Rode 360 southbound today. 28 miles. Hot hot hot. Ugh. I haven’t been riding enough and wasn’t prepared for the heat (nominally 99°F–actually a lot more out on the road). I was reduced to my bailout gears by the last couple hills on 360, grinding along at a miserable 6 mph, under a cloudless sky and atop egg-frying pavement.
It’s Hatch chile season again, so here’s Chiles 101: The Science Behind the Burn. It turns out we really can get addicted to spicy food. Just say yes!
Saw Lovely & Amazing with Gwen yesterday. Good movie. Very good acting. The little non-verbal ways in which the characters conveyed their feelings towards each other impressed both of us, and the interactions were very true to life.
It was also refreshing that, although serious things happened to the characters in the movie, we weren’t hit over the head to convey “hey, this is serious!”–the filmmakers trusted us enough to figure that out for ourselves. Also refreshing is the fact that not everything was wrapped up with a bow by the end.
Catherine Keener may have already typecast herself with bitchy roles, though. While her character in this movie was somewhat bitchy, my initial reaction to her was that she was especially so (I don’t imagine she’s like that in real life, of course). It took a while to see past that in this movie.
According to the New York Times (registration required), some folks are demonstrating their dislike for SUVs by sticking mock tickets on their windshields. This seems to inspire a lot of anger. According to the article, some people write the organization to express their displeasure, or to defend their choice of vehicle.
One man told a sobering story. “You have no idea why I drive the vehicle I have,” his message said. “Maybe, just maybe, it’s because my wife and myself have lost a son in an accident and want my family to be safe. Try losing a child.”
This guy is guilty of two lapses in thinking: 1. For the occupants, SUVs are not safer than cars, they just make you feel that they are (and because of the risk-compensation mechanism, might actually be even more dangerous than they seem); 2. SUVs are much more dangerous to surrounding vehicles. So, hey, who knows–maybe this guy, having lost his child, will cause someone else to lose one.
There was a meetup of Austin bloggers a few days ago, at the Bouldin Creek coffee house. It was fun. A total of six people showed: Jon Lebkowsky, Jenny Nazak, Rebecca Robertson, David Nunez, Rob Fischler, and myself. Completely coincidentally, I also just discovered an Austin bloggers webring.
It’s interesting to peruse some of the other meetups listed on this site (I hadn’t even been aware of this system until I heard about the blog meetup). A lot of lonely groups out there, with only one person. Perhaps the Bruce Springsteen group could get together with the Prince group. And to compare the memberships of groups dedicated to various websites I like. Apparently Metafilter (10 members) is more popular than Plastic (only 4) or Kuro5hin (6). Perhaps because Metafilter is a faster read.
From time to time I’ll see a cryptic string of numbers and letters in the signature line of someone’s e-mail. This, I have learned, is a “geek code,” denoting in highly compressed fashion the degrees and dimensions of one’s geekiness. Well, I just ran across the equivalent for bloggers. Apparently I’m a B4 d+ t+ k s- u- f i o+ x e+ l c
Apparently, Hollywood may be giving up on the whole region-code scheme for DVDs, which prevented a person from (perfectly legally) buying a DVD in, say, the USA and then playing it in, say, Japan. Or vice-versa. This system is so obviously anti-consumer that some countries have made region-code locking illegal. Of course, I’ve got one of the first DVD players that allowed the user to hack the region code, but I’m still pleased. Score one for the rest of us.
This is one of the best bits of vitriol I’ve read in a while:
Go get your ten-billionth burger, America. Fatten your already fat asses with bacteria-and-hormone-ridden meat and do nothing as you sit stupefied before your mind-numbing television sets awaiting the next episode of sad families being humiliated on “Cops.”
Of course, this was written by a Canadian, and as we all know, Canada is just a suburb of the USA.
via Plastic
Another Tuesday, another firenight.
I had been feeling that my usual wicks were a bit too light, so I made a set of monster wicks, and used them last night. I haven’t had that much of a thrill firedancing since the very first time I lit up–the intense sensations of noise and heat, the excitement and surprise and fear. These monster wicks are a little too heavy for me to be comfortable with (so far), and I have a lot of almost-blisters from the force, but that was fun.