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Stolen!

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I locked up my road bike in Union Square for the dinner hour. I came back sometime later, and my baby was quite thoroughly vanished.

Needless to say I’m distraught, but I’m even more annoyed. I’ve never been totally comfortable in San Francisco, but now my entire vacation will be colored by insecurity as well as crippling confinement. I had planned to cross the Golden Gate the following morning, and climb deep into the mountain heart of Marin County.

Now I’m spending most of my time in Japantown, and that’s been awesome in it’s own way. However, I’m nagged by the notion that I’m not here by choice. For someone who actually pedals more than she walks, being suddenly deprived of the daily freedom of the road feels miserable. It’s disruptive and violating to my very self-concept, and stealing someone’s bike is just beneath contempt.

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Don’t Mess with Musicians!

Thursday, May 8, 2008

This post is about musicians and the ex lovers they write about.

Dating an artist is such an interesting experience, I think everyone should try it once. Artists are often unusual in appearance and outlook, and therefore offer a break from what may otherwise be a drab and unremarkable existence.

I chose my wording carefully there, but I’ll emphasize my meaning: I said it will be interesting. I didn’t say it would necessarily be good.

In my opinion, a self-described artist is typically a delicate creature, with a nervous disposition and a fragile ego. Intimacy often compounds upon these traits, and makes for plenty of the kind of high drama that is too much for mere mortals.

I would love to see the statistical data about the average duration of romantic entanglements among artists. I don’t suppose it’s very long, given the sheer volume of songs about break-ups.

I’m not a credible authority on artist psychology, but I’ve observed in the mainstream music world that there is a right way and a wrong way to date a musician.

The wrong way is to date Alanis Morisette.

I got a feeling that Alanis has done some damage to herself in the dating scene. Who wants to get involved with someone who brutally slammed her ex with a hit song on a Grammy-winning album? To be fair to Alanis, though, she was 18 when she wrote “You Oughta Know”:

Cause the joke that you laid in the bed that was me
and I’m not gonna fade as soon as you close your eyes, no
And every time you speak her name
Does she know how you told me you’d hold me
Until you died, till you died
But you’re still alive

And it also seemed like the subject, who also had the grave misfortune of being spelled out in the press, really deserved what he got.

Along this thread, I think it would not be prudent to be a musician’s first lover. Like normal people, they will likely take inevitable break-up harder.

On the other hand, when I hear “Foolish Games” by Jewel, I think that is possible to be a musician’s first love, and actually get positive press when you break her heart.

You took your coat off
and stood in the rain.
You were always crazy like that.

Huh. He sounds kind of spontaneous and fun. There’s more:

You were always brilliant in the morning.
Smoking your cigarrettes and talking over coffee.
Your philosphies on art, Baroque moved you, you loved Mozart.

An intellectual (and a possible hint and sexual prowness)? I’m actually getting interested…

You teach me all these things
Things that were daring, things that were clean
Things that knew what an honest dollar did mean.

You get the idea. Can you believe this? It sounds like Jewel is writing a personal ad that, as it turned out, conveniently rated high on the charts for a very long time..

And I hear her account of heartache and think to my self: Wow, honey. That, um, really sucks, but I have every right to discover him on my own.

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Ico: Part 2

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

I recently wrote about my self-conscious impressions of Ico, an novel puzzle adventure game for the Playstation 2. It was an uneasy beginning. The controls felt clumsy and delayed. The camera never seemed to be in the right place. The first scripted monster KO’d me twice. I haven’t chucked a controller since I was eleven, and at this point twenty minutes in, I felt terribly disappointed in what was professed to me by respected sources to be a game I would love.

Well, I psyched myself up and picked up the controller again last night. Whatever hang-ups I had before, to my surprise and lasting delight, I got over it.

