Friday  03 Jan 2025           1 comment

I had an Acura NSX from 2003-2024 (sold as the Honda NSX outside of North America). The NSX was a significant piece of automobile history with several features never used in a production car before: aluminum body/suspension and titanium connecting rods, to name two. I put 97,000 miles on it and sold it for more than I'd paid in 2003.

In 2005, a guy working at Honda posted to an Internet forum that he had a few prototype NSX connecting rods on hand and would send one to any NSX owner who contacted him. He sent me one and it hung on the wall in my living room for 19 years.

Wood paneling fades from daylight coming in through windows. There's a faint shadow of a connecting rod on the wall under the peg it used to hang from. The photo underneath is from Colorado in the 1980s and is a smaller print of the one that I gave to the guy with the spiky hair years later when, by a twist of fate I wrote about a while back, he was working across the street from me in San Francisco. 🐎
Thursday  02 Jan 2025           comment?

I had some urgent paperwork to send to the east coast late last month. I went to a FedEx office and asked for their cheapest overnight service; they wanted $68.30.

I felt so old. I remember when FedEx would send an envelope overnight for about $12.

I chose the two‑day service this time, which was $9.75. It got there the next day anyway. This is consistent with my experience over the years: you pay for FedEx's two‑day service around Christmas and it goes overnight. I imagine that during periods of high volume, it's to FedEx's advantage to move stuff out of their system as soon as they can. But if they did that all year 'round, people would get wise to it and stop paying for next‑day service.

Happy new year, everyone.
Saturday  28 Dec 2024           1 comment

spurs
Much like a pic from four years ago.
Friday  27 Dec 2024           comment?

It was a nice sunny day today. Two friends and I were out climbing.

One friend's seven-year-old son Diego was in attendance. His imagination was going wild the whole time. He likened different rock formations—or, as he called them, rock structures—to foods. He asked me to taste one rock and say what food it reminded me of, where taste implicitly meant pretend to taste.

Nothing immediately came to mind. After a moment I figured I'd name something that the color of the rock vaguely reminded me of. "Tater tots," I said.

Being with Diego this afternoon made me realize how dull we adults are by comparison. Without a youngster in the mix, we conduct ourselves in a routine manner and talk about matter‑of‑fact stuff.

My having resorted to naming a food that the rock resembled visually exemplifies my poverty of imagination as an adult. The seven‑year‑old me had more immediate access to seemingly random thoughts.

Today featured many simple pleasures. Just hearing Diego call something ginormous made me happy.
Tuesday  24 Dec 2024           comment?

Desert rain is like this sometimes. today, near Mojave, California
Thursday  19 Dec 2024           comment?

click for the video YouTube recommended Lucas Imbiriba's guitar playing to me yesterday. In this still, he is fretting an A♭ on the low E string and an E eight frets higher on the high E string. I grabbed a guitar to see if I could even reach that far and it felt like I was going to sprain my thumb.

This A♭ is, coĂŻncidentally, the lowest note on my marimba. I can reach far enough to play it and the E he's playing but my peripheral vision isn't good enough to see both bars clearly.

Happy nineteenth, everyone.
Wednesday  18 Dec 2024           1 comment

My friends are uniformly appalled that the USA has again elected a certain man whose name I hate to spell out on these pages. Implicit in that statement is that I no longer have friends who vote Republican. I haven't disowned anyone—it's just how things have played out. Also, I'm not close to any living relatives—neither geographically nor personally—and thus didn't have an awkward experience at Thanksgiving as a lot of families experienced in this polarized time.

It wouldn't be remarkable to have no Republican friends in, say, San Francisco but I live in a rural red county. Republicans are among my acquaintances here but we aren't friends.

More so than city life, rural life sees people making friends with people unlike themselves. I made friends with conservatives when I moved here but almost all of them are now deceased. I don't know where they would've stood in today's politics; I don't consider the current GOP conservative.

None of my rock climbing buddies votes Republican and I don't have a good explanation for why that is. It's not like climbing is an inherently blue sport. There was one maga climber in town but he moved to Utah.

