Friday, December 2, 2011

End of the road, start of the new: The Genderist

For further reading, please go to my new blog, The Genderist, a blog about men talking to men about feminism.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Recommended Organizations

Here are a few great Los Angeles organizations I've become involved with or otherwise come to admire:

Iridescent - Engineering outreach connecting engineering students and professionals with underserved youth and their families. I'm a particular fan of their Family Science program, which puts their engineer-educators into schools in the early evening to facilitate science activities for the entire family.

ReDiscover - Take trash, make art, locally. In a tiny storefront and expansive shed out back, this neighborhood arts center reuses the castoffs of local architecture firms, artists, and manufacturers into crafting activities, support to school art programs.

Trash for Teaching - Take trash, make art, on an industrial scale. Like ReDiscover with much more of an industry/manufacturing focus, TFT is in the midst of inventing a science and engineering outlet for their awesome industrial materials, with a goal of serving the entire LA area.

Treepeople - Environmental awareness and advocacy for the watersheds and ecosystems overlaid on this great metropolis.

Skirball Cultural Center - While they have an eclectically wide range of programs for different ages and interests within the context of their theme of Jewish culture, my favorite (and Miriam's) is the Noah's Ark exhibit, a great and beautifully staffed and maintained children's museum of stuffed animals, toys, daily activities and performances, and fascinating animal sculptures made of recycled materials.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

The secret of great salad

The secret of great salad, as conveyed to me by Marcella Hazan: toss the greens with the dressing (or just oil) for much longer than you think necessary, to get an even sheen of oil on every face of every leaf.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Magnetic awesomeness

I did a series of workshops on nanomaterials at Iridescent a few weeks ago, which were a lot of fun to put together and teach. One of the best materials we were able to give the kids to experiment with was ferrofluid, which is composed of nano-sized magnets suspended in oil.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Pitagora Suichi

As in so many things, the Japanese version of a Rube Goldberg machines is cute, small, exact, and wonderful. Also, exceedingly plentiful, as You Tube can attest.

Great guide to making coffee in a french press

I'm not really a coffee drinker, historically just drinking diner coffee and sometimes when I go out for donuts. In the past year my coffee consumption has shot up, and I am now the proud owner of a french press. Here's how to use it.

Monday, June 27, 2011

So that's about a year

I started this blog a year ago tomorrow. I was in the midst of leaving my job at MIT and heading into a vast unknown territory west of the Mississippi and beyond the office environment and thought, correctly as it turned out, that having a practice of writing would help to anchor me. It hasn't quite been a daily practice, but I've averaged a little less than every other day of practice writing, poems, mini essays, observations, reviews, and the occasional photo. It's been a good year for writing for me, which is after all something I intensely enjoy and find satisfaction from. I haven't put this many of my ideas to page since the year or two out of college before my epistolary habits degraded into mere logistics and planning.

That said, its time for a change. My goals for this blog floated around for the first month or two and settled on giving myself space to write, to think in a more sustained way than Miriamcare regularly allows, and to keep myself in the practice of adult communication. In the past few months, an uptick in my professional work has helped to cover my need for adult communication and extended writing, at least professional writing. So I think I have space to play around with the blog. Over the summer, expect a little more experimentation in its format and focus. I hope at the end of the summer to settle into something new and more finely tuned than the at times unedited random musings I've sometimes posted here. Depending on where things go, there even may be a wholesale overhaul and a new blog, complete with new name, look, and tone to replace this one. As Ira Glass likes to say, stay tuned.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Every driver, every officer, every hero a woman

Big Machines
a board book

In which a pair of children and their dog go out for a walk and see a sequence of large machines, such as bulldozers, fire engines, cherry pickers, cranes, airplanes, and boats. Every character in the book is female, from the little girls to the drivers of the trucks to the firefighters to the pilot to the police officer directing traffic around a construction site. The art is in a brightly colored cartoony style with a simplified cityscape background, bright sunny day, and focus on the machines. Text to emphasize the machines and teach about what each is or does. Story ends with girls returning home and playing with toy trucks, machines, planes, etc.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Everything from this point forward is a bonus

I feel there's a trope in American literature and culture about the walking dead inhabiting a living afterlife. Think of a person or character who has had a near-death experience: been saved from suicide, or a walked away from a plane crash, or outlived a too short prognosis for certain death by cancer, who afterwards thinks of life as a bonus period, unexpected, blessed and unworldly. In my work as an engineering and science educator I teach kids to follow their curiosity and imagination and immense abilities to build and discover. The materials used in this are often cast-off toys and tools of other, better funded projects, or reused styrofoam trays, or decade-old computers, or the durable packaging and scraps from a construction site. These are things destined for the landfill and the recycling center, and I am able to pluck them out of their journey for a short living afterlife in a child's hands and mind's eye. Being already dead and not quite knowing it, such material doesn't mind if we cut through half a dozen pieces before getting the right shape. It is perfect stuff to hot glue together into little sculptures, whittle to become a shim or strut, be crushed under a pile of books carefully stacked up to see how much force it can take before cracking. And it call be swept into the dumpster without more than a twinge of guilt on the part of this particular recycling citizen.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Curvilinear Cardboard Construction

We have a big box in the living room this week as a little house and playroom for the toddler among us. With each passing day it gets a bit more decoration and gains new architectural feathers. There's a window cut high on one side, the french double doors on the other end and lots and lots of drawings, inside, outside, on ceiling and floor and walls. Becca devised a folding table in the corner out of two curves of cardboard, which when up help strengthen a substantially weakened structural integrity. The leftover material of the french doors forms a beautifully curved support to a little cantilevered roof.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Learn like a fox, teach like a hedgehog

As Isaiah Berlin playfully quoted, "The fox knows many little things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Originally talking about history and Tolstoy the sorting out of historians and philosophers, his quote has since been applied to all sorts of things. At least in my circle of college friends, since one of them is now (and probably was at the time) one of the world's leading scholars on Isaiah Berlin.

I did a bit of teaching this week and struggled a little to remember how to be a good teacher. I have not been in front of a class of students for about a year except in the most informal of settings. I tried to slow down, not just make my points and move to the next but to watch to see how each idea was absorbed. To emulate what each of the students, fourth graders or middle schoolers depending on the day, was thinking as I spoke and showed images and gave them materials to touch and manipulate. I tried to think of myself as the learner and to see all of the extraneous details in the room and in my room and examples that distracted from the big messages I wrote up at the top of the lesson plan. In a Montessori way, I wanted, though mostly failed, to give the core message and just that message. To talk about nanomaterials required talking about chemistry and plastics and consumer decision making and scientific notation and changing diapers and how oil can stain fabric and constant little details besides the day's big idea that materials' properties can change dependent on the scale of its composition, from macro to micro to nano.

Thinking as a learner, there were dozens of little tangents I could go out on, squirreling away knowledge bit by bit. Or putting it in my fox hole, as the case may be.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Actually enjoying poetry

I have rarely been much of a fan of poetry. But right now I have as bedtime reading The Poet's Corner, edited by John Lithgow. I looked it up after hearing his awesome rendition of Gertrude Stein's "If I told him" on Selected Shorts. The poets are quite familiar, Frost and Auden and Keats and Sandburg and such, and most of the poems are recognizable too. Mostly what makes them appealing is reading them outloud. I tend to skim when I read, which is fine for news (the fast is over) and novels but not so good for poetry. Saying each word means I read each word and I hear each word as I perform each word and make its meaning clear, both for my "audience," who are mostly asleep, and for myself. Also, perhaps, I'm older and wiser than in high school and college when last I read poetry.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: leftover Ezra chickpea dish with alphabet pasta
dinner: homemade fettucini with broccoli, chicken thigh cutlets, spinach salad (Did I mention that I bought a folly's worth of baby spinach because the five pound bag was only five bucks? Luckily most of that is in the freezer now.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Children can help, really

I'm in the midst of a bit of reading about Maria Montessori's educational philosophy, partially inspired by recent discussions about Miriam's potential future at a preschool of some sort or another, mostly out of an interest in making full time parenting as rigorous and intellectually engaging for me as possible. Her focus on physical action as educational method, the hand teaches the brain, seems at least as well fitted for a child in the home as in a classroom.

Today Miriam took an extra long nap and I found myself making fresh pasta. She woke up at the very end of the preparations, as I was about to run the flattened dough through the fettucini cutter. So after a little break for cooking to welcome her to the waking world and give her a snack of milk and cheese and cucumbers (upon her request), I asked her to help make the pasta. She turned the crank beautifully, only occasionally reversing direction and sending the half-cut pasta back up out of the cutter. Though it started as just a way to engage her while I finished the prep, it turned out three hands were quite useful to feeding the sheets in smoothly and removing the completed fettucini without having the strands overlap and stick to each other. Go teamwork!

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Movie recommendation: Inside Job

I first heard of Inside Job when it won the 2010 Oscar for feature-length documentary. At which point I ordered it from the library and was less than surprised to learn that I was 63 places down the line, which means I get it until June.

It is a thriller-style telling of the origins and effects of the financial crisis of 2008, laying blame on deregulation of banking from the 1980s onward, particularly of derivatives, the outsized compensation offered to financial services executives, enormous lobbying power of that industry, and capture of economics academics via consulting and board positions. With most of the bad guys off stage and interviews with some of the leading doomsayers of the 2000s, it makes its point forcefully and without much nuance. Given the complexity of the subject matter, nuance may have made the movie too dense, but there is a bit of manichean thinking that could have been softened by making a stronger point of what the present and future of the economy looked like from, say, 2002.

I think of myself as a pretty well informed reader of business news (except not this week, sez the man on the media fast) and there weren't too many surprises in here, but there also was basically nothing that contradicted what I already know about recent financial and economic history. It was refreshing to have the story brought together and I recommend it for anyone who is curious about the financial crisis and worried about future crises, which the filmmakers, and I, think are all too likely, given the absence of reform.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Progressive traffic tickets based on car value

According to the internet, Switzerland enforces speeding laws with progressive ticketing, in which tickets are made proportional to the driver's income. This is meant to hold wealthy drivers accountable to speeding laws as well as regular folks for whom a $50 or $200 ticket is a reasonable disincentive, for relatively minor infractions that don't quickly add up to a suspended license. Such a thing does not, of course, exist in the US. Among other things, the size of the country and the complexity of overlapping jurisdictions would make it difficult for ticketing police to have easy and secure access to income levels for all drivers.

Here in Santa Monica, there are many, many luxury vehicles on the roads, being driven by what I assume are wealthy drivers. In nearly a year of crossing these streets, I would say that the drivers of luxury cars, particularly sports cars, are more likely to be driving at dangerously high speeds, to breeze through a crosswalk when a pedestrian is in the street, and to weave in and out of traffic, compared to the general population of vehicles.

I propose fining these traffic violations in proportion to the value of the car, either from a quick Kelley's Blue Book value lookup based on model and year, or, should California go back to regular annual vehicle taxes, based on the vehicle tax basis amount. That basis would eliminate the privacy and complexity issues in tracking down a driver's income. And the occasional outrageously high speeding ticket, like the $290,000 ticket in Switzerland , serves both as a reminder to drive safely and how far the wealth of the elite is from that of the middle class.

Media fast

I am going cold turkey on news and media. I'm starting with a one day fast, hoping to stretch it to three and possibly to a week. That means no reading the LA Times at breakfast, which will be the easiest of the various media blockages. Becca serendipitously decided this morning to put us on vacation hold after feeling the weighty heft of the newspaper recycling yesterday. No more online comics (A Multiverse, Freefall, Questionable Content, Girl Genius, and XKCD). No more NYT. I'll just let this week's New Yorker come in and go straight to the magazine bin and won't flip through old issues. No podcasts on the walk to the park (This American Life, Radiolab, Marketplace). No talk radio (KCRW and KPCC are the NPR stations in LA). I haven't decided about music in the car.

Once, before parenting, I decided some Saturday morning when Becca was working to avoid all media completely, not just periodicals but books, music, mechanical reproductions of any kind. I poured myself some cereal and stared out the window for an interminable time, which clocked at around 4 minutes. The light was bright and diffuse, the floors glowed yellow and gold. I could hear every crunch of my cereal, and feel each movement of muscles pulling on bones to move the spoon from bowl to mouth and back again. Each foot was planted firmly on the floor, as in a meditation or yoga pose, as my mind raced for something to occupy it, settling on sensory awareness, of sound, taste, and proprioception.

Then I decided to go for a walk and found myself living again in the world and lost the moment of infinite slowness. I don't imagine I'll have anything like that as part of the current fast, not least because it is a lesser news media fast and not a fast of all printed and recorded language.

Off to read more of The Montessori Method!

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

How much does an ad-free Sunday Times cost?

How much would it cost to get the Sunday New York Times, printed and delivered, without the advertisements in it? $10? $20? They would save a little on paper, and on ad sales staff, and in return lose all of the advertising revenue. Sales would go down as the price rises, but since the product would be improved with the absence of those distracting ads, they may not go down dramatically.

Another way to ask the question: how much does the New York Times Corporation make off each subscriber in advertising revenue per issue? $5? $10? $20? $50?

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Reading The New Yorker while writing a term paper

As her mother did before her, my mother has been paying for my New Yorker subscription for my entire adult life. Starting in college, I read it when I had a chance, and since then, with what seems like more free time for volitional reading, I've had years when I read most issues cover to cover and served as a resource to the rest of my family on what to read and what to skip. Sometimes the articles are so long.

I recall certain seasons of reading those too long articles not just for the pleasure of the stories and information contained but for the form and weft of the writing. Particularly towards the end of college, when I was writing quite a bit, mostly term papers but expansive literary-tinged emails and some short fiction, I recall a particular energy around reading New Yorker articles, while I tracked and processed the writing on two or three levels at once, reading for content, listening for literary allusions, particularly in the reviews, and struggling to see how they held together, and perhaps how I could write to match.

Since then, at least until this past year of blogging, I have written at a far slower pace, in all categories of writing but particularly in the literate and referential style honed by late night electronic conversations with my erudite and highly educated friends. Concomitantly, my reading of the New Yorker is less exciting as well. Perhaps it simply was in a golden period of writing around the turn of the millenium, but more likely as I focus my energy on fields outside of the careful crafting of allusions and pithy phrases, my awareness of such declines. There are compensations, toddler giggle being the one that comes first to mind, but I miss getting the references.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: bean salad
dinner: the end of the potato leek soup

Saturday, May 28, 2011

12 ways to play with 12 bean soup mix

1) sort, by color, size, etc.
2) put in tupperware and shake like a maraca
3) experiment with static and kinetic friction by sliding a ramp
4) make rangoli
5) glue onto cards and add fun facts about each bean
6) play mancala
7) sprout and eat
8) sprout and plant
9) glue together to make little creatures
10) use to model relative sizes of planets, elements, countries, etc.
11) glue onto paper to make mosaics
12) make soup!

Friday, May 27, 2011

My gender neutral lens

Gender differences permeate society. Parenting is no exception. Finding ways to embrace my daughter's gender without letting her be limited by it is a lifelong project. One of my tools is a simple gender-bender: for any given activity, expectation, way of acting or dressing or thinking, switch the gender. If if sounds strange, if dressing a boy in pink or seeing a girl ignore the other children on the playground as she grabs for a sand toy, question if the strangeness is inherent in some sort of sex difference, and if so, how. If not, remind yourself that this gender-based assumption of correct behavior is socially constructed for reasons that benefit someone, and that someone very well might not be your child.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: brownies
lunch: potato leek soup leftovers
dinner: bean salad, potato salad, and hot dogs at a picnic in our living room

Thursday, May 26, 2011

If she can go down the slide, she can do anything

In the past couple days Miriam has started embracing slides. For months she's been climbing up the stairs, playing around on the platform, and sitting at the top of the slide, but she's usually then stood back up and come down the stairs. Occasionally, she'd reach out for a hand and slide down with support, and even more occasionally turn on to her belly and slide down lying down feet first.

Now she climbs, walks, sits, slides, and gets up to go do it again and again. I irrationally worried for those months of being afraid of the slide that she would always be afraid of it, and by extension be afraid of most of the world and end up creating for herself a safe sheltered too small life. Now I am irrationally exultant for her in her lack of fear of that momentary loss of physical control and pleasure of sliding, and by extension proud that she's off to conquer the world. If she can go down the slide, she can do anything. At least, if she can overcome her fear of the slide, she shows that in general she can have fears and grow out of them. I feel like a stage of childhood, or perhaps of parenthood, has ended and a new one begun.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: frosted mini-wheats
lunch: peanut butter and jelly
dinner: potato leek soup with kielbasa

Still thinking about unschooling

A few things today suggested to me why I'm afraid of the public school system my child(ren) are on track to inhabit for 13 years. Or a private school system, for that matter, should something dramatic happen in our family's station in life. Perhaps it's not so much being afraid of school as thinking there is so much more that can be done with 13 years of education. And so much damage that can be done in that environment. A large part of course is the dramatic loss of control over my child(ren)'s environment, particularly compared to my current state of stay-at-home parenting.

I, like the good upper middle class liberal that I am, have my car radio permanently set to NPR and hear a lot of Air Talk on KPCC. Both stories that I heard today resonated with my standing interest in homeschooling. The first was about a Toronto couple who are trying to keep the gender of their four month old private from the world, hoping to avoid gender stereotyping. The second about a recent book "The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth" about how quirky kids in high school who are social outcasts have better prospects as adults for creative careers and satisfying social lives. School, and the uncontrolled, or undercontrolled, environment of kids picking on other kids and picking up stereotypes from other kids, seems at the root of a lot of damage that happens to children. I think of middle school of this at its worst, when many children turning into teens have emotional awareness and can grasp the levers of social power but have not yet developed a sense of responsibility. If I can help my child(ren) avoid the artificially created world of 13 year olds out of the context of the full life spectrum of society I want to. Certainly spending year after year in a culture peopled by kids all the same age is preparation for no area of life besides schooling.

Later in the day, listening to yesterday's Marketplace podcast about online learning, I was struck by how expansive and impressive non-classroom learning tools are in the Internet Age. Featured was a group, Khan Academy, that creates and promotes short educational videos on typical school subjects, and promulgates a philosophy of learning at your own pace, sticking with one topic until you deeply understand it, in contrast to a classroom's pace set to a "typical" student which leaves some bored and some behind and discouraged.


Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Bru's Waffles
lunch: Bay Cities Italian Deli godmother sandwich
dinner: leftover sandwich and pasta

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Fountains of Southern California

I'm sure the book "Fountains of Southern California" exists and is lovely. I imagine a coffee table book of lusciously sparkling photography, sketches by fountain designers, a passing reference to the unsustainability of SoCal's water sources, etc.

Among the chapters would be one on children's fountains, their design and function as a play space as well as landscape beautification element. Perhaps including a history of water parks and of the development of water playgrounds, the best of Southern California's children's fountains and water features would be featured. Common trends, like water jetting straight up out of a flat concrete pool, may be researched, their earliest antecedents, futuristic imaginings by competition-winning design students.

I'd include the water features of Kidspace, the children's museum in Pasadena. There is creative use of water throughout the outdoor section of the museum, but most substantial water feature is the fountain gazebo leading to the pool at the top of their walkable stream. Off a corrugated tin roof falls a wall of rain, sometimes heavy sometimes light. Beneath there is a platform and a bench in redwood. The rain falls into the upper pool of the fifty foot concrete and stone stream, with trees all around and a view of some of the hills of Pasadena. To the left of the bench there is a waterwheel slowly turning under its pumped feeder stream. Though the day may be sunny, the sound is of rain on a tree lined lake under grey skies. It is a little odd to match that sound to the bright sparkle of full sunlight shining onto the falling drops, turning them to ephemeral neon lines of white light.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Mermaid's Ball

The Mermaid's Ball, the Mermaid's Ball,
The biggest party of the Fall
For mermaids know as no one knows
To make the Ball for one and all

With nimble fingers doing their parts
To run the wires and draw the charts
The mermaids work all through the year
To make the Ball in fits and starts

A Ball won't happen on its own
It takes experience and wisdom, honed
On practice, experiments, and study
To make the Ball of such renown

Their hair tied back, their gloves in place
They start to put each piece in space
And to connect as planned and noted
To make the Ball gather apace

A Ball is not a simple thing
A Bathypelgaic Atomically Lasing
Light show for the rays and fish
But mermaids know as no one knows
Their physics, engineering, and how to glow

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Mattie Saunders, CPA

Mattie Saunders ended up becoming a CPA. This was a disappointment to her parents, who were theater people, but not really a surprise. She had always had a thing for numbers, and for order, that had manifested itself early in her sorting of blocks and charting of days of parental absences per month against household income. Her childhood friendship with her parents, so different from the much too intimately knowledgeable relationship she would hold over them as an adult, was mediated by her seeming maturity and their only sometimes feigned childishness.

An enormous fan of graph paper from around the age of three, Mattie obsessively collected data about her life and plotted it. When she was nine, one of her secretly cherished charts measured her father's mood, which rose and fell on what appeared to be a 24-32 day cycle. Sometimes the peaks of this cycle corresponded with the final frenzied week before one of his shows opened. Then the point Mattie added to the long running Critical Review of Daddy's Work As Measured By Number of Congratulatory Calls Received in First 10 Days of the Run chart would be a little above the curve.

Sometimes the troughs of his cycle, which she would later learn in the supplemental reading to Abnormal Psychology 211 did not constitute clinically recognized manic depressive disorder until the diagnostic revision in DSM-IV, unfortunately fell along important dates in Mattie's own life progression. Her seventh birthday party felt his absence, though her eleventh did not. Christmas 2005 was a bit of a bust. She was disappointed that he was unable to give much of a speech at her wedding, but that was in part balanced out by his enormous helpfulness six days earlier in negotiating with the florist over the total disaster of a plan for the table decorations she provided, finally, after three weeks of delays. And considering his opinions of Mattie's fiance it was perhaps all for the best.

In the age range of nine to thirteen, Mattie wondered what it would be like to have parents who went to an office during the week, came home on weekends, slept at night and only at night. She took in stride the weeks and sometimes months on end when she would leave for school to a cheery wave from her mother and return six, seven, or, by high school when she had a little more choice in the matter, eight to ten hours later, to find her in exactly the same spot at the breakfast table with another novel or script in hand. Then at a sleepover at Laila Sanchez's house in eighth grade she complained about having parents that were never there except when they were there too much and the general consensus was that all parents were like that, whether on a month-to-month schedule or the more typical phases of the week. Thirteen was a good age to start to realize that her life was actually quite similar to those of her friends and peers, as it gave her something to talk about with them. Also it helped dissipate the aura of superiority her parents had mostly successfully wafted about her through sparkling and witty conversation with their own friends and peers that was undoubtably meant for Mattie's ears as well. Mother, in particular, was very good at keeping all of her audiences in mind at once.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Taxonomy of storybook animals

Natural/scientific - animal is portrayed by photograph or detailed accurate painting or drawing in naturalistic setting. Captions describe natural behavior.

Ambiguously artificial behavior - animal is portrayed mostly realistically but captions purport potential human motivations or thoughts.

Animal with some human characteristics - animal talks, walks, wears clothes, reasons, but is clearly an animal of a specific species with species-specific characteristics, both physical and psychological, like a crocodile that sings about eating other animals. May have magical opposable thumbs, either invisible or some repurposed appendage like a claw or feather.

Human in animal skin - character of basically human characteristics, such as walking upright, talking, wearing clothes, in which another animal body could be used without changing the character or its relationship to other elements in the story.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Some we talk to, some we pet, some we eat

For the past year or two I have been reading deeply into the genre of board books, those children's picture books appropriate, at least tangentially, to children young enough to rip the pages. I've stopped reading cloth books, which are more appropriate for children young enough to want to munch on the pages.

Board books, and children's picture books in general, contain a lot of animals. Barnyard animals, jungle animals, zoo animals, cats and dogs and rabbits and mice, you name it, there's a book there. Some of these animals are represented visually by photos, some by drawings, some by collage or painting or watercolors. Among the photo-based books, nearly all the animals act like animals in the course of the story. Hippos lay in mud, chicks eat corn, dogs sit with their heads out the window. None of these animals talk, wear clothes (that is clothes that they have chosen for themselves), or otherwise act like humans dressed up in animal bodies.

The drawn, painted, etc. animals are a different story. Some of them act like animals. Many of them act like humans, either children or adults. Their childlike or adultlike behavior is correlated to the apparent age of the animal, but not closely. Little Pookie the pig cries and is comforted by his pig mother. A pink dog and a blue dog meet to flirtatiously discuss haberdashery. Ollie the bird-of-indeterminate-species decides today is the day he's going to hatch.

In some books, some but not all of the animals are gifted with speech, magical invisible opposable thumbs, names, and reasoning abilities far beyond their natural brethren. These books range from confused to subtle. At their best, a book that has characters that look basically alike but have radically different abilities, so much so that some are people and some are animals, creates a space for stories and conversation about what it means to be human, why we consider it acceptable to eat some animals but not others, and how to create connection and understanding across differences. This potentially richly creative space is underexplored.

For example, I don't believe in two years of study I have come across any books in which animal characters eat meat. It might be confusing to a two year old, who has nearly no conception (at least in this supermarket culture) that piece of chicken on the plate and a chicken clucking around are the same substance. And as a vehicle for beginning a grounded understanding of the origins of meat and the ethics of killing animals for meat, such a picture book would almost require a parents' guide of reasonable answers to tough questions.

But even without using the power of mixing character-animals and animal-animals for opening up complex topics for discussion between parent and child, witty use of that mixing could create memorable (and salable) humor. There's a scene in Fantasia 2000 in which Donald Duck plays Noah, and in watching various animals go onto the arc two by two does a double take when the ducks walk by. By his standards, they are naked (and by our standards, he is always half naked, perhaps in reference to his half human-half animal status), and they don't recognize him as one of them, or know quite what to make of him. There are far too few moments like that in board books with cute little animals currently in print.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Room numbers

The LA Convention Center has meeting rooms numbered in the 300s, 400s, and 500s, in addition to the major exhibition halls on the ground floor. All of the meeting rooms so numbered are on the second floor, in different wings of the sprawling, L-shaped building. This is confusing the first time you look for a room, amusing the second, and mildly exasperating after that.

Friday, May 6, 2011

LA Museums I've brought a toddler to in the past year

By Approximate Proximity to Santa Monica:
Santa Monica Museum of Art
Santa Monica Pier Aquarium
Hammer Museum
Fowler Museum
Museum of Jurassic Technology*
Getty Center
Getty Villa
Skirball Center*
Zimmer Children's Museum
LACMA*
Craft and Folk Art Museum
Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits*
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
California Science Center*
Griffith Observatory*
Los Angeles Zoo
Japanese-American National Museum
Chinese-American Museum
LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes
Huntington Library and Gardens*
Kidspace

* - multiple visits

Monday, May 2, 2011

Our Land, 2051 edition

In this completely revised edition of the classic middle school American History textbook, America's history has been resorted by period, bypassing the standard tripartite division by region of middle school textbooks, an approach that has previously only been found in high school and college level texts. From archeological prehistory to our present federalism, from the Panama Canal to Baffin Island, each era is portrayed as a set of interlocking stories that draws from the previous period and establishes the conditions for the next. With frequent sidebars following representative families, focused on the children and teenage members of those families and their everyday lives, Our Land helps students of all backgrounds place themselves with the vast regional, ethnic, and social diversities this country's history represents. Special attention is given to recent history, particularly unification and the role of shifting technologies. Recommended for 6th-8th grades.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Where's Spot? and Ender's Game

Where's Spot? is a book for children about a dog looking all over the house for her puppy, Spot.

Ender's Game is a book about children in a military academy in space in training and at war with an alien race.

Both books won awards in their time, are praised for a simplicity that approaches parable, and spawned and empire of sequels, merchandise, and optioned movie deals.

None of the sequels are of the same caliber of the original works. The first books, perhaps out of a naivety shared by author, narrator, and protagonist, capture a rhythm and a tone that is memorable and hints at universal stories, stories of searching for a loved one or of raging against the man behind the curtain. The later books tell rather than show. They force rather than invite the reader to respond in the proscribed manner. They make the original books seem more like a lucky jackpot of good writing than those progenitor books seemed on first reading.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Monday night dinner

This week's Monday Night Dinner with friends -

wasabi peas, nori strips, and rice crackers
Miso Soup (making dashi is ridiculously easy, particularly compared to making chicken broth let alone beef or pork broth)
Teriyaki Mahi Mahi
Broccoli in Garlic Sauce
Stir fried Miso Eggplant
rice
banana chocolate chip nut muffins

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Archipelago is too pretty a word to describe Los Angeles

A peaceful walk up Arizona Ave. tree lined and wide of sidewalk, a few pedestrians on the street and dogs lolling in the yards.

This bus stop along a four lane road with a few feet between traffic and bench, no shade or shelter.

This bus stop along a four lane road next to an offramp from the highway as cars go past at highway speeds, crouching against a 7' painted concrete wall in the dust and broken glass beneath scraggly bushes.

The Getty Center's loveliness, the stone, the austere modernism, the so visibly careful planning, the delightful garden of paths and flowers.

This bus stop waiting with tourists and students, more perhaps than usual because of school vacation, teens alone and in small groups. Watching cars come out of the parking lot, speed off.

This bus stop alone not connected to anything by sidewalks it is only a transfer point by the side of the road from one bus to another, or perhaps to walk into the luxury hotel on a hill by the side of the highway. There is no safe way to access this spot but by car or bus.

A child asleep on my back as we walk home.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Unbranded or not, here we come

I want to live in an unbranded world. Nothing to sell and no one trying to sell it. Where my daughter can grow up and follow her interests and not be told she can only be a princess. I want to live in fellowship with others in a big city networked across cultures and dreams. There's something being sold to a toddler who can't know better, someone getting rich off child psychology. The supermarket is a gauntlet with dangers at eye level, not my eye level but hers and what an enormous amount of disrespect this business must have for me to arrange it like so. I can throw out the TV and unpackage our foods and plan days and years around crafts out of books from the '70s from the library and her friends and mine will still be branded and cultured and we want to keep up and we want to be cool and we'll follow the brands and the trends and the fads and we won't have to buy but we'll want to.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: cheesy potato
dinner: one pan baked ziti and brownies

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Gourmet before gourmand

I am a picky eater. I try to hide it these days, and to overcome it by will, particularly in social or public settings, but given my own devices I will have, as I did today, a cheesy potato for lunch, or ramen, or pasta with plain tomato meat sauce. I'm much less picky than when I was a child. I have a running list of foods that I recall rejecting entirely as a kid that I now eat, sometimes with gusto. Tomatoes, pickles, olives, eggs, mushrooms, cheese, and broccoli. Thinking about these foods now makes me wonder how I could ever have not liked them.

I like to cook. I quite consciously chose cooking as a hobby in my first apartment out of college, to control what I ate, rather than cede that control to my roommate, and for the frugality of it, for cooking was a one-two wallet saving punch of keeping my food bills down and my entertainment budget low. I enjoyed cooking before that, but trace my real interest and skill at putting together a tasty dinner for two or three people, with something for leftovers at work the next day, to that period just after college.

I would like to think that I've improved as a cook since then. I'm more conscious of the presentation of food, and of balancing a meal between heavy and light, salty and sweet. I'm much more conscious of the origins of my food, the humaneness of the care of the animals who provide my meat, the ways the land on which my food is grown is kept healthy, or not. I have a substantially larger repertoire of dishes than in those first months of cooking dinners on a regular basis, both drawn from my shelves of cookbooks and in the back of my head from repeated experience. I can saute, grill, broil, and char with a blowtorch, make omelettes, get popovers to rise, cut perfect 1/8" cubes of carrot or potato and know when I need to do so (not often), stock a fridge, make chicken stock without getting every pot in the kitchen greasy, and find a ripe peach by its smell. I can host a dinner for 10 (with a little struggle) and have a meal for two or three people, with something for leftovers at work the next day, on the table every night of the week.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: rotibun awesomeness
lunch: misc leftovers
dinner: wonderful french onion soup and beef bourguignon at Le Petite Cafe

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Why own books

When moving to Los Angeles, I got rid of about half my books, things I hadn't read in years. We had gotten into a sort of frenzy of discarding material goods, thinking about the approximately dollar-per-pound that it would cost to ship things across the country. We threw away or donated shelves and shelves of books, bags of clothes that had fallen out of rotation, boxes of memorabilia and tchotchkes sitting in the basement.

Too many books. Becca and I took a Great Books program together in college and not only still had copies of some of those classics, but still had doubles. Out went the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Dante. Out went garage sale purchases of modern fiction, music history, beadmaking guides, few of which I had ever actually read. We went from bookshelves in every room and boxes in the basement to two large shelves worth, and those not even full.

Since then, I've occasionally felt a loss out of proportion to the books as mere material things. Particularly the books that I had read, these were an externalized part of my memory. I have tried to abide by an informal rule in the past couple years to only buy books I have already read. Buying books on recommendation, on spec, resulted in the giant piles of unread books we had around the house, and hid the gems from my past that contain ideas that had become a part of myself. I have a bookshelf of science fiction, much of it first read when I was a teenager, and am not only able to pick up a book and glance at a favorite passage as the fancy strikes, but I can glance across the spines and remember who I was and, intellectually, where I come from, at least in part.

Being a heavy library user, and consumer of more ephemeral media like newspapers, magazines, websites, podcasts, TV, and movies even at the peak of my book collection, those spines represented only a small fragment of the ideas flowing into my life (from media. Forget trying to create physical representations of  all the conversations I draw intellectual sustenance from). But they are something. A persistent, visual, neat reminder of my books, emphasis on the "my". I wish I had a similarly persistent externalized memory of the rest of my intellectual environment.

It would be the reverse of that scene in The Neverending Story II in which the little boy main character, under the sway of the evil witch (Oh, gender roles of Hollywood! Oh, humanity!), trades wishes for memories, and as each wish is made a memory leaves him and turns into a giant swirly marble, collecting in the witch's crystal ball.

I want for myself those marbles, each marked with a memory, that I can run my fingers through, turn over, sort into piles, put on shelves, juggle and put in a pocket. Barring that, I'll own books.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: toast with butter and honey
lunch: hot dog fried rice
dinner: spaghetti and meat sauce, with friends
dessert: chocolate walnut banana bread

Monday, April 11, 2011

A big box of tools

In anticipation of this summer's Tinkering School camp that I'm involved with at the reDiscover Center, I am acquiring tools, materials, and books to help me teach seven to nine year olds about making stuff. Right now, I'm in a kick about woodworking. Band saws and drill presses are out, but I've found a few books about teaching carpentry to kids that encourages the use of hand tools and real wood (as well as a ton of books that are more about crafts and more on the popsicle stick and white glue level). The best of these so far is Woodworking with Kids, by Richard Starr, from around 1980. He recommends things like having the kids mark where they want to cut their 2x4, clamp down the wood, pick out the saw, then have an adult start the cut to the point where the blade is safely in the groove. On his advice I went to a couple garage sales this weekend looking for clamps, saws, hammers (8 oz and 12 oz the better for little hands to swing), and t-squares. So now I have a big box of tools, none of them more expensive than a dollar, that are going need some scrubbing, derusting, and sharpening. What fun!

Monday, April 4, 2011

The age of my self-image

I'm often surprised when I look in mirrors. Not every time, not typical mirror watching, the fogged up mirror I wipe to shave or holding Miriam and pointing to the dada in the reflection off a car window. But sustained mirror looking, like at the barber's, or surprise mirror glances in an elevator or passing shop window. I am surprised at how bad my posture looks, or how bald I really am. The surprise comes from the disconnect between my actual image and my self-image. There is an inherent bias towards the past to in self-images. I have iconic photos of myself, photos I remember triply: the occasion, the image, and memories of looking at the image. All of these are past, some a decade or more past. Looking at the kid pictures and the teenage pictures, the college pictures, I recognize myself in the image but don't identify with it. But the wedding photos look like who I think I am now, who I see when I close my eyes or am chatting with an acquaintance and imagining what I look like to my conversational partner. Which is not what I actually look like. Close, but five years fewer moles and pores and wrinkles.

Which is in contrast to the long running joke that I've been 30-something in outlook and demeanor for at least that long.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Child psychologists are no Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud packed the house at MIT. It was a friendly audience, full of comics fans and coders. He was on a year long tour promoting Making Comics and had perhaps the most entertaining, polished, fast-paced Powerpoint presentation I have ever seen outside of a video of a TED talk. As befits a theorist of visual communication who is famous for phrases like "juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence" this was no simple reading of text printed on overly dense slides. His hour of constant patter wove in and out of a complex dance with the sequence of photos, drawings, and occasional words displayed on screen at a rate of hundreds per hour. It was early in the tour, but the talk was, as they say, smooth as butter.

Yesterday I took Miriam to UCLA BabyLab to take part in a psycholinguistic study. We sat in front of a TV with eye tracking equipment built in that could identify where on the screen she was looking. For about ten minutes, arrays of toys and dots appeared on the screen in different patterns, in a line, a cross, a square, and a friendly white person voice asked us to "Find the toy in the middle. Where is the toy in the middle?" or on the left, or on the bottom, etc. The same sort of sequence happened over and over, and apparently would have gone on forever only stopping when Miriam lost attention and stopped looking at the screen. 