I found the controls would be annoyingly clumsy at first, but I soon found in Ico’s world that combat is really trivial. The objective of battle, in fact, has a function entirely separate from the standard preservation of life:

Jorda is an otherworldly girl Ico encounters as he wanders the castle grounds, whom he takes in his charge and is determined to protect. They mutually depend on their combined talents to overcome obstacles. Demons periodically attempt to steal her away. They are not interested in the horned boy, and though they knock him around a bit, he is in no danger of actually being killed. But he must drive them away from Jorda, or he will be irretrievably separated from her.

I figure out eventually that, unlike Out of This World, dying is relatively hard to do. This simple fact kicked down my anxiety factor to almost zero, and I was able to relax and appreciate how gorgeously designed the game is.

Good design leaves little to take away. The castle environment is sparse and spacious, appropriately gloomy and foreboding. There is little by way of organic matter here, but what is presented benefits from the contrast with absolute vibrance. There is little that moves, and fewer things that are actually alive. It’s a sterile, alien world in which I never saw nor expected rats, spiders, zombies, or any of the standard dungeon fare. After two hours of navigating stone and iron, I ventured out into a grassy clearing and actually wondered at a lovingly animated pigeon – such was the profound loneliness and trepidation the castle inspired in me, that I felt in that moment genuinely comforted.

Everything matters. Nothing is wasted. The puzzle design makes use of all three dimensions of the immense playspace. Although solving the puzzles involves it’s fair share of crate-pushing and switch-pulling, there a coherent sense to the layout the rarely feels contrived.

Selective use of sound and music comes across wonderfully. The music that comes with the shadow demons is the auditory form of the hair standing on my neck. It has a natural place in the total castle embience, and it ebbs and flows seamlessly with the wind and the echoes.

I come around to the characters, who’s movements are genuine and personal. Ico scampers flat-footed and occasionally falls on his butt. When the boy tugs Jorda by the wrist at full tilt, she slips and falters as she struggles to keep up. To my surprise, I began to deliberately avoid running with her, to treat Jorda with tenderness and consideration. Such a marvelous effect.

We are moving through one castle that is so well designed that you can emerge from one balcony and look out upon where you had been hours before, seeing the path you had taken and the paths you had made for Jorda who’s physical weakness necessitates forging a separate route. And as I go on, I get the sense that the castle as a whole is one giant Chinese puzzle box. Each move in it’s proper sequence, I solve the puzzle from the inside.

And when you open the box, you are rewarded with one of the great moments in gaming. The 50 ft gates that have been visible throughout the game swing wide and a stone bridge rolls out to span a chasm longer than a football field. You barely see across the sea fog the familiar Idol Gates, a barrier which only Jorda can overcome. You grab her by the hand and eagerly charge ahead, but the the girl is feeling extremely weak. So you must walk her slowly over the bridge.

I cannot adequately describe the intensity of this moment. There is no triumphant soundtrack, just the wind and the footfall of two exhausted children. You have to play it through, and as seldom as the characters speak you come to feel real affection for them.

This game isn’t so much an entertaining diversion but a true work of art. It’s unusual, and it’s games like Ico and Katamari Damacy that ignore the trends and the fashions. They disregard all the contrivances intended to sell copies and just playfully, sometimes artfully explore what gaming experiences are possible.

Ico asks very little of the player. It doesn’t demand catlike reflexes or great puzzle-solving ability. It doesn’t even ask for much of your time. All you have to do is pick up the controller, and it rewards you most generously. At the average game run of six hours, it is literally like a strange and beautiful dream.

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Ico

Monday, April 28, 2008
It’s hard to find anyone who won’t rave deliriously about this game, so I don’t understand why I dislike it so much.

First, a little introduction to the game: A young boy is born with horns, and even though he is cursed, he is allowed to be nursed by his mother and live in the village until he is about ten years old.

At present time, he has come of age to be escorted to a spacious ruin and, behind several idol gates opened by a magical sword, sealed inside a tomb to suffer a lingering death for the good of the village.

Shortly after the men leave, a seismic upset knocks Ico’s sarcophagus alone off the stone shelf where dozens more (containing perhaps the remains of other horned children) quietly repose.

The tomb breaks in the fall and Ico has another chance at life. More cinematic takes us along as Ico explores the first three rooms (because we couldn’t possibly do that by ourselves) and ultimately turns over control of the character as he stands, exactly where he started, in the first room next to his would-be tomb *facepalm*.

I could understand the purpose of that exploratory part of the cinematic if it provided a few minutes of direction in an admittedly capacious castle, so that I could concentrate on figuring out the controls. This is not so, since I was required to do some entry-level puzzle solving that were not mentioned in the video.

I wasn’t really in the mood for an obstacle course/switch hunt at this point, but I went through the motions. I learned Ico’s currently single-button repertoire was intuitive and multi-functional as I climbed boxes, grappled ledges, climbed ropes, and closed gaps with boyish leaps.

I’m making headway, even growing accustomed to the awkward camera, and then I get KO’d twice by the first scripted enemy in the game. This is the last game to invoke controller-chucking since, since…

Then a dark memory from my distant past creeps to the forefront. I was about eleven at the time, and I remember a clumsy user interface against a grainy background. I had such trouble controlling the character that I couldn’t even manage to squash leeches without snuffing it.

This game reminds me of Out of This World. Another supposedly ground-breaking game with unanimous rave reviews all over the gaming world. I desperately wanted to enjoy this game, but alas I couldn’t manage the shortcomings that are apparently marginal to everyone but me.

Ico too, I desperately want to enjoy, but Ico’s game design is like a torture suit perfectly tailored against my gaming peeves.

The camera was the first big turd in my drink. The control options fail to include reverse (pilot style) heading, so I spend time fighting instinct as the camera swings around at the opposite vector of what I meant.

I also fail to understand the wisdom of fixing the camera’s 130 degrees of lateral movement to the rear of the character, especially when Ico typically navigates a very spacious, jump oriented environments!

And the final humiliation. The first enemy wasn’t even a random slug bogey, but a scripted part of the tutorial. You shouldn’t be allowed to die in the tutorial!

In twenty minutes, I had streaked the full gamut from excited hopefulness to controller-chucking frustration. In short, I am heartbroken. I’ll go crying now back to the warm, forgiving embrace of Katamari.

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Growing Up

Sunday, April 27, 2008

I’m at an age when most people have stopped actively looking forward to the next year, and when most people have not yet begun to lament the relentless march of time. The mid-twenties have it’s own quiet little crisis, as friends start stressing about reaching 30.

The truth is I enjoy getting older.

Every waking moment, my worldview changes just a little because I am learning. Even the most constant things in my life are continually viewed against an ever-varying background of understanding. Effectively, I rarely regard the same thing or person twice with exactly the same perspective. Even concerning things I dislike at present, I find in everything the potential for endless fascination.

I have a realistic idea of what boredom really is. I don’t believe it’s fair to say that you’ve gotten tired of something. The truth is you should really just go away until you’ve grown up some more.

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Ginger Ale a la Kiki

Saturday, April 26, 2008

I got really excited about ginger beer after watching Dr. Kiki make some in one of her podcasts.

I took some liberty with the recipe, adding a lot more ginger, more yeast, and less sugar. The approximate quantities are as follows:

  • 3 heaping TBS grated ginger
  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 1 packet active dry yeast
  • 1 bottle lemon juice (the kind in the lemon-shaped bottle)

It’s really crazy simple, isn’t it? I hadn’t thought about it until I wrote it down.

Anyway, I bloomed the yeasties in a cup of warm sweet water. It’s fun to watch the yeast make a frothy head. Also, it’s a good habit to make sure the yeast is alive and frisky before you commit any other ingredients.

So the ginger, sugar, and lemon juice all goes into a 2-liter bottle. Then comes the yeast water, chasing it with enough warm water to fill, leaving a little space at the top. Shake, shake, shake.

The contents of the bottle is going to ferment for about two days. The yeast will chow on the sugars and belch CO2 gas in prodigious quantity, as well as trace amounts of flavonoids.

You’ll want to put the bottle in the bathtub or the shower stall, and check on it at least twice a day to let some gas out. Don’t neglect this, or you might end up with a big mess! Also, you want to relieve just enough pressure to keep the bottle from exploding. If you let the pressure equalize, you’ll lose all the gas in solution, resulting in somewhat flatter soda.

In about two days, or until you can’t stand babysitting anymore, chill the bottle. You should open the bottle ice cold and with the same care as you would with a champagne. There is a lot of gas in solution, and you could have an explosive uncorking.

I’ll add more to this post when I have more experience with it, but you shouldn’t have a big splash if you open the bottle cold and don’t agitate overmuch.

I’ve found the grated ginger is perfectly good to eat, and I don’t mind it floating around in my drink. Alternatively, I see culinary possibilities with the fermented ginger root. Try to finish off the bottle by the next day, as the bubbly doesn’t last. I doubt you’ll have any problem with that, however.

Cheers!

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Time To Carpet-Bomb My Kidneys, Yay!

Friday, April 25, 2008

I’ve been crawling around my apartment like a sick cat since Wednesday. I’ve never had a UTI before, but there is no mistaking it when you get one.

It started Tuesday, and I decided to hold off on my ride until the pain resolved. The next day, the infection spread to my kidneys and I was not having fun anymore.

Virulent little fuckers.

Now I get to squat in a bunker while I carpet-bomb my kidneys with antibiotics over the weekend. I’ve been doing a little reading, and apparently the drug I have is a pretty big gun. If I had E. coli, Gonorrhea, and Anthrax all at the same time, this drug would wipe them all out. Thanks, Jason.

I’ll spare you any further details, and I won’t lecture you about all that “ounce of prevention” stuff. You know that. My whole training week is in the garbage, and I could have used the medicine money for a new set of tires.

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Curry: Courgettes and Japanese Eggplant

Thursday, April 24, 2008

I’m a curry fiend. I love the flexibility of the composition and it’s warm, forgiving nature. It’s hard to make curry taste bad. It’s also one of those foods that gets even better the second or third day.

There is at least one dish in every culture that makes use of the odds and ends of the pantry, taking advantage of stewing and brazing methods to mingle the flavors of the ingredients while retaining their textural contrast.

Let’s meet the cast for my curry today!

  • One Japanese Eggplant
  • 3 Courgettes: Called Zucchini in the US, but Courgette is a little easier to spell.
  • Garlic: Lots of it.
  • Shallots: Optional but tasty
  • Olive Oil: A flavorful cooking lubricant. Don’t sauté with Extra Virgin. It doesn’t take heat very well, and it’s expensive! Use a lesser grade and save the good stuff for dips and salad dressing.
  • Curry Paste: Indian Specialty item. Concentrated for sauces.
  • Yoghurt: Added to pot just before serving. It contributes a creamy mouthfeel to the sauce, adds flavor, and reduces the overall spiciness.

I feel I should warn you that what follows is not a recipe for curry. In fact, I can’t accurately reproduce the dish in neither process nor product. Cooking isn’t a science experiment to me; It is a highly creative process.

Generally, I cook by feel alone. I add ingredients to taste, and cook until it’s done. I only abandon that method when I’m baking or brewing, because the portion control is truly important.

So this is what goes on in my head when I make curry:

I had never cooked eggplant and courgettes in a curry before. I’d eaten them in restaurants, and had good idea what I wanted my dish to taste like. I wanted the vegetable to be tender, yet firm enough to retain the shape they were cut into. I was really looking to get an earthy flavor from these bright-tasting veggies, so I didn’t go for the sauté right away.

First, I quartered the courgettes and tossed them in oil. I also stuffed the whole eggplant with minced garlic. Then I baked them at 425 F. I was really careful to not fully bake the veggies, because I planned to boil them afterward. I wanted them to be firm enough to retain their shape when I turn them in the pot a few times.