Many of us never anticipated seeing politics like this in the USA in our lifetimes. One friend, who's around my age, is still taken aback eight years after the election of 2016. Evidently you're never too old to lose your innocence.

Last year, Sroyon wrote
Among the many songs that I like, there is a niche category where the singer (or band) delivers a line/couplet in a way which infuses it with a sense of heightened emotion or significance.
and invited readers to cite other examples. In addition to one I mentioned at the time (a Frank Zappa lyric), I like a particular expressively-sung couplet in a song about loss of innocence after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The song is Europa by Die Nerven. The couplet, sung twice starting at around 30 seconds into a live performance, is
und ich dachte irgendwie
in Europa stirbt man nie
(roughly: and somehow I thought no one ever dies in Europe)
Some people find German a harsh language for lyrics but I like the forceful quality that the fricative in dachte gives these lines.
Friday  06 Dec 2024           comment?

Over 100 former Republican national security officials signed a statement in August saying DJT was unfit to serve another term. Among them was Olivia Troye, former Special Advisor to Mike Pence.

DJT is unfit to be President because (among many other things) he makes atrocious choices for key government positions, e.g. Kash Patel for FBI Director.

Patel didn't like some comments that Ms. Troye made about him on MSNBC earlier this week. Two days ago, Mr. Patel's lawyer sent a letter to Ms. Troye's lawyer demanding a retraction. A Bluesky post has the full response from Ms. Troye's lawyer but the key part is below. now go away or I shall taunt you a second time
Tuesday  03 Dec 2024           comment?

Most rock and roll guitarists stand while performing. Robert Fripp of King Crimson and Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter of Steely Dan are exceptions. Both play while seated (and both are fine guitarists).

When Fripp said he wanted to sit on a stool, his band mate Greg Lake said no, you'll look like a mushroom on stage. Fripp sat anyway. From his journal for May 14, 1969:
A personal turning point following a discussion on presentation: I sit down after 8 gigs standing. Hendrix, dressed in white with his right arm in a sling approached me afterwards and said, "Shake my left hand, man, it's nearer to my heart."
Rick Beato posted a long interview with Jeff Baxter yesterday. Jeff explained how he got started by working in music stores in Mexico City and in New York, where all kinds of musicians would come in the stores. He said (starting at 3:41, edited for brevity),
So one day AndrĂ©s Segovia comes in because he's playing at Carnegie Hall and one of the tuning machines on his Ramirez had broken. We didn't have anything in stock so I ran across the street to Charles Ponte who was the cello and violin guy thinking, you know, maybe, maybe. He had one set so I bought those, took them back, took the Ramirez back in the room, repaired it, strung it up, and meanwhile it was Frank Zappa, Mike Bloomfield, I'm trying to think of the other guitar player it might have been, and they're all rocking away, all standing up and they're all having a great time and Mr. Segovia is just sitting there on the couch in the front room, very quiet.

So I brought the guitar out, I said hold on guys, hold on a second, so I hand him the instrument. Sitting there, he tunes it up, he plays the first 64 bars from the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo.

And it sounds stupid, but it's like all the photons left the room except for AndrĂ©s Segovia. I mean this man, whatever was going on with this guy, he had an aura about him. The place got completely quiet.

Afterwards he said thank you very much, paid Dan, and then turned to me, in Spanish he said, "Would you please tell them that you don't hang it around your neck like a canoe paddle, you hold it next to your body because it's a part of you, it's right next to your heart." And I thought, yeah, I'm sitting down, works for me.
this

FAQ
search
contact
rss/xml
atom/xml
Mastodon
spam notice
terms of use
warrant canary


sundries

xkcd
Sroyon
pylduck
Woolly Days
TYWKIWDBI
Futility Closet
Language Log
Yastreblyansky
Bruce Schneier
Dinosaur Comics


archive

2003
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2004
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2005
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2006
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2007
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2008
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2009
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2010
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2011
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2012
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2013
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2014
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2015
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2016
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2017
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2018
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2019
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2020
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2021
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2022
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2023
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2024
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2025
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec