, quirks and absurdities of behavior, both of the French, and eventuall about Clarke himself.

After many a hilarious and unsparing comment at the expense of the French, Clarke returns home for a visit, first struggling to find (of all things) the english for underwear at the local Marks & Spencer. Then it’s time for dinner at home:

When my mum put her usual salad bowl on the table–uncut lettuce leaves, whole tomatoes, cucumber slices, sticks of celery–I felt an irresistible urge to ignore the mayonnaise and salad cream bottles and make myself some vinaigrette. There was only malt vinegar in the kitchen, though, and some cooking oil of unidentified vegetable origin. I did my best with the ingredients at hand, returned to the table with my bowl of dressing, and began tearing up some lettuce leaves with my fingers. It didn’t occur to me that I was doing anything unusual until my dad asked, “Don’t they have knives and forks in Paree, then?”

“Yes, but …” I didn’t finish my explanation. Not because I’d forgotten the words, but because I realized how stupid it was going to sound to say, “One doesn’t cut lettuce with a knife.”

I read Bill Bryson’s “Neither Here Nor There” last summer, which is a breezy trip across Europe, and the two books are worth comparing. Bryson flits from country to country, often just long enough to do a time-condensed travel-writing/humor Alexis de Toqueville treatment of each country. While often funny (sometimes very, very funny), Bryson is often too content to go for the low-hanging fruit, and sometimes trades in cliches, which is irritating.

Clarke, on the other hand, is telling a long-form narrative, but the details that come out of it (who else can go on strike?) tend to be sharper, more subtle, and thus, less flippant, even if no less cutting.

Paper or Plastic? Neither!

After years of wrangling, and nearly passing a surcharge on plastic bags a few years ago, San Francisco has just set a big precedent. This from sfgate.com:

The city’s Board of Supervisors approved groundbreaking legislation Tuesday to outlaw plastic checkout bags at large supermarkets in about six months and large chain pharmacies in about a year.

(Here’s the story.)

Here’s a bit of backstory: First, unless you’re brain damaged, you probably know that plastic bags are a complete blight on the earth. Plastic bags decompose about as slowly as nuclear waste, account for 7 percent of landfill weight and 18 percent of volume–and that’s when they make it to a landfill. Often they find their way into the watershed, where they get ground up into little bits and ingested by fish or suffocate fish or marine mammals.

(For more info on the faux choice of paper vs. plastic, see the bit about bags by the Georgia Conservancy.)

North America is moving at about the speed of a receding glacier away from “paper or plastic.” For example, Ikea announced two weeks ago that it would charge a nickel a bag. A UPI story noted that Ikea “wanted to bring a bit of European sensibility to U.S. shopping.” That’s putting it lightly. When I hear “U.S. shopping,” I picture obese Neanderthals dragging billowing plastic sacks behind them at super-stores …

A few years ago when I first started to switch to canvas bags, I had a variety of strange reactions from clerks. Many of them were baffled; I once had a surly teenager huff in disgust. Others made a big deal about doing double-entry bookkeeping when I was shopping, carefully counting my bags so that I got the correct number of bags times .03 credit. (You’ll be happy to know I invested that nine cents in a progressive mutual fund, and it’s now worth .134!)

San Francisco has been pondering alternatives to plastic since at least 2004, when they proposed a 17-cent surcharge on them in the city, prompting one of the lamest rationalizations ever attempted by a PR lackey. In fact, it’s so lame it’s worth dredging out of the archive and quoting verbatim: “We think essentially it’s an unnecessary and misguided approach,” said Tim Shestek, spokesman for the American Plastics Council. “This tax is going to hurt those who can least afford it.”

Tim, if you’re reading this, you’re pond scum–no, worse, you’re a plastic bag that’s going to take 10,000 years to fall apart, probably offing a few critters in your eternal half-life. (More evidence of Tim-the-Evil)

Admittedly, PR lackeys are paid to be amoral mouthpieces, but come on. Since when has the American Plastics Council ever donated a single plasti-widget to help “those who can least afford it?” Because if they did, the solution would be screechingly simple.

Here’s Tim Shestek in a perfect world: “We at the American Plastics Council think plastic is a wonderful technology, if correctly used. Clearly, churning out millions of bags that last for millennia and harm all sorts of living creatures isn’t one of those uses. We are concerned that this tax would hurt those who can least afford it–which is why we’re giving away bags made out of recycled plastic.”

I live in the Portland area, which is potty for sustainability, so it should come as no surprise that my dowdy, mismatched bags are often–well not exactly embraced (as the do suffer from occasional pre-laundry grottiness), but almost never looked upon as goofy. True, I do get the occasional Rite-Aid clerk who is still flummoxed when I tell her I don’t want my single pack of gum in its own plastic bag, but for the most part they’re accepted.

Two stories of the recent past: At the the local hoity-toity mart, I brought my bags late one night on the way home from somewhere, and the clerk saw them and seemed somewhat puzzled that her chain (Haggen … are you listening?) didn’t sell them near the checkout, if at all.

And a few weeks ago I was at the local blue-collar Safeway, and I handed my bags to the woman working the checkout. She paused slightly and examined my bags.

Here it comes, I thought, another tiresome opportunity for yours truly to spend his fatigued post-work hours having evangelize for basic common sense.

“This is a Trader Joe’s bag,” she said. “They’re our competitor.”

I shrugged and said something noncommittal, but I was pleasantly surprised I didn’t have to defend my lifestyle when all I wanted to do was buy bread and eggs.

She rung me out and closed her checkout lane, and then told me to wait. When she returned, she had a black Safeway bag, which she gave to me. For free. “Here,” she said. “If you’re going to use them, use one of ours.”

I said thanks and took the bag home with me.

It’s made out of recycled plastic.

A Tale of Two Coffee Grinders

The first coffee grinder I ever owned was a squat little number, the size and shape of a lunchpail thermos. To grind beans, you took the hockey-puck-shaped lid off the top, poured the beans in and ground them, took the lid off and poured the coffee into a filter. Simple.

It was a stalwart little appliance, a gift from my good friend Rob that lasted about 20 years, until the accumulated hoop stress wore out the exterior. It’s remarkable how you can take all those quiet mornings for granted, just you and your grinder. I think of all the mornings in college and grad school, up early, walking the grinder to the far end of the office or hooding it in an oven mitt so I could grind without waking the rest of the family. I swear, it’s enough to make you sentimental about a blade, electric motor, and a few other parts.

When it gave out, I was once again in the market for a new coffee grinder, and I bought a Black & Decker. There’s an undeniable counter appeal to it. It’s black and stainless steel, and it even reflects the flash in a sort of Crate & Barrel way. It also fits nicely into my lattice of delusion about my kitchen (i.e., “Yeah, it’ll go well with the SubZero fridge we’re going to put in one day”).

It’s works differently than Old Faithful. First, there’s a hinged lid on top, and then the grinds go into a plastic cup. When you’re done, you pull out the cup, take the lid off the cup, and pour out the grinds. If you’re curious, clicking on the images will show you a larger picture. Just say, “I’m a gearhead” while doing so.

Attention Black & Decker: Your product stinks.

• First, the grinder sounds like a garbage disposal full of Legos.
• Second, it doesn’t make coffee grinds, it makes coffee dust.
• Third, this grinder makes a mess. A big mess. As I pull out the plastic cup, take off the lid, put the lid down, flip over the cup, tap the grounds into the filter (and clean off the side of the cup where they stick), the grinds start to go places: on the counter. On the side of the coffee maker. On my hand. On the outside of the cup and lid. And when I’m particularly unlucky, these little motes of chaos make it all the way onto the coffee maker.

Bear in mind all this occurs at my point of maximum vulnerability, when the birds are chirping in the new dawn of a day, when I’m still in my pajamas, sleepy, half-competent, grieving over my beloved old grinder. To subject a soul to such mess and frustration at such moments is cruel incarnate. To coat my grinder, counter, hands and coffee maker with schmutz is just lame.

There’s a Stephen King story, where a John Doe touches some mossy stuff, which over the course of a few days starts to cover him. At the end of the story, while suffering from terminal moss (or perhaps algae), and nearly covered, he knows the gig is up and shoots himself. As the grinds creep up my hand and infiltrate the kitchen, this story keeps coming to mind.

But it works, and I could spend a half-minute every morning for the next 20 years cleaning up after the damned thing. My friend has one, and says she spreads out a paper towel to catch the fallout. This is exasperating. After all, this is company has been around for a while, and it invented the portable electric drill, so a working coffee grinder should be child’s play for them.

Alas, no. The engineering axiom is KISS: “keep it simple, stupid.” Somehow they overlooked the glaringly obvious: Taking out the plastic parts, separating them, dumping the grinds, cleaning the plastic assembly, reassembling it and putting it back in is way too many steps. It’s almost enough to send one into perorations about the decline and fall of American know-how, so on, so forth.

But I just want a cup of coffee … without it, all incisive critiques of global capitalism are more or less impossible.

Think of a marriage, and your mate’s personality quirk that you never noticed when you were dating, but years later drives you insane. When I looked at my future relationship with the B&D (funny, it’s also an acronym for bondage & domination), I envision years of hatred for this appliance, how every unpleasant experience with it will leave a bitter residue in my morning cup, how the accumulation of motes and frustration will lead me to complain about it incessantly, my otherwise partly sunny disposition reduced to tiresome Andy Rooney ranting. Or worse, this insidious accretion of wasted bean detritus will drive me slowly insane, until I do something violent and unpredictable, and you’ll experience the shock of seeing me hiding my face in a perp walk on the 6-o’clock news.

For my birthday, my wife bought me a new grinder. And guess what? After I grind my beans, all I have to do is take the lid off and flip it over. It sounds better, works better, doesn’t make a mess, and allows me to enjoy a steaming morning cup of joe. I stare at the dull, menacing steel exterior of the Black and Decker and it stares balefully back. I’m sure it knows it’s days are numbered.

The only question I have now is ethical: whether giving it away is like exposing someone else to a Stephen King horror story every time they grind their beans.

Rubbing Elbows

Here’s the alt-transit story du jour:

My son Theo and I had to go downtown this morning, and I asked him how he wanted to go: car or train.

Theo: “Train.”

(For all you Hummer owners and other unevolved lovers of iron, gas-burning behemoths, please note the wisdom of a three-year-old when choosing a mode of transport. And in case you’re disinclined to believe me, let’s talk about our first automotive encounter of the day. Three blocks from home, We’re tooling down the otherwise empty street, when a car pulls up from a side street and wants to turn left in front of me. I’m fairly close to it, close enough that most considerate and sane drivers would wait another 3-4 seconds and turn in behind me. Of course this guy turns right in front of me, so that I either have to brake for him or rear-end him. Then, when I don’t slow down in a way that was satisfactory, he braked. Just in case I didn’t already know he was a jackass.)

So we drove to the park & ride and took the train, which is actually light rail (for here in Portland, Trimet runs the MAX, which goes through tunnels but isn’t a subway … look at that! We’ve taken care of the backstory and the tag cloud!) And it worked perfectly: We got to the station, the train came a minute later, and we found a seat. And yes, I know what an uncommon occurrence this is.

It was about 8:30 am, a time for commuters and students. But just our luck, we happened to sit across from the girl wearing pink: pink sweatshirt, pink skirt (hemmed with a 6-inch fringe of black), pink leggings, and black plastic gaiters and black boots … and pink and white rabbit ears. Yes, rabbit ears. Space-alien couture aside, she was healthy, lucid and well taken care of by someone, since she had functional glasses, braces, and chatted aimably with a woman passenger.

But wait, there’s more. Next to Mademoiselle Rabbit Ears was a guy with a black eye, traveling with a bag, a small suitcase, and … his vacuum cleaner.

(Shall we have a WTF moment here? Yes, let’s.)

As we rode I was musing about this, about taking Theo on the MAX, and exposing him to the city’s cross-section of humanity. I think it’s good, in a way, to see the Asian girl blinged out with her Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and plugged into her iPod, the woman tapping away on her laptop, the impressive number of people reading, and the nice people (invariably 50+ years old) who find him delightful … even Bunny Ears and Vacuum Cleaner.

Later in the morning, on the Portland Streetcar on the way to work, there was the guy wearing two pairs of blue jeans, and another guy with his plastic bag of recycling, with greasy, stringy, disappearing hair, with a tattered scrap of newspaper and empty coffee cup, who got off the streetcar and began chewing. On his cup. And, as much as I try to be Mr. Egalitarian Transit Guy, I’m sort of glad Theo didn’t have to see or smell him.

I also try to be me Mr. Pithy End-with-a-Dazzling-Last-Line, but tonight nothing comes to mind. Got one? Add it to the comments.

The Untouchable John Banville

Most recent book I finished was The Untouchable, by John Banville (he’s Irish) ,which was insanely well written. It’s based on the life of Anthony Blunt, a British art historian and scholar of Poussin who was outed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 as one of the circle that included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Donald MacLean. And for those of you who don’t live an afterlife in spy fiction, they’re all from Cambridge University, and spied for the Soviets–while also spying for Britain.

My only quibbles are that he has an abiding love for describing sunlight coming indoors (patches, shafts, rays, etc.) and uses the word “truculent” a few too many times. But apart from that … oh my God.

I have a pretty high-powered vocabulary, but I started writing down all the words I didn’t know, or wasn’t sure of.

Consider this truncated (though not truculent) list:

poniard	chivvy	benison
supererogatory	levantine	dissembled
dessicated	embonpoint	stertorous
recrudescence	hoyden	casuist
discommoded	superannuated	melodeon
attenuated	apostasy	sepulchrally
odemic	flocculent	oneiric
moue	connubial	brumous
soubrette	shebeen	purblind
simony	quiff	pudeur
quondam	uxoriously	raillery

Wow. Good story, amazing writing, and your vocabulary will get an all-out workout.

(In case you doubt, consider the rave from the august-sounding Virginia Quarterly Review. … the “sounding” being crossed out thanks to Waldo Jaquith’s … um … impactful-sounding comment.

Blogging Las Vegas

I was in Las Vegas last week for a conference. I hadn’t been for years, and even then, barely went to The Strip (I used to go for volleyball tournaments and we always stayed on the cheap downtown).

Hoo boy, the Strip. I was prepared to hate it, since it’s an enormous resource-suck. But … it’s SO big, and SUCH an unapologetic rip-off, that I found I somehow didn’t hate it … it was just fascinating.

I stayed at The Flamingo, which was a half-mile from the Sands Convention Center. The first day it took me a half-hour to walk that, since I did one of those Billy in Family Circus go-all-over-the-place paths. I ended up walking through the Venetian, which is in front of the convention center.

The Venetian is a mock-up of Venice, complete with canals, and gondolas, and gondoliers, and dressed-up street performers, including one whose gig is to wear all white and stand like a statue. Also, there’s a shopping center fashioned like Venetian streets.

That “sky” above is a painted ceiling. It always looks like dusk in there. I had lunch at one of the restaurants (in the “piazza,” on the “canal”) and the waiter said he gets completely confused because there’s no natural light.

It’s also huge. The Venetian is mammoth … you can spend a half-hour strolling through the maze of walkways, and on the grand canal floor, there’s Burberry, Movado, and dozens of other boutique-y brands. I encountered most of them when I was desperately seeking a muffin. Finally I discovered that the floor below the canal (?) is where the tobacco shop, boulangerie and plain ol’ food court dwell.

Out front is a campanile (i.e., a clock tower), an imitation of Venice’s famous Rialto bridge (with moving sidewalks inside so overweight Americans don’t actually have to walk), more canals and gondolas–though I never heard the gondoliers outside singing to the boaters. Probably don’t want to get heckled by the drunks.

The convention center is mammoth too. The main hallway is over 300 yards long, there are 5 floors, and for some reason, our keynote speeches and coffee were on the fifth floor, and the smaller rooms were on the third. Thus, a half-mile of walking twice a day, just for the intro and lunch sessions.

Add to that the walking I did to get there, to get back, to get around and to explore, and I think I walked 10-15 miles in two days. My legs were sore for an hour and a half.

On Thursday after the conference, a fellow conferee and I explored the MGM Grand. We walked in the MGM for an hour, and in the midst of a casino, dozens of restaurants and shops and clubs, there’s a lion habitat. (Check out the “Photos” link below the picture to see a slide show.) Lions in a casino–exactly the kind of tacky spectacle I’d been expecting, only there are 20 lions that live on a huge ranch, and 3 at any given time are visiting. So that explained why they looked muscular and healthy (the same could not be said for the people gawping at them).

We also visited Paris, which like the Venetian, imitated a grand european city. Paris has the same kind of ceiling over its casino floor, and has a half-size Eiffel Tower. We went to the top (for the full-size price), but the view was impressive. Incidentally, the tickets say, “No unauthorized weddings.” When we were up there, one couple was attempting to have an unauthorized honeymoon. But they managed to keep their clothes on.

Back on the street, drunks with balloon hats, carnival barkers handing out cards for strip clubs, and a guy with 4 teeth, attempting to sell me a golf shirt for $10 so he could gamble. It was an XL; I was the only one it would fit. Despite my longstanding policy of buying golf shirts of nearly toothless strangers, this time I passed.

So I’ve changed my mind. It’s still a deeply weird place, and an environmental nightmare, but boy howdy is it ever worth exploring.

TSA = Take Stuff Away

I was traveling from Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas for a conference, and wanted to travel light and fast–but what works in the mountains doesn’t work at the airport.

True, I didn’t have to check a bag, but I did have to run the safety gauntlet. In the midst of taking off my shoes and belt and generally abasing myself for the rent-a-security known as the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration), I forgot about the “6 ounces of goo” rule.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, they have no signs that say you have to take off your shoes. But if you don’t, they tell you to. If you point out that there are no signs, well … they don’t like that. (As someone who works in communications, I find this absolutely retarded. If you’re going to treat me like cattle, why not tell me how to behave?)

It was quiet at the airport; the ratio of TSA to humans had to be 1:1. But the grandmother whose important job was to tell me when to walk through the metal detector had to make me wait. Why? HellifIknow.

So, in an attempt to be as accomadatingly bovine as possible, I waited. Then, somewhat peeved with me, she waved me through in an attitude of “Don’t you know anything?”

(Note the needle on the temper-ometer now pointing to yellow.)
Now back to the goo. I’d forgotten about this ridiculous rule, which the intercom calls the 3-1-1 rule, though there aren’t signs to spell it out. (And speaking of ridiculous, the first page I found when I Googled it is only links. Apparently they’re using those same screeners to write web pages.)

But the low-wage dorks in epaulettes didn’t forget about the goo. First I had to further abase myself and my toiletry bag by spilling its contents so they could examine it. Then they gleefully donned the blue latex gloves to show me my tube of lip balm and my toothpaste, and after struggling over the mental gymnastics required to add two numerals on two tubes, concluded that I had MORE THAN 6 OUNCES OF GOO. I half expected them to announce this on a bullhorn, to shame me with my mugshot on a website, “Too much goo.” Unimaginable shame, I’d never brush in this town again, etc.

Triumphantly, they gave me a Sophie’s Choice: lip balm or toothpaste confiscated.

I snatched away my lip stuff and stormed off.

From behind, the voice of some passive-aggressive jerk of an employee: “Have a nice flight.”

Minutes later, while the tea kettle that was my temper had stopped whistling, it occurred to me I should have argued with them.

1) The goo containers aren’t full. You’re adding only the volume of full containers, etc. (The point of such an argument is not to win, of course. Just to be a pain in the ass.)

The next morning I also discovered they’d taken my whole razor–even though the handle and the blades are separate.

(On the way back I went through the same sequence in Las Vegas, but there they have video screens with witty short segments explaining what to do. They even enlisted the help of the Blue Man Group for one. I find authority is SO much more palatable when done tongue in cheek.)