Ten minutes in the oven, and the eggplant is the brownish color of a tomato takes between green and red. The courgettes are bubbling and fragrant.

When the veggies are cool enough to handle, I cut everything into bite-sized pieces. I heated some oil in a large pot.

The garlic in the eggplant isn’t enough for my taste, so I peeled and sliced a whole head of garlic as well as a couple shallots. I sweated these in the pot before I added the veggies. Sweating is a cooking method similar to sauté, but the temperature is greatly reduced. The idea is to not so much cook the food, but to tease out some of the water and flavorful oils so that they can play with other ingredients and reduce the need for additional lubricant.

As I said before, the veggies had already enough cooking, so I immediately chased a small amount dilute curry paste. I believe there should be just enough total liquid to see a line rise up among the stewing chunks. If there’s more, the food will be overdone before the excess water cooks out.

Because I baked some of the natural water out of the veggies, the curry sauce rushes in and permeates the flesh with spicy flavor. Yum! I’ve got a fireproof stomach, but I like to sense the natural taste of the vegetables, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken such care to avoid overcooking them.

Therefore, I cool the fires with yoghurt. The fat the yoghurt coat the tongue, so the curry doesn’t taste quite as hot. The delicious curry is ready to serve as soon as the yoghurt is stirred in. I like to top it over some nice saffron rice, when I can afford it.

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Riding Like Asshole Will Eventually Get You Killed

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

About two years ago, of all possible things, I was nearly killled by an ambulance truck.

It was certainly stupid of me to ride my bicycle on the wrong side of the road, and it’s a mistake I thereafter forever kicked.

Anyway, I’m cruising south on” M” Street from school, against traffic, and I see an ambulance truck ahead waiting to pull out of a parking lot and join traffic. He saw his opening before I counted on it, and he slowly creeps out –just as I’m passing in front of his nose!

It was bad. It was too late to stop short and let the truck cut me off. If I had swerved away, chances were good I’d get pummeled by oncoming traffic. So I did the worst thing, the only thing –I stopped right in front of the lurching truck and started yelling at the driver.

The driver didn’t hear me, and nothing more came to mind until I heard my back wheel getting tacoed against the truck’s fender. The bike stared to lean on its own, and I barely slipped my inside leg over the top of the warping frame. I fell backward into the road. The tires of a passing car swerved away from my bare head, which I narrowly avoided smacking against the pavement.

As my bike slowly disappeared under the advancing truck, rolled onto my hands and knees and scrambled for the curb. I like to imagine that manuever was a fantastically nimble tribute to Indiana Jone’s sliding roll under the stone gate, but the oversized duffle bag slung about me at the time probably ensured that my homage wasn’t at all graceful.

I crawled up the far embankment like a ragged castaway to shore. Meanwhile, I could hear my the screech of twisted metal and the tuneful popping of spokes, as the truck took the frame completely under itself and proceeded to drag it another seven or ten yards down the street.

The truck ground to a halt and a crew of four men poured out. As I chuck my clumsy bag in the direction of the truck, a middle-aged man in a blue uniform follows the trajectory with his eyes, until it bounced next to my mangled cruiser, dangling visibly from the back end of his vehicle:

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”

Well, I have to admit that in a funny way, I was lucky. The medics are already there, washing my scrapped skin. Besides that, I wasn’t hurt at all.

Four hours and a tetanus shot later, I come home and the cops had been kind enough to bring the bike home. If bikes did yoga, it looked like it was stuck in a really advanced position. I used to keep the wreck sitting out next to the house, where I had to see it every time I rolled my new bike out to the street, until there can a time I was certain that I had absorbed the lesson.

Well, telling this story has been somewhat cathartic. Still, my eyes probably portray something like terror every time I see anyone riding the wrong way on the sidewalk. You didn’t have to read the whole story to get the moral, but I think explaining my feelings about this riding habit is necessary to make a case to those who irrationally cling to it’s practice. It’s something we were taught to do as kids, and frankly I don’t see how it makes even little kids safer.

I wish there were more parks around, so kids too small to use normal traffic conventions could ride safely.

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Los Banos to Atwater

Friday, June 1, 2007

Los Banos to Atwater>

 
This day started early. I got up at the ungodly hour of 6 am to attend my local Chamber of Commerce. A few hours later, hopped up on good coffee and bad PowerPoint, I loaded my bike into my LeSabre (MSRIP) and drove up and over El Pacheco.

The idea was to leave my car with family in Los Banos, and gloriously ride 40 miles to Atwater, where I would stay with friends and glut on pizza and beer for a couple days.

Well, the riding gloriously part seemed good idea at the time. The reality was that the first 23 miles was a marshy wasteland with no potable water, and the last 20 miles was a goathead-infested wasteland that destroyed both spare tubes. The icing on the cake was a persistent headwind that reduced my progress to a jogging pace.

Just north of the Los Banos is San Luis Wildlife Preserve, the aforementioned “marshy wasteland. However, I’ll take a moment here to contradict myself, for the scenery is really very pretty:

Having grown up in the area, passing through over twenty miles of protected range for waterfowl and endangered Tule Elk was the joy of my daily commute to school. The scenery is especially (and I’ll soon explain how it is only) enjoyable from a climate-controlled and rapidly moving automobile.

I had found it so far to be the case, that beautiful scenery is even more so when taken from the immersive view from a bicycle seat. But I learned at considerable cost that it takes much more thought than to just swing a leg over the saddle of your six speed and try any country road with nothing but a liter of water and the weatherman’s promise there will be no rain:

I should have brought a lot more water, for a start. It turned out I probably needed three liters just to get out of the marshes, because there wasn’t a solitary source of safe water over the first half of the trip.

There was a great many things that came to mind that would have made the trip easier, faster, more comfortable, but none so essential to success as having enough water.

It was the first time I realized there were serious limitation to my bike, as it was very heavy at about 30 lbs and had six small cogs in the rear cassette to a single moderate crankgear. For those of you unfamiliar with gear mechanics, this makes for beautiful urban riding.

Unfortunately, my trusty comfort bike was not made for the long haul. All the extra weight counts when you’re pushing against a stiff headwind. The flat pedals meant I could only push the crank down and not also pull it up, so my pedal stroke was very inefficient. I actually lost all my momentum to the wind. It was like starting from a dead stop continuously, mile after mile. I walked a lot through the marsh, just because it was more energy efficient to walk my own body along and roll the loaded bike than it was to mount and pedal the sum of the burden against the wind.

I don’t remember how long it took to make it to the fruit stand at Stevenson. I rested for a long time and made damn sure I wouldn’t run low on water again. I also bought a pineapple by way of a gift to friends I was meeting. I had to jam it into the rear pack, it’s spiky green fronds jutting out the back. I laughed deliriously at myself.

When I got going again, there was relief from the wind when I turned east, but I ran into a new problem:

Goatheads, tribulus terretris, puncture vine. They infest the side of the roads in farm country, and in high summer they scatter the nastiest caltrops Mother Nature ever devised in huge quantity. They tend to land in the road point-side up and the thickest tires fall on them like little swords. I repaired so many holes that I exhausted my supply of patches and my pump broke down, and then I ran out of CO2 cartridges.

It was just as I crossed the Atwater city limit that I my last tube gave out. I had three options at that point: Either buy a tube in town, walk, or call in a rendez-vous. I hated to throw in the water bottle, after coming this far at such cost, to call in a ride with only four miles to go. I wasn’t too tired to walk, but the sunscreen stung my eyes and I was very much in need of a hug.

I don’t mean to make this entire blog read like a Series of Unfortunate Events. The trip was, in fact, an overall success, despite all the set backs. I got to see much pretty country, albeit for much longer than I meant to. I had some problems, but remained almost entirely self-reliant and gleaned a lot of insight about touring.

Needless to say there was much beer that night, and pizza topped with Stevenson pineapple.

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