Kind of cool. And in contrast to Scott McCloud's fast paced slide show of all of comics history, a bit of advertising and poster design, visual jokes, text jokes, and exegeses of a few famous comic artists' best known works, extremely limited. Science moves slowly, methodically, and haltingly. Our little trip to UCLA took most of the afternoon and was conducted out of the goodness of my heart, interest in science, and to have an activity for the day. Two undergrads took an hour or two to get us through the lab, administer a series of forms and questionnaires about Miriam's language skills, and get my parking straightened out. And as a result, they got a single data point for a study about the developmental psychology of a few English words and concepts, and that just barely as apparently Miriam only just made it in front of the screen long enough to get reliable data. Go science!

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: bean salad and rice
dinner: pasta e fagioli
dessert: chocolate bread pudding

Friday, March 25, 2011

Scott McCloud, child psychologist

Scott McCloud, comics theorist, has a short discussion in his best known book, Understanding Comics, about abstraction and identity. Look at a photo of a face and you see a particular person. Make a detailed realistic drawing of that photo and it is still recognizably that person and no one else. Draw an abstracted cartoon of the face and the person is still there, but the cartoon could also represent dozens or hundreds of other similar looking people. And abstract the drawing to just a few dots for eyes and a line for a mouth and it could represent just about anyone.

As it is written, so it is so. At tea time a few days ago I pulled Understanding Comics off the shelf for something for Miriam and me to read and flipping through came to the page about face cartoons.
I pointed to the photo. No reaction.
I pointed to the detailed drawing. No reaction.
The cartoon. "Dada!"
The smiley face. "Mimi!"

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cheese omelettes and toast
lunch: leftover chili and rice
dinner: tuna greens salad

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Wait, wait, don't touch that

Wait, wait, don't touch that -

-a game for toddlers and daddies to play

brought to you by NPR - Neurotic Parents Rationalizing

My magic mirror onto space

Though it would probably first be installed in science museums rather than sold as a home decor item, I want a magic mirror onto space. Take a high resolution screen, an HD-level or higher resolution at a fine dot pitch, not a huge screen with many but huge pixels. Decorate the rim to look like a porthole on the International Space Station, perhaps with thick piece of glass over the screen. Hook it up to a live feed from NASA of a fixed camera pointed out from the ISS, broadcasting whatever you'd see if you glanced out of a window on that part of the space station. Leave it running. Install it on an interior wall of your house, ideally in a room without windows, and forget about it. Glance up once in a while to see what things look like outside. Way outside.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts, chocolate milk, orange juice, bacon
lunch: cuban style grilled cheese, greens salad
dinner: moroccan flavored beef stew with golden raisins, beluga lentils with mushrooms, couscous, salad with soy dressing, meyer lemon oil cake

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The land beneath the streets is a city's greatest asset

In 2004, DARPA sponsored a road race for robotic cars, to test how far along robotics research had come towards operating in real world conditions. Universities around the country put together their best software and sensor packages to try to teach the cars, SUVs mostly, how to recognize objects, avoid pitfalls, and navigate in the offroad terrain of the road course. It was an utter failure. Most of the cars barely made it past the starting point before freezing up in glitches, getting tricked by shadows into thinking there were unpassable chasms ahead, or failing to steer around obstacles, then turning over and crashing. The best car made it eight miles out of a 200 mile course at a pace of less than 10 miles an hour.

As of 2010, the best robotic drivers in the world, based out of a Stanford-Google joint project, are able to drive around regular city streets in normal driving conditions, following traffic laws, avoiding collisions with stationary and moving objects, and safely driving around the Bay area. They have a human in the drivers seat paying attention to road conditions and able to override the robot at any time.

At this rate, sensor-laden cars that can drive themselves more safely than human reaction times will ever be able to manage should be available in the lab in the next five years and be ready for market around 2020, just when my nearly new Civic is starting to kick the bucket.

I joke that Miriam, now almost two, will never need to get a drivers license. By 2025 when she turns 16, we'll either be out of oil or we'll all be driven around by hyper-efficient robot chauffeurs. I prefer to believe in the latter.

People love to own their own cars and drive them around, here in LA as much as anywhere in the world. But cars are expensive. Personal ownership is inefficient, with your car sitting around most of the day so you can drive it for an hour or two. The car you have (even if you have three or four) is probably not the optimal car for your current trip. It's too big or too small, too slow or too hard to park. You spend a few minutes every trip finding parking and walking to your destination. You need to insure it and you worry about getting in an accident every time you get behind the wheel (or at least you should). You feed it gasoline and oil and take it on regular trips to the mechanic and a good chunk of your home and property is dedicated to its storage.

Corporate ownership of robotic cars would change that. ("Corporate" here is merely standing in for non-personal. The corporate body might be private, non-profit, or municipal.) Imagine a ZipCar fleet that drives itself around, that comes to your house just as you are stepping out, with a vehicle that fits the number of people who are going on your trip and your stuff and nothing more, and takes you right up to the door of your destination before driving off to pick up the next passenger. Imagine highways with cars that can talk to each other and drive at a hundred miles an hour a few feet from each other, signaling to change lanes by exchanging trip plans and negotiating the optimal speeds and timing to keep everyone moving without slowing. And all with fewer accidents per trip than the safest human drivers.

The vast infrastructure we dedicate to cars could be more efficiently used or repurposed. You could replace your driveway with a garden. You could turn your garage into a guest apartment. The downtown parking garage gets turned into an office building, and the ocean of asphalt around Walmart reverts to forest. Perhaps the biggest infrastructure gain would be a more efficient use of roads. When cars can drive within inches of each other, parked cars are unheard of, roads blocked by stopped cars are just obstacles to reroute around, and cars sized to fit just the passengers, most roads need not be much larger than bike paths.

Which means a seven lane behemoth like the road I'm parked out at right now, with 12 feet per lane, two lanes of parking, four lanes of driving and a turning lane in the middle becomes a huge piece of unused, extremely valuable real estate. Owned by the city. In the middle of a valuable neighborhood surrounded by well established businesses, comfortable residential neighborhoods, and all the amenities of city life. In a world without cars getting people around more efficiently than our current system, the land beneath the streets is a city's greatest asset. One that can be converted to parks or sold to developers or turned into permanent street fairs and pedestrian malls and outdoor markets. What's your dream for a 40'x10,000' lot in the middle of Los Angeles?

This is easily 15 years from now, if ever. But 15 years is about the right amount of time to establish the framework for setting the patterns of post-personal-car land use of municipally owned roads. So talk to your city counselors and planning authorities and get those principles in writing. And enjoy your robotic chauffeurs.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: vegan chili at Trails Cafe in Griffith Park
dinner: scallops and stewed tomatoes, garlic bread, rice, and oven roasted asparagus

Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Seasons are Hiding! A children's book

The Seasons are Hiding!

It's always sunny. It's always warm. Where is winter? Where is summer? The seasons are hiding!

Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, are you here?

Here we are!

We four, we seasons, we are close friends and sometimes we look alike. We all have sunshine and we all have flowers. We share the sun and the moon. But if you follow your nose and soak in the sun and listen and watch carefully, you can tell us apart.

I am Summer. I am warm (but not too hot) and I am DRY. No rains fall on me. The leaves of the trees turn shiny and dusty. The grass on the hills turns to brown. The days are long and there is lots of time to play.

I am Fall. I can't decide what to be. At first I am dry and I can get HOT HOT HOT. The winds come from the west, then the east, then the west again. But then the rains come! Everything drinks in the water: the trees, the animals, the ground itself. The hills turn green.

I am Winter. I am warm and cool (but never cold, that would be rude). To me, rain is welcome, but sunshine too. The nights are long and some animals sleep through it all. There is snow on the top of the tall mountains.

I am Spring. I am warm and my air is clear. I love the flowers and the flowers love me. The distant snows melt and the rivers run strong and clean. New leaves and plants grow. There are lots of good things to eat.

We are the seasons. We may look like each other but we are different. All of us are special, each in our own way.

Yesterday's run destination: home from church via Douglas Park

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: leftover chicken and broccoli stir fry
dinner: pasta and bolognese
bonus: blondies

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Review of Pasolivio in Paso Robles

Stopped in here on the way back to LA for a lovely experience but what I (and Becca) thought was a terrible bunch of olive oils. The setting, in the rolling hills outside Paso Robles, couldn't be better, with a quiet country road, big old trees, a picturesque olive orchard, chickens clucking in the distance, and a campus of quiet historic barns and structures.

The staff was friendly, chatty, and attentive, with a set 10-15 minute story of the orchard, its current management, the prizes they've won, and a sequence of tasting their oils (pressed on site) and the local vinegars and wines that they sell as well. They kept everyone in the tasting room engaged and moving along, and there seemed to be another car of agritourists pulling up every five minutes or so.

But the olive oils. I like olive oil. I like fruity, dark, extra virgin olive oil that really shines through in a salad or as a dip, something that can't be mistaken for anything but top notch olive oil. This wasn't that. Half of their offerings were olive oil mixed with a citrus oil, which should have been a tip off from the beginning that the underlying olive oil product was something they needed to hide. For the straight EVOOs, and there were three of them at price points from high to astronomical, what they needed to hide was apparent: bitterness and astringency way beyond my comfort zone and out of range of any other high quality/price oil I've ever tasted. This is not to say that others won't like these olive oils, but to me and Becca, these were hard to choke down with a straight face.

Another tip off that the oil couldn't stand up by itself: instead of basic salt to flavor the oil they had some sort of tasting salt with a mix of herbs and spices, which certainly masked the olive oil flavors, if not all of the harshness. Nonetheless, and somewhat guided by the fact that the oil did improve a little when mixed with other flavors, I bought a bottle of their least offensive EVOO as a souvenir. I have served it a couple times, but I'm about ready to give up on it and just cook with it, which seems like a bit of a waste for a $25 bottle of oil.

Admittedly, this was my first tasting at an olive orchard. Previously, I've only done tastings in Italian import shops and gourmet food stores, comparing various small run and large producer olive oils under the guidance of store staff. So maybe I've just never been offered the good (i.e. strong) stuff. Or maybe Pasolivio is making it all up and hoping the dumb city folk have had enough glasses of wine on the way up the valley that they won't notice how gross their overpriced oil is.

Yesterday's run destination: San Vincente Blvd.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: hot oatmeal with maple syrup
lunch: chicken and broccoli leftovers, cold, standing up in the kitchen while getting ready for my meeting
dinner: mac and cheese with peas and bacon

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Supermarket Price Comparison Dot Com

The modern economy collects vast amounts of data on consumers, particularly buying habits. My supermarket shoppers cards allow each company I shop with to track my purchases for months or years, a profile they use to personalize marketing to get me to buy more, sell to advertising agencies to develop advertising to get me to buy more, and sell to manufacturers to develop new products that I am likely to buy. Any time you are asked to give a company information about yourself or your purchases, in consumer surveys, warranty registrations, even customer service calls, that information goes into a profile that has a very definite economic value to the corporation, both for itself and on the open market for consumer information.

Well, it's not quite an open market. I can't buy my own profile from Safeway. If I was a data mining company, I could buy profiles by the thousand, but even though the information collected is about me, I don't receive access to it, either as a service of the Safeway Club Card program or for a fee. I'm not quite a full member in this club.

The hidden but blatant commercialism of consumer data collection isn't an inevitable outcome of data collection and mining techniques. It is the result of a particular regulatory and ethical environment which blocks the worst prejudicial uses of data but does not locate ownership and copyright of consumer data with the consumer. An enormous investment has been made in data collection in the modern networked era by retailers, manufacturers, advertisers, and the data servicing companies that serve them. There are many more implementations for that investment than selling us more stuff.

Rob Walker's Consumed column in the New York Times is hit or miss but when it hits it resonates with the deeply felt part of me that wants to be an enthusiastic patron and contributor to culture without being swept away by a mindless consumerism. A column a few months ago on consumer data described Indhira Rojas' IndexR, which posits a system in which consumer data, analyzed and delivered to the consumer, would guide recycling decisions, tapping into material data provided from up and down the supply chain.

My personal shopping data, presented to me, would be a fantastic resource for guiding future purchasing, not as a way to entice me to buy more but as a tool for making my purchases more efficient and buying less. Lets stick with supermarket shopping club card data and posit mygrocerylist.com, "Where your data works for YOU." Glancing through the last few months of groceries, on a neatly and automatically sorted chart like what Mint.com does for financial transactions, I could see that I keep buying canned bamboo shoots but never using them, or that switching from regular to organic milk has cost about $10 a month.

Aggregated across the various supermarkets I frequent, I could note to never buy canned tomatoes at Ralph's, or chicken thighs at Trader Joe's. I could autogenerate a suggested shopping list based on previous purchases, then review it for gaps and frivolities.

Aggregated across the purchases of likeminded consumers and plugged in to digitized weekly specials mailings, I could get shopping list that breaks up my weekly purchases across two or three stores (which I'm going to anyway to pick up some last minute item or because it's on the way home) to take advantage of sales, doorbusters, and run of the mill price increases and decreases. Making this easy and automatic relies on my having access to my buying habits, which has already been collected by the supermarkets.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: toast with butter and honey
lunch: persian chicken in lime-spinach sauce at Shaherzad
dinner: roast chicken with rice and broccoli

Monday, February 28, 2011

What's in your 20 minute radius?

When I lived in Arlington, MA, I would commute via Red Line to the end of the line at Alewife. Alewife had terrible imageability and signage, and visitors constantly got confused as to which exits to take from the platform and the station. In four years of commuting I think I recall three complete signage overhauls. One included a handy map of the area with concentric circles estimating how far you could get in a 10 or 15 or 20 minute walk from the station. The shopping center was within the 10 minute radius. Our house was on the edge of the 15 minute circle.

What's in your personal 20 minute radius? If you stepped out of your front door, how many people could you get to in 20 minutes of walking, biking, or driving? How many businesses? Is there a library in your circle? A supermarket? A farmers market? A museum? Parks? Do your friends live in your 20 minute radius? Your closest friends? People you could drop the baby off with in an emergency?

20 minutes is about as long as I feel I can be in transit and still feel like my destination is "close by". In my current city locale, that means about 10 blocks by foot, 20 by bike, and anywhere from a two to five miles by car depending on traffic, time of day, the direction I'm going, the availability of parking. Transit time isn't just what Google Maps says it will take to get to my destination. Add a minute to get into the car and pull out of the driveway (a minute not needed if just walking away). Add a minute or two to find parking, or, sometimes, five or ten minutes if there's no street parking and downtown is locked up and you need to wander up to the very top of the municipal garage to find a spot, then walk back down the five flights and back a block to get to your destination. At moments like that, my 20 minute zone has a big hole in it covering downtown Santa Monica that just happens to include a whole lot of destinations I'd like to go to.

I think there are 1-200,000 people living in my 20 minute radius, but only four donut shops and one ice cream place I'm interested in going to. I live in a dense part of a big big city and even without getting on the highway (which since it takes 15 minutes from front door to on ramp isn't too helpful in expanding my 20 minute radius) there is a lot of life around me.

My 20 minute radius shrinks a little when I have the baby with me, just for the added time of prepping a stroller or getting her in and out of the car. Generously that takes up two minutes, leaving 18 for actually getting anywhere. My radius shrinks during rush hour and grows on Sundays when roads are clear and parking abundant. Any car trip adds a few minutes of adjusting and parking, leaving at most 15 minutes of driving, instead of 18 minutes of walking. If I biked more, I would be faster at getting my bike out of the shed and wouldn't need to hunt down the key to my bike lock, and my biking radius would grow a little bit.

Walkscore.com will grade your home and neighborhood for walkability, measuring how many cultural and commercial resources are available to a pedestrian. Which is great, when I'm a pedestrian, but doesn't account for the resources I can access by car in the same amount of time. For the sum total of my 20 minute radius, the best I can do is estimate, live here, track how long it gets to the places I want to go.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: lentil soup
dinner: Eli Breakfast Sandwiches and lentils on noodles

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Duplo Labyrinth

Today's sparklefun activity at least as much for daddies as for the official audience in the 18-24 month zone: building a Duplo Labyrinth.

Taking inspiration from the classic Labyrinth game of rolling a ball through a maze of barriers and holes by tilting the board, most recently made semi-famous again by the eponymous iPhone app, Duplo Labyrinth replaces a fixed board created by corporate minions and mass produced out of cheap softwoods with good old ABS. Duplo Labyrinth uses a 20x20 baseplate and standard blocks to create a playing field surrounded by a rim with carefully placed gaps. A lovely wooden ball plucked from a nearby European hammer-the-nail-workbench-type toy replaces the marble in the original game. Carefully holding the board level and tilting from side to side, which is easier for those of us with arms longer than 16", keeps the ball rolling around the obstacles, away from the gaps, and on to the colorful goal zone. Added creativity erupts with on the fly barrier rearrangement. Hilarity ensues when the little one starts rolling the ball off the edge of the board just so, such that it consistently goes under the couch.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: waffles
lunch: waffle PB&J
dinner: fish tacos with homemade tortillas and also experimental potato flake-based not-a-tortillas

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Your tax dollars at work

Between Santa Monica and UCLA sits the massive campus of the West Los Angeles Veterans Center. There's a hospital, housing, recreational facilities, and quite a few buildings I didn't quite understand the purpose of. The buildings are numbered, and go up into the hundreds. The main entrance is from Wilshire Blvd., which cuts through the middle of the campus as its speeds towards the 405. Follow the meandering road north into the hills and at the very northern edge, nearly a mile away, up against the beginning of a canyon, sits the Brentwood Theatre.

Today's event: a special hearing held by the chairs of the US House and Senate transportation committees. Barbara Boxer played host. Miriam was most most definitely the only toddler in the room of a couple hundred players. She was the only minor, for that matter. I was one of the few without a suit jacket, though I did think to dress up and had a collared shirt on.

We checked in outside with the young senate staffer, got the once over by one of the six LA County sheriffs standing around under a tent just outside the entrance, and walked in to the hearings, already an hour into the proceedings by the time we got there. On stage in front of a half full comfortable auditorium of perhaps 400 seats, sat around 20 people in two rows, the first row behind panel discussion tables, the second kind of lurking in the shadows behind them.

Hoping to find an empty area where Miriam could run up and down the aisles for the few minutes before she started making distracting levels of noise and we would go to the next stop on the morning's itinerary, Aidan's Place, the fantastic playground in Westwood, we went up to the top row. This afforded a lovely view down into the half dozen Blackberries lit up and in use of the other people with a predilection for sitting in the back of the room. So it was a little hard to make out who was who. Luckily, politicians use one another's names all the time when speaking and tend to gesture broadly.

I missed hearing Mayor Villaraigosa, who I would like to learn more about. He got himself quoted in the LA Times article about the hearing. Speakers seemed like a who's who of transportation planners, like the head of the Metro, of a Southern California planning commission, Orange County's Transportation Department head, etc. Out of twenty or so people on stage, three women, one black person, two hispanic people. Lots of white men. The level of discourse would be about average for an NPR talk show, minus the call-ins. Each speaker got around five minutes, and maybe they were going to take questions after all ten had spoken.

After two and a half speeches, Miriam realized we weren't in a park, reading a book, or playing with Legos, and signaled that it was time to go. So we left.

Who were all those people in suits silently watching the proceedings? Elected officials and their staff? Construction magnates hoping to bid on future infrastructure projects? Unemployed and curious citizens with a free day and a good feel for fashion?

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: Kate's yogurt cake and a banana
lunch: the end of the tofu yaki soba
dinner: cheesy potato

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Captain Zircon's ultimate sacrifice, Part I


Captain Zircon and the Sands of Time

Captain Zircon is hard, harder than steel, harder than stone, one of the hardest substances on earth.

Captain Zircon cannot be damaged by acid, except for the strongest and most dangerous acid of all: hydrofluoric acid.

Captain Zircon is dense, denser than water, denser than mere mortals, denser than most substances above or below the earth.

Captain Zircon is transparent, impervious to energy rays, heat rays, death rays, and other radiation weapons. 

Captain Zircon is immune to magnetic attacks.

Captain Zircon is millions of years old. He was created in the fiery blast of a volcano, thrown out by the explosion into the atmosphere, where, with uncounted trillions of fellow zircons, he floated down to earth, as they covered the earth with a fine dusty ash. When he was created, a radioactive clock was embedded in his crystalline body, which will continue to tick for billions of years. Captain Zircon fell into a gentle sea, settled to the sea floor, and was soon buried where he lay by sand and sediment washing over him from a nearby river mouth. There he lay, frozen in place, for millions of years. Through uplift and climate change, tectonic shifts and intense pressures, he and his fellow zircons and their thin layer of ash became one with the rock. Until one day, not long ago, an intrepid geologist discovered Captain Zircon locked within a rock in a remote canyon in southern Utah, and released him from his prison. And the legend of Captain Zircon was brought to the light of day.

The geologist, Marion Ellery Samson Bijou, had been looking for Captain Zircon, though she wasn't sure she was going to find him. An inquisitive and meticulous scholar from a young age, Mes-Ba, as she was known to her friends and fans, had always enjoyed the outdoors. On this particular expedition, she found herself 15 miles from the nearest road, a drawing of her beloved and a dog eared copy of Walden as her only company, camped under an overhang in a dry canyon. She had heard coyotes a few days before, but hadn't seen any. Sagebrush and pine dotted her landscape of ochers below and unworldly deep blue above. 

Mes-Ba was on the hunt. Like many of her fellow geologists, she had an overwhelming desire to put the past in order, to know what came first, when things happened, and what the future might hold. As she chipped out samples from the rock walls near her camp, she was hunting for the radioactive clock in Captain Zircon's heart, for only Zircon could tell her how old the layers of the canyon's rocks were. Put down layer by layer, year by year, century by century, epoch by epoch, most of the bits of rock and sand and fossil that were pressed to become the rocks of Mes-Ba's canyon were impossible to match to a particular moment in time. But not Zircon. Zircon was different. Zircon had within him the ticking radioactive clock of Uranium slowly, so so slowly, decaying into Lead.

As she scanned and chipped and filtered, she looked for the telltale line of black and grey that signaled an enormous volcanic eruption deep in the past. And she found it! Pencil thin, but running along the canyon in both directions, this little tenuous smudge of grey surrounded above and below by reds and yellows and browns, with the occasional shell or fossil fragment. Every layer of sandstone below that line was older than it. Every layer above was younger. 

Just how much older or younger none could say, but at just that point, in that ash, lay Captain Zircon, frozen in time, his clock ticking away as it had been from the day of his origin, when his crystalline form and coalesced and solidified in the aftermath of that unfathomable blast.

Mes-Ba chipped out a chunk of rock encompassing Captain Zircon, and a few hundred fellow zircons, and held it to her heart, thanking the earth for its gifts and relieved that her long journey had not been in vain. Then she carefully wrapped and labelled Captain Zircon's rock and continued her studies of the canyon and surrounding landscape.

A few weeks later, back at her lab, Mes-Ba had another run in with Captain Zircon. Though they shared a love of the earth and of understanding its processes and history, ultimately their relationship would destroy one of them. But first, Mes-Ba needed to break Captain Zircon out of the bonds of rock that held him. First with a hammer, she chipped away at the layers of sandstone and discarded those pieces she was certain did not contain any of the zircons she so vigorously sought. This left a few dozen gumball sized pieces. These went into the jaw crusher, a metal monstrosity feared by all rocks but not by zircons, who could not be crushed by its clamping plates of steel. The rocks containing Captain Zircon and his fellow zircons now were little more than pea sand, but still each grain contained many minerals stuck together, surrounding each zircon. The pea sand was ground yet finer, to a fine dusty sand in which each tiny fragment was a unique piece of a single mineral, and at last Captain Zircon was free of the bonds that had held him in place for these millions of years since his birth.

Mes-Ba was overjoyed to have freed her friend but knew much work lay ahead of her. For now, instead of a few rocks, she had millions of fine grains to search through to find him. While she could recognize any zircon on sight, there were only a few hundred zircons in the millions of mineral particles in front of her. 

Sunday, February 20, 2011

I've been to a few people's homes around the Westside in the past six months, and I saw many many apartments before renting one upon moving to Santa Monica last summer, and can now comment on a particular type of apartment occupied by young professionals without trust funds.

The building is two stories tall, long and skinny, with similar buildings on either side. There may be four, six, eight, or ten apartments, all one or two bedrooms. The building is divided into entryways, each entryway accessing two apartments per floor. Entryways never have doors, let alone secured doors and buzzers. Construction is stucco on chicken wire on wood frames or concrete. The pathway along the side of the building to access the rear entryways is usually poured concrete, sometimes asphalt, and is lined with some sort of skinny greenery, a wall, and then the next building, which is nearly identical to the present one.

The apartments usually have wood floors or fake wood floors of some sort of laminate made up to look like wood, floating over plywood or concrete. The front door enters into a combined living room-dining room, with a galley kitchen hidden behind a wall. The continuation of the kitchen area suggests a dining area, though this is usually too small for a table and chairs for more than two people. Sometimes there is a balcony.

Tucked to the side is a bathroom and bedroom, or two bedrooms, usually separated by the bathroom. The whole unit is roughly a square, split down the middle into the living-dining-kitchen half and the bedroom-closets-bathroom half. Sometimes one of the bedrooms has a private bath within.

The walls are decorated with framed not-art, personal photos and prints and objects collected from international travel not intended as art, like mexican sugar skulls or a kite from Shanghai. Dust collects in the corners. Everyone has at least one bookshelf in the living room. There is a couch, sometimes two, a chair, a small dining room table, sometimes a big TV sometimes no TV never a small TV, a desk and computer corner, and a slight awkwardness when entering for the lack of transition space between the public outside to the private inside. Open the door, or have it unlocked and opened for you, and you are directly into the cosy interior, and can collapse directly onto the couch from where you stand, if you feel comfortable enough with your hosts to do so.

Yesterday's run destination: main branch library

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts and coffee
lunch: tuna wrap at (not recommended) Naturally, in Pacific Palisades
dinner: tofu yakisoba

Saturday, February 19, 2011

After the Fall's Forever Medicine Kit (tm)

For the survivalist who has everything, a new gift: the gift of life. You can make your own bow and arrows to hunt feed yourself and yours. You've installed a passive solar heating system and invested heavily in insulation to keep your cabin warm through those cold Colorado winters.  You even set in a supply of seeds for all the crops you'll need and a few you don't quite know how to cook. Because after the fall, it's going to be a long, lonely time and there's no one going to be there to lend a hand.

You have the top of the line survival medicine kit, you've read through all the manuals, you're ready to set a bone or perform CPR. But your medicine chest, deep and rich though it might be today, one day is going to run out. And a little cut starts to look pretty serious when the last tube of antibiotics just ran out. Which is why you need After the Fall's new Forever Medicine Kit (tm).

Kit includes:
Penicillium fungi spores
Bacilus subtilis, granulated colonies
Willow seedlings (Don't be alarmed that it looks like a stick! This is a 100% guaranteed viable seedling in a dormant state)
And much more! A total of 21 different spores, seeds, and seedlings.

128 page instruction booklet gives detailed directions on how to produce and purify lifesaving drugs using the same raw materials currently employed by the industrial pharmaceutical industry. Make your own aspirin, penicillin, and bacitracin, just to name a few. Booklet printed on TYVEK for maximum durability.

With the Forever Medicine Kit and proper management of your biological medicinal stock, you will be able to produce key drugs, proven by 100+ years of scientific medical research to be effective on a wide range of ailments, injuries, and diseases, within the comforts of your own homestead. This Kit provides the seed material and the straight-forward instructions you need to make the drugs you'll need.

NOTE: these drugs are to be used only in EMERGENCY SURVIVAL situations. After the Fall takes no responsibility for the proper preparation and ultimate effects of any of the drugs produced by these seed materials and instructions. Proper preparation assumes the availability of commonly found materials and equipment, like sterile bottles, wood or charcoal, bread, rice, or similar feedstock, and healthy soils. Not all seeds and trees will grow in all climates.

Yesterday menu:
breakfast: donut
lunch: cheese and crackers
dinner: black bean soup ala Atticus, greens salad with lemon honey miso dressing, crusty bread and olive oil with zahtar

Friday, February 18, 2011

Clean up time is fun time

Clean up, clean up
Everybody clean up
Clean up, clean up
Clean up now

More mornings than not Becca has left for work before I have showered, which when it first happened was a cause of great alarm. What will I do with the highly mobile and curious baby while trapped by soap and water? Can she safely be entertained in the bathroom? Or maybe she's still asleep and I'll leave the door open to listen for her waking up and just be quick about it.

Turned out to be a non-issue, as uberbaby ended up cheerfully playing with her bath toys on the bathroom floor and found it hilarious to flap the shower curtain back and forth. These days, it is just part of the morning pattern. She gets to bring in a toy or book, she points out where I should put my clothes and the spot on the counter for my glasses, we play peek-a-boo with the shower curtain, she lines up her bath toys on the edge of the tub, and it all works out.

Yesterday her toy was Travel Boggle, recently reassembled after a few dice wandered under living room furniture. She stacked the dice. Put them on the board, and took them out. Threw them. At least, so I presume from what I heard, I didn't look, I trust her to play peacefully and safely at this point. When I was almost done with my shower, I shouted out that it was time to clean up, and a minute later as I emerged 13 blocks were back in place and she was grabbing, with great hilarity and satisfaction, for the remaining three.

Yesterday's run destination: around the block

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: french toast
lunch: pasta and chili
dinner: mapo tofu and snap peas

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Cheesy potato

As a young teenager I would come home and collect the mail from its box at the top of the driveway. I got to open the junk mail. One day, there was a promotional mailer from a spice company, McCormick, or the like, with a short stack of recipe cards, diecut for entry in a rolodex, shiny and colorful. One was for a quick side dish: microwaved cheesy potatoes. Cut a raw potato in thick slices, but not all the way through, using a wooden spoon handle on either side of the potato as baffles to keep the knife from going all the way through. Microwave. Add small slices of cheese between each slice and sprinkle with more cheese and oregano. Microwave, briefly.

Somehow this dish, quick and simple, filling to the point pinch hitting for a complete meal, became a standard of my personal cuisine. I make it a few times a month, often for a weekend lunch. These days, I don't pre-slice the potatoes, which I think leads to a better texture, and sometimes just open up and flatten out the potatoes without slicing at all. These are minor details. Mostly, melted cheese is yummy.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: maple miniwheats
lunch: leftover chili, again
dinner: pasta and red sauce with chorizo, greens salad

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Health care is more than medical insurance, right?

Once upon a time, four years ago or so, I went to a heartfelt but less than rigorous lay-led church service on insurance. Andrew Fischer spoke on how the function of insurance, to sustain people and families after a crisis-level loss of property, health, or life, used to be provided by churches, as the most substantial local institution of care, and how providing this care to members in turn strengthened churches and communities. Then around 200 years ago, private, regional, market economy insurance started to be provided for the tragedies of domestic life, evolving out of the insurance developed around a growing mercantile system of trade. Andrew focused on what was lost in that transition, trusting that the story of what was gained, in spreading risk, clear contractual relationships, portability, etc. had been adequately told in the popular business press.

By moving the function of insurance out of the local community, he said, the personal relationship of care among neighbors was weakened. By relying on businesses instead of parishioners to help us after the loss of a job, the death of a spouse, or the destruction of a home by fire, flood, or crime, we marginalized the church, pushed it out of the necessary core of a family's existence. By ending the practice of helping our neighbors in their times of need with our own time, energy, and money, we created a vacuum of care that left many people spiritually hollow, without outlet to help others through personal connection, atomized among neighbors who rarely become friends.

It was interesting, not exactly convincing, thought provoking, and nostalgic. The idea of tracking and measuring the losses involved in shifting key societal needs from the world of social capital to the world of financial capital matches other trends in my idea environment, that about the price of pollution and climate change, of hidden costs in the rich world's industrial food system, of separating health care from medical care.

With the spiraling costs of health insurance regularly in the news, I wonder about how to capture the benefits of community-centered care without losing the fantastic gains of industrial scientific medicine.

I occasionally avoid medical care, not that I or my immediate family have needed substantial medical interventions in the past few years (barring my partner's pregnancy and the birth of our child, which required in the end only minimal medical intervention), not because it is expensive to me but because I understand it to be expensive to the medical system. The science fiction reading part of my mind thinks about how to create for myself a minimal medical cost life. Certainly regular exercise is involved. Probably identifying the riskiest behaviors in my daily patterns, like driving. A low calorie diet, but one that brings me joy. Finding happiness and low stress habits among my friends and family. Hoping to luck out genetically to avoid having big, expensive diseases, like cancer, alzheimer's, or diabetes. Accepting home hospice care by loving friends and family, even at the cost of potential years of life.

I think of a health care system, one that includes medical insurance and access to the fruits of excellent medical care but goes beyond it to support me in leading a healthy life. I want integrated care that encourages and enforces lifestyle choices that help me be healthier, happier, and less dependent on medical intervention, that cares about me in good times and bad, and that I can care for in return. A church community, at least the mythically friendly and supportive one that Andrew sketched, sounds like a good candidate to host such a system. Caring for the whole person, knowing the people around me and letting them know me and my life, a community that relates to my spiritual, intellectual, familial, social, and personal dimensions and recognizes that they are wrapped up in one another. I believe such a holistic care system, though it has very definite flaws, could be enormously more efficient in health per dollar of medical care than the crisis mitigation business model we seem to have now.

Yesterday's run destination: Montana Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: eggs and toast
lunch: leftover chili with lime and cilantro
dinner: shrimp fried rice

Friday, February 4, 2011

Parenting Tips from Hell

I just read Room, by Emma Donoghue, in a flurry and a rush. It is beautiful and painful and very much in the company of the works Donoghue cites as inspiration, stories of parents in impossible situations, like The Road (McCarthy) and Life is Beautiful (Benigni). Thinking on those works, here are some parenting tips if you find yourself in hell with a small child, perhaps the hell of a concentration camp, or wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape, or imprisoned in a basement or shed for years on end:

structure your day
every object is precious, keep track of them
everything has multiple uses
hell is fun! for kids who don't know better
teach them everything you know, all the time
even one book is a great source of words, games
it's ok to cry sometimes, just don't let it overwhelm you
eat the best diet you can, multivitamins are your friends
other people may seem to want to help, but you can only trust the two of you
the world outside your bubble is both more terrible and more friendly than you imagine it
even the most hellish parts can be made into a game
after your child has outgrown the fiction that they aren't in hell that you construct for them, he'll pretend to believe it because he sees it helps you cope
fresh fruit can be the most colorful wonderful thing in the world
the best games don't need anything but two people talking to each other
everything you do to prepare them for the day you'll be gone is never enough

Today's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast and rooibos
lunch: can of chick peas
dinner: ribeye and red wine reduction, broiled asparagus, onion tart, spouted lentil salad

Thursday, February 3, 2011

At the Moth

Across 5th Street from the main Post Office sits one of the semi-anonymous clubs of Santa Monica, Zanzibar. It is more up front about its presence than most, with a large sign on the corner and a small marquee listing upcoming acts. Not like that place on Santa Monica Blvd that doesn't have a name, but some nights has a bouncer and a line outside. But without that sign, Zanzibar looks like just another of Santa Monica's many warehouse/light industrial one story boxes.

Last night, there was a line down the front of the club and around the corner. I parked in front of the library two blocks away and joined the line, by myself in a line mostly of pairs of people. Behind me were two white girls talking about a wedding one of them was going to, her bridesmaid dress and its expensive alterations, the oddity of the bridal shower a few months ago. In an excellent gesture towards friendliness on what for around here was an exceedingly cool evening that made me wish I had grabbed a jacket over my sweater, the management had stationed a volunteer to hang out at the end of the line handing out slips of paper for anyone who wanted to to write a one sentence story of the craziest "after hours" adventure they had been in.

The line moved in fits and starts as groups passed the doorman, paid their entrance, and were released in to find a place to stand. I ordered a beer and found a spot near the bar, the night's festivities just getting started on stage. The room is full, perhaps near its fire department mandated maximum of 212 persons, seats around, standing behind, a crowd at and around the bar. It's buzzing but not loud, friendly but focused on stage.

The MC, perhaps an aspiring comedian? in any case quite comfortable with the mic and the crowd, vulgar and funny, as she described the night's rules. Put your name in the hat if you want to tell a story. Three teams of judges, volunteers from the audience who signed up earlier. Five minutes, then you get a signal on the ocarina (the ocarina of time?) to wrap it up. Six minutes, a louder signal. Seven minutes, they play it in your ear and your score goes down down down. Five storytellers, intermission to grab a beer, five more, pick a winner to go to the GrandSlam next month, go home. It is a Wednesday night, after all.

And stories. True stories, stories of adventures after hours, at pool parties and in strange apartments, hitchhiking through Tennessee and a man with tattoos not remembering how to breath fire. Five maybe regular people, all but one professionally smooth on stage, practiced, putting in jokes and little details and turns of phrase, not quite to the point of poignancy and rarely capturing a mood and fully setting and fleshing out the scene from their recollections of wild days gone past, but fun, enthusiastic, captivating.

It is nearly nine when I leave, walk back to my car through the still open library to pick up a book and stop by the reception for the Swiss Consulate-sponsored coffee table book of photos of glaciers for a chocolate or two, collect myself, drive home the twenty blocks through familiar streets.

Yesterday's run destination: Washington Ave.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast crunch and coffee
lunch: chicken and potatoes
dinner: bean quesadillas