Category: General

thanksgiving plans

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

first of all, a day early, but i won’t be blogging tomorrow — happy thanksgiving!

our plans?

usually, they involve lots of yummy pennsylvania dutch starchiness when we visit kirk’s parents, but this year we’re staying home. kirk’s parents had a previous commitment (on thanksgiving? whatever.) and it’s our first year in our new apartment anyway. so instead of a food network thanksgiving, or a southern-ish-style thanksgiving, we’re having a martha stewart living thanksgiving. the turkey recipe from the november issue, to be specific. here’s what’s planned so far, with more probably to be added:

» brined turkey and stuffing, a la martha — we got a fresh turkey from our local farmer’s market, and we’re soaking it in a spiced brine for 24 hours prior to cooking. yummo, as rachael ray would say to martha if they weren’t blood enemies. the turkey will be stuffed with some kind of yummy stuffing, the details of which i can’t remember. the most important stuffing note, though, is that the recipe calls for the stuffing to be placed in cheesecloth before placing in the turkey. that way, you can take out the stuffing when the turkey is done, and cook the stuffing longer so you don’t get salmonella or whatever. this is a major victory for me. kirk always worried about the ill effects of stuffing a turkey, so he’d never let me put stuffing loose in the turkey. never mind that i lived my entire life doing it, and never died as a result. ah, compromise.

» organic green bean casserole — they had a display of organic fried onions and organic green beans and organic cream of mushroom soup at whole foods, and the concept of organic green bean casserole cracked me up so much that i had to buy it. maybe we can have organic jell-o salad for dessert, to complete the ’70s vibe.

» cranberry salad — my family historically makes the standard cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries. one bag cranberries, one cup sugar, one cup water. boil. kirk this year made his aunt marcia’s cranberry salad, which has nuts, and oranges, and chopped fresh cranberries, and sugar, and oysters, and chopped chives, and other stuff i’m forgetting. well, not really oysters and chopped chives. but it’s far too busy a recipe for me. and nonstandard thanksgiving fare to boot. and he made at least 18 pounds of it. i’m skeptical. we’ll see.

» cope’s corn — no thanksgiving would now be complete for me without it. see, i can change.

» potato filling — this is mashed potatoes with celery and onion and bread and 11 herbs and spices according to the colonel’s secret recipe. actually, kirk’s mother’s recipe. but it is yummy. i’ve adapted to this, as well. great comfort food.

» gravy — lotsa lotsa gravy. made from pan drippings and roux, the right way.

» steamed broccoli — there has to be something green, right? or i may open a can of mustard greens.

» pumpkin cheesecake — a bit of a twist on tradition, but one i can handle.

i think that’s it. i’m probably forgetting something. but you get the gist.

here’s hoping your thanksgiving is as blessed as ours will be.

our wii media center

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who needs an apple tv? not us.

we have a mac in our “home office”, which is in fact a shallow closet. elsewhere in the apartment, we have a wii, and we have the wii hooked up to the hdtv, and we have the wii hooked up to the home theater. and the mac and the wii are on the same network.

enter wii transfer.

for a $19 shareware fee, which i paid and so should you when you use shareware, this little program feeds music, movies, photos, and browser bookmarks from your mac to the wii’s internet browser. so if i want to listen to itunes music through the stereo, or watch a downloaded video file on the hdtv, or watch a slideshow of my iphoto pictures, i can now just fire up the wii, use the wii’s browser to pull up the content, and bob’s your uncle, as they say in paraguay. it installed easily with practically no configuration, and worked perfectly out of the box.

there are a couple of minor drawbacks. you can’t play purchased drm-encoded video, so all my wonder showzen episodes bought in itunes stay on the mac. and audio files don’t stream yet (they are copied over to the wii on the fly), so you run into wii memory issues with large audio files. no radioshift yet.

but those are very minor quibbles. quibbles i can put up with when spending $19 for wii transfer, as opposed to $299 or even $399 for an apple tv. we listened to itunes playlists all weekend.

great stuff.

unsolicited recommendation: homedecorators.com

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

for years, kirk and i just left our liquor bottles in a disorganized clump on the floor. with our holiday party coming up, we thought it might be nice to have a small liquor cabinet to put the bottles in, something that had a top that could double as a small dry bar.

so kirk found this lovely and well-priced corner cabinet at homedecorators.com, and he ordered it.

the website was well-organized and very informative, the ordering process was straightforward, and the shipping was expedient (delivered less than a week after the order was placed, good for such a large object).

we were especially pleased with the quality of the shipped product. it was partially assembled, and the pieces were clearly labeled, each with its own letter of the alphabet. the assembly directions were clear and literate, and it was fully together in about 20 painless minutes.

since our entire kitchen came from ikea, we are not strangers to furniture assembly. the homedecorators.com assembly experience was much better than the ikea experience, and considering how happy we were with ikea, that’s saying something. the parts were of superior quality. no pressboard, all hard wood, better hardware (bolts, screws, etc.).

for a price comparable to ikea, we got a higher-quality product and a better overall customer experience. we’ll be repeat customers with homedecorators.com, without a doubt.

your creation museum report

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via daring fireball, a tour of the creation museum, from just the right perspective.

here’s a sample:

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look.

i had to stop reading, because i was at work and in danger of laughing so hard i’d disturb the nearby cubedwellers.

this one’s a classic.

entertainment on strike

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

the world of entertainment is on strike. and how is it affecting me?

not much, i have to say. at least not directly.

first there’s the writer’s strike in hollywood. i guess that if you were a big tv watcher, you’d be upset about this. no new episodes of csi or lost or letterman or whatever, and all. but, having given up television (no cable tv, and our tv doesn’t have a tuner, so no over-the-air broadcasts either), i could care less. if the strike goes on long enough it could eventually affect the movies, and i’d care marginally more about that, but there are enough movies on netflix to last a lifetime. if they stopped making new movies tomorrow, i’d still never get to watch all the movies i’d like to see.

second strike is the stagehands on broadway. we don’t go to as many shows as we used to, so this doesn’t directly affect me in that sense. however, it definitely affects the economy of new york city, so in that sense i’m at least indirectly affected. but again, there are plenty of live entertainment options in new york — some broadway shows, off-broadway, off-off broadway, concerts, cabarets, and so on.

in general i support the concept of unions — we wouldn’t have much in the way of benefits and rights as workers if they hadn’t fought for them. and there are many jobs that i wouldn’t take unless there was a union to represent me. and when i taught school, i always belonged to the union — even though i agreed that they promoted and tolerated incompetence, i still saw the overall value in membership.

i think the writers have a valid point. everything’s going online, and if something they wrote is rebroadcast on the internet or sold via itunes, there should be some payment for that. of course, if the strike continues, there may not be much of an audience left for their product, given people’s limited and continually fracturing attention span. but they have a point, and they should press for a solution if they think the risk is worth it.

i don’t think it helps their image, though, to have big stars on the picket lines, and jay leno bringing them donuts, and so on. i’ll bet the vast majority of striking writers are middle class folks with middle class incomes, and all those big stars do is leave casual observers with the impression that all writers are wealthy people looking for even more wealth.

the broadway stagehands seem to me to have less of a point. i’ll be the first to admit that i’m not fully informed, but from what i can gather, one of their main demands is to retain the right to tell producers how many union members each show must hire.

i’m guessing that most people would think that an unreasonable demand. i know i do.

i’d love to have the contractual right to tell my company that they had to employ a set number of my co-workers. who wouldn’t? but that’s not reasonable. and while i’m sure greedy producers drive up the cost of broadway tickets, having to hire union employees regardless of actual need isn’t helping either.

for the sake of the economies of new york and los angeles, i hope both strikes are settled soon.

personally, though, i don’t care much either way.

update: with the broadway strike, what’s at issue is controlling how many workers are present at the load-in for the show (when all the sets, etc., are brought into the theater). i have less of a problem with that — i dont think the producers should be telling the union how many people that takes.

for the grammar nerd in you

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via daring fireball: Philip B. Corbett, who oversees language issues for the [NY Times] newsroom, is answering readers’ questions this week.

this is by far my favorite NY Times article in recent memory. you may think that odd, given that i’m posting about it on a blog that has no capital letters, but it’s true.

update: here’s what mr. corbett says about the phrase “in recent memory”:

A small sample of other words and phrases that my colleagues and I have identified as overworked and deserving a bit of rest:

in recent memory — An almost meaningless phrase.

it’s a long article, and obviously i posted the link before reaching the end of it.

sometimes i just can’t win.

not going to dubai

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i’ve never thought much about going to dubai. it seems to me like las vegas in the desert, except that it costs much more to go there, and you can’t gamble. there’s shopping, but if i want to go high-end shopping, which i don’t, i have a whole nyc full of exclusive shops. there’s, i suppose, seeing the desert.

you get the drift.

anyway, after reading this article in today’s ny times, i’m quite sure i will never go. from the article:

Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.

Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.

The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.

nothing like institutionalized homophobic ignorance to attract tourists to your desert paradise, right? any glbt person who goes to dubai has lost their frigging mind.

correction: anyone at all who goes to dubai has lost their frigging mind.

happy halloween 2007

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

kirk’s pumpkin on the left, my pumpkin on the right. click on the thumbnail to enlarge the picture.

i’m a strict adherent to the “triangles and variations thereof” school of pumpkin carving. kirk believes in making his pumpkins look as much like ike from south park as possible.

i’m looking forward to actually having trick-or-treaters — we’ve never had them in all these years of living in new york, but in our coop we are guaranteed to have them.

trendspotting: music without earphones

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

i’ve seen this enough recently that i think it’s a trend-in-waiting.

after years and years of everyone wearing headphones and listening to their own music in their own world, i’m seeing a growing number of younguns going headphoneless on the subway. not with big boom boxes, but with small devices with a small external speaker.

i kind of like it, as long as it’s occasional and not too ubiquitous. i don’t mind listening to snatches of music that i’d never hear otherwise. and i like it when people figure out slightly subversive ways to buck the current trend. my biggest objection is that the speakers are of such crappy quality that the music sounds awful — i’m guessing that the volume is maxed out so the speakers sound blown.

now, if this ranges toward half the world carrying boom boxes on the subway and turning them up loudly, then i’m going to have a problem. and i’m most definitely in the minority on this, i’m sure. but on a small scale, i’m ok with the concept.

food on the florida trip

~ jamie ~ 4 Comments

kirk’s been doing a great job with the florida vacation recap, with more to come, so as promised i’m kicking in with a bit of a food overview.

dinner on landing was at a branch of the orlando ale house. big cheap beer and big cheap food — kirk had an extremely brown fried seafood platter, and i had a not-too-bad shrimp cajun fettucine alfredo thing, and $2 fosters on tap. slow service and a noisy atmosphere, although it was good to watch a bit of the tail end of the baseball game. food was edible but not much more than that.

friday of course was epcot food & wine festival day. yummo, as rachael ray would chirp. walk around the world showcase at epcot and eat appetizers all day. how can you beat that? while we didn’t eat absolutely everything, we put a pretty good dent in it all. each plate was ~$3, and kirk and i of course shared all plates.

in order of consumption, with occasional notes:

    » Peru: Cause de Cangrejo (crabmeat and sauce on a polenta-like cake); Arroz con Pato (rice with duck)

    » Canada: Canadian Cheddar Cheese Soup (cheesy and bacon-y); Maple Glazed Salmon with Roasted Corn and Arugula

    » Greece: Spanakopita

    » New Zealand: Lamb Slider (awesome gravy and scone-y roll)

    » Oklahoma: Three Sisters’ Soup (corn, beans, squash); Seared Buffalo with Scalloped Wild Onions

    » Morocco: Bastilla (like a samosa, with middle eastern flavors and phyllo dough), Walnut Baklava

    » Italy: Insalata Caprese, Lemonato

    » Germany: Debriziner Sausage with Sauerkraut in a Pretzel Roll

    » Turkey: Meze (can’t remember the specific ingredients, but this is definitely misnamed. meze means “appetizer” in Turkey, so it’s a generic description rather than a specific dish. come on, epcot. step it up.); Manti with Yogurt Sauce (a kind of turkish ravioli — this is a specific meze)

    » South Africa: Durban Spiced Chicken on a Skewer (nice Asian flavors); Bobotie with Mango Chutney (spicy minced meat with an eggy topping); Spice Cake with Marinated Fruit (best dessert of the day).

    » Ireland: Boxty (a potato pancake) with Bacon Chips and Kerrygold Garlic and Fresh Herb Butter; Irish Cheese Plate and Brown Bread with Apple Chutney and Kerrygold Irish Butter; Bunratty Meade Honey Wine (far too sweet for me but still tasty).

    » Chile: Shrimp con Pebre Salsa (like gazpacho with shrimp minus the liquid); Tomaticán with Manchego Cheese (tomato and corn stew). Both were outstanding.

my favorite was, surprisingly for me, oklahoma. they were there to celebrate their 100th anniversary of statehood. the three sisters’ stew was the most flavorful dish i had all day — absolutely delicious. and the buffalo was tender and tasty, and the onions were really strong and balanced the slightly gamy buffalo well.

that evening, we had tickets for the south african wine event, basically a big tent with about 25 south african wine producers, each of whom had 2 or 3 wines to taste. definitely took advantage of the spit buckets on that one. i like the wines but found them uniformly too alcohol-tasting (their wines averaged 14% alcohol, strong for wine). kirk is the wine guy, so maybe he’ll give details of the ones we liked. the food was buffet style — good but basically an expanded version of what we had sampled from the south africa nosh stand.

lunch saturday, with momfla, was at the festival de sabor in ybor city. big plates of asada-style pork, moro (black beans and white rice), yucca, and platanos (fried plantains). it was a booth run by a local restaurant, and unfortunately i don’t know which one, but the food was amazing.

dinner saturday was a papa john’s pizza in the room. we were exhausted, watching the baseball game, and craving convenience. not a bad pizza as chains go, but totonno’s has nothing to worry about.

lunch sunday, again with momfla, was in ruskin at by the bay cafe — mom and i had been before, but kirk hadn’t been. they specialize in real maryland crab dishes — soup, authentic crab cakes, etc. we had crab dip as an appetizer, along with an order of battered and deep fried portobello mushrooms. crab dip worderful, mushrooms ok. momfla had a small plate with broiled salmon (i think), kirk had crab cakes (all crab and practically no breading — good stuff) and i had blackened grouper (perfectly cooked, moist and flavorful). there were sides of coleslaw and potato salad, the choices we made from the list of sides — both were great in that mayonnaise-y, southern way. you never know where you’ll find quality food. this place is definitely worth the trek.

kirk and i wanted to have a great last-night-in-florida meal, just the two of us, preferably romantic, so we asked the desk clerk at the holiday inn express in bradenton for a recommendation. she chose the beachhouse on bradenton beach, and she could not have made a better choice. it’s old florida — they have a stretch of undeveloped beach, and you sit on it outdoors at a table, watching the sunset and the moonset, listening to an acoustic guitarist playing island-ish but not jimmy buffett music, drinking boat drinks, and eating wonderful food. kirk had never had conch before, so despite his aversion to bouncy food, we split an appetizer of conch fritters. the conch in conch fritters is ground, so he didn’t have to avoid the bounce as it wasn’t there. light, not at all oily, and delicious. next stop for kirk: gator tail. for the entree, we both had surf and turf. the steak was just ok (ribeye, not the most flavorful cut, though it was tender and well-prepared) but the grilled lobster was remarkable. perfectly cooked, unadorned except for the drawn butter. we had dessert (can’t remember what — kirk?) and coffee. service was attentive and friendly — our waitress gave us a customized list of local beds-and breakfast that we’ll probably check out come winter.

obviously, we ate very well on the trip. but extravagantly. i must admit that the excess affected me negatively — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. and on my return, i did a three-day brown rice fast and haven’t had meat since, except for using up some chicken broth in a weekend soup kirk made.

and then i read the omnivore’s dilemma, which kirk had bought and was lying about the apartment.

sometimes the signs are all pointing a certain way. i’m going to be vegetarian again for a while. we’ll see where it leads.

sioux city sux, not gay

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from my yahoo! home page this morning:

City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport’s unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport’s new marketing campaign. The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport’s new slogan, “FLY SUX.”

make lemonade out of lemons, and all. were they given any other options?

Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.

my god, how could you turn down “gay”? think of the glbt tourist dollars that could be coming your way. sioux city: the new p-town. key west of the extreme north.

you can’t make this stuff up if you try.

real advice from fake steve

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

fake steve jobs on why to avoid business school, and school in general, if you want to truly be successful.

from the article:

Business school dude, listen up. Forget shadowing me. You’ll never be like me, because I’m one of a kind. I came out and they broke the mold. But if you want to learn how I operate, do the following. Quit business school. Go work at some shitty electronics company and learn how to source components. Travel to India and seek enlightenment. Grow your hair down to your ass. Take LSD. Smoke pot. Live on a commune. Sell your van and start a company. Put yourself in danger. Create a situation where if you fail you’ll be unable to pay your rent and you’ll be out on the street. Struggle to make payroll. Get screwed by suppliers. Learn to screw them back. Bounce checks. Run out of money. Go hungry. Be scared.

wow. i really wish i had the guts to do that. but i’ve resigned myself to the safety of dronedom.

The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory

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via daring fireball, a wired story about one man’s quest to beat the decades-old cannonball run cross country driving record.

from the article:

For nearly two years, Roy — a pale, shaved-headed, independently wealthy ectomorphic veteran of the Gumball 3000 road rally — has obsessed sleeplessly over every detail and thrown money at every possible electronic connivance. His mission is intended as a triumph of the mind over the base adrenal impulses of common speeders. His route is nothing like the careless line a spring-breaker might plot across a Rand McNally — it’s a painstakingly GPS-mapped and Google Earth-practiced manifest desti-document, waypointed mile by mile for detours, construction, and speed traps.

it’s an amazing piece of writing that hunter s. thompson would have been proud to hang his name on.

those demonic black-clad youth

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from a news article about the school shootings in cleveland:

Coon, who was white, stood out in the predominantly black school for dressing in a goth style, wearing a black trench coat, black boots, a dog collar and chains, she said….Police believe Coon, wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt, black jeans and black nail polish, targeted the two teachers he shot Wednesday.

why is it that all these kids who shoot people in school are always dressed in black?

it isn’t, that’s why. it just sticks out in your mind that they are, because the press always notes the clothing and style of the kid when it doesn’t conform to their perception of societal norms.

what does dressed in black have to do with his motives for committing the crime? absolutely nothing. maybe, however, this has something to do with it:

The Department of Children and Family Services was called to Coon’s home in 2000 because he had burns on his arms and scratches on his forehead, the newspaper said.

maybe someone should have spent more time on that. but why bother, you know. the weirdo dresses in black and listens to marilyn manson. try to ignore him.

it’s easier.

should the legal drinking age be 18?

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

it’s a topic that came up during the last democratic presidential candidates’ debate, which took place at dartmouth college.

of course, the college students’ logic started with “well we can fight in iraq, so why can’t we drink?” not flawless logic, but they do have a point. it might be a better point if they were actually fighting in iraq, instead of buying drinks anyway at an ivy league college with money from the trust fund, but still, not a bad point.

from the article:

“Legal age 21 has not worked. Most people at the age of 21 have already consumed alcohol,” said John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont. McCardell now heads a nonprofit organization started in January called Choose Responsibility.

The group is calling for lowering the national legal drinking age to 18 combined with education about the effects and risks of alcohol.

“The current drinking age has just driven the drinking out of public view,” McCardell told ABC News. “It has meant that instead of drinking in bars or restaurants where there is supervision, it’s happening in dorms and dark corners.”

He argues that young people should be given alcohol education, much like driver’s education, and then rewarded with a drinking license, for which they become eligible at 18.

i agree. people are going to have their vices. might as well have them be publicly acknowledged and supported. prohibition didn’t work in the ’20s, i mean the 1920s, so why would a prohibition of a segment of society that will find ways to drink anyway work any better now than it did then? in fact, because it’s a segment of society rather than all of society, you could argue that it would be expected to be even less successful.

and it is. ever heard of a college student that couldn’t find alcohol if they wanted it? personally i think other countries are far more enlightened on this subject. rather than make the consumption of alcohol a bogeyman, many foreign kids grow up having a drink or two, a glass of wine with dinner, a celebratory belt now and then.

and there’s no mystery surrounding alcohol then. lots of kids, myself included, grew up using alcohol, and i’d bet that the rate of alcohol abuse among that group is lower than the average.

i was 17 when i went to college, and the legal drinking age was 18. i had no problem getting served in bars, without i.d. how? i went to bars for lunch, sat quietly and had a sandwich and a single draft beer at a time when the bar was glad to have the business and could not have cared less who was buying. and then, when i returned at night, they didn’t card me. because they knew me from lunch.

if you want to drink, you’re gonna drink. you’re gonna find a way. might as well bring it out into the open, and stop criminalizing normal human social behaviors. if 18-year-olds are drinking legally, you have a far better opportunity to ensure that they are drinking responsibly, because they will be drinking publicly rather than privately.

aging and gay, and facing prejudice in twilight

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in the ny times this morning, this story about the homophobia-based mistreatment of gays and lesbians in nursing homes and assisted-care facilities.

from the article:

Elderly gay people…living in nursing homes or assisted-living centers or receiving home care, increasingly report that they have been disrespected, shunned or mistreated in ways that range from hurtful to deadly, even leading some to commit suicide.

Some have seen their partners and friends insulted or isolated. Others live in fear of the day when they are dependent on strangers for the most personal care. That dread alone can be damaging, physically and emotionally, say geriatric doctors, psychiatrists and social workers.

i hope that i don’t end up in a nursing home or assisted living. but the odds are that i will.

i hope i’ll have enough money to be in a nice, nonthreatening place. but the odds are that i won’t.

maybe i should look into long term care insurance for kirk and myself.

memories light the corners of my mind

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i had a wonderful evening last night with our mortgage broker from chase, dinika, and her friend luigi. it had been a long day, and i was a bit tired and slightly cranky, but thankfully kirk was sparkling and witty and carried the day for both of us. we met at the black pearl, had a few drinks (me: newcastle brown; kirk: espresso martinis), finally ordered the much-vaunted lobster roll which was indeed quite yummy, and talked about a wide range of subjects: shanatram, the book dinika loaned us and that we both love; movies; new york living; past and present loves; our lifelines (dinika reads palms).

and kirk and i told the story of how we met. short version: me in south florida, kirk in nyc, i see hedwig in nyc, i leave message on hedwig.com message board, kirk the webmaster responds, the rest is history.

except that apparently wasn’t it. kirk has put his old design for the hedwig.com site up on his site, thestagingarea.com, and after the events of last night, i was poking around that site this morning and found this:

Name: Jamie
E-Mail: picaman_AT_csi_DoT_com
City/State: Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Home Page: https://www.queerspace.com
Date: Mon Mar 22 14:50:12 1999
How you found us: Too much Grain and Brita; I don’t remember
Wrote…
HATAI was the last of 7 shows i saw on my just-ended NYC trip and DAMN i’m pissed cuz if i’d seen it first i would have just seen it again and again. it’s the most amazingly well-done show i have EVER seen….i’m a complete hedwig convert

so apparently i didn’t initially find the message board — i just left a brief message in the guestbook. and truly, if kirk hadn’t been so diligent in emailing everyone who posted on the site, and hadn’t taken the time to make it more than a cursory email, we might never have met.

i wish i had that email, but i don’t. it must have been a great email, though, for me to bother to reply with something thoughtful that kirk then in turn responded to.

and so on.

thanks, kirk, for taking that moment. it changed my life, and all for the better.

SNL Digital Short – ‘I Ran’

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

another in a series of andy samberg shorts for saturday night live, in case you missed it. this one’s called “i ran”, and imagines a love story between samberg and mahmoud ahmadinejad of iran, where by ahmadinejad’s account there are no homosexuals.

hilarious stuff, and i love how samberg does this without a trace of irony and with no knowing winks, which of course makes it all the more ironic, and definitely not homophobic.

and a hell of a catchy tune as well.

unsolicited recommendation: buynlarge.com

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

via kottke, the “secret site” for the upcoming new movie “wall-e” from pixar.

i generally hate it when companies do crap like trying to make me “discover” their site to accomplish their guerilla/word-of-mouth marketing campaign objectives, but this site is exceedingly well done and a riot to click through.

it interests me that the movie will have no dialogue. i’ll have to see how they accomplish that, but given the complexities of a worldwide movie release, it’s a strategy that’s brilliant in its simplicity.

t. rex, scruffy the cat, lloyd cole, and the perils of aging

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

sometimes you get little reminders that your brain ain’t what it used to be.

kirk and i had a fantastically fun time last night at joe’s pub in the park. joe is joseph papp, the guy who started doing the shakespeare in central park thing, and his public theater has an adjacent performance space for bands and cabaret and performance artists called joe’s pub, but it’s downtown, and sometimes they produce joe’s-pub-style shows in central park at the delacorte, which is where shakespeare in the park is, and last night was one of those nights.

whew.

that bit of explanation aside, we originally went to last night’s show because justin bond was covering the carpenters’ “close to you” album in concert. you know, kiki and herb justin bond. the combination of justin and karen carpenter being, of course, too irresistible to resist. and he did not disappoint. their registers and resonance sound remarkably similar, and he engagingly covered all those bacharach tunes. also did “superstar” as a bonus, and told a chillingly effective story about being a kid and being forced to play softball. it went badly, and he took solace in listening to the “close to you” album with a young relative, and feeling loved and accepted regardless of his inability to hit a softball. it was a favorite childhood memory, and that relative was in the audience, so it was full circle for justin. a lovely moment.

justin was done, but he was just the opening act. two more sets: a guy doing covers of some guy’s music that i’d never heard of, and a t. rex tribute on the occasion of marc bolan’s sixtieth birthday, which was also the thirtieth anniversary of his death. i never knew that marc bolan died on his thirtieth birthday. wow.

i had no interest in the penultimate set, but i’m a bit of a t. rex fan, and kirk was into it, so we decided to stick around. so glad we did.

the second set turned out to be songs by scott walker. i’d never heard of him, but i’m now a huge fan. he predates the beatles — he’s an american singer who got his start as an teenage expatriate in london in the ’50s. if you can imagine it, his music sounds as if englebert humperdinck did a set composed entirely of leonard cohen songs. fantastic stuff, and the singer, david driver, performed it wonderfully. i’m a david driver fan now, but a bigger fan of scott walker. i love it when something surprising, new and cool gets unexpectedly thrown at you — you gotta be open to that possibility, though.

the evening wrapped up with the t. rex tribute. quick t. rex story from back in the day: when i dj’ed at einstein-a-go-go in jacksonville beach in the mid eighties, there was a huge t. rex poster behind the booth. some kid came up to me and asked, “who’s trex?” pronounced as one word. evidently he missed the period. i told him that “trex” was robert smith’s first band before he formed the cure. so he went and told all his friends, and word spread like wildfire, and suddenly all the black clad youth were requesting “trex” songs to be cool. so i got to play lots of marc bolan, and the younguns were none the wiser, at least for a while.

anyway, the t. rex tribute was so much fun. patti smith did “children of the revolution” — how perfect is that? lots of new york rock royalty performed — here’s a list from the joe’s pub site:

An All-Star Collective of musicians including Clem Burke(Blondie/Drums), Tony Shanahan (Patti Smith/Bass), James Mastro (Ian Hunter-Patti Smith/Gtr), Jane Scarpantoni (Lou Reed/Cello), Dave Amels (Mary Weiss/Keys), Tish & Snooky (Manic Panic/Back Vox), Geoff Blythe (Dexy’s-Black 47/Sax), Rob Youngberg (Honeycomb/Percussion), and Claudia Chopek (Violin) will back a glittering array of special guest singers. Performers who will be singing the praises of Bolan & T.Rex include Sylvain Sylvain and Steve Conte of the NEW YORK DOLLS, Richard Lloyd of TELEVISION, Tony Winner Michael Cerveris, Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Justin Bond (Kiki of Kiki and Herb), Ragga, Robert Gordon, Richard Barone, Lloyd Cole, Willie Nile, Ivan Julian (The Voidoids), Keanan Duffty (Slinky Vagabond), The Bedsit Poets, Screaming Orphans, Justin Tranter (Semi Precious Weapons), and Marc’s son Rolan Bolan and featuring special guest of honor the legendary T. Rex/David Bowie/Morrisey producer Tony Visconti.

ivan julian was especially good — he sang and played the guitar while seated, and it’s been a while since i saw someone command a stage like that. the chair barely contained his energy, and he was a kick-ass guitarist.

and lloyd cole was there, with his son william. william is a great lead guitarist and has perfect emo hair — the kid is going places. i used to play lloyd cole’s music a bit at einstein’s and i sat there racking my brain trying to come up with the song i loved. and it popped into my head this morning. the song i was so desperately trying to think of?

“you dirty rat”

by scruffy the cat, not by lloyd cole. jeebus. i’m getting old.

but “you dirty rat” is an incredible song — one of my favorite einstein’s-era songs. listen to it — catchy as all hell.

anyway, aging brain notwithstanding, it was a fantastically fun evening. gotta do more stuff like that. david driver does lots of loser’s lounge stuff — maybe i should check that out. i’ve always wanted to.

update: hilary, who stage managed the show, has pictures, a detailed set list, band info, and more on her blog. check it out.