Let me know if you find anything buggy on the site – I only just now noticed that Comments were turned off on the previous post. And we’ve had some server outages lately as well, so sorry about that.
In other news – I saw Big Star!
I’ve been making mix CDs of my favorite songs from 2009 for some people lately, and I’ve come to realize that nearly all of the songs are available on YouTube in some shape or form. I should note that while most of these are songs that debuted in 2009, some of them are simply songs I discovered for myself in 2009. So here is my personal chart of Top 15 tunes from 2009:
1. All I Know is Tonight – Jaga Jazzist
2. This Is for the Better Days – (Band of) Bees
4. Cannibal Resource – Dirty Projectors
5. Shake Me Like a Monkey – Dave Matthews Band
6. Love Letter to Japan – The Bird and the Bee
8. Carry Me Ohio – Sun Kil Moon
9. Ooh You Hurt Me So – Clare and the Reasons
10. Down the Drain – Chickenfoot
11. The St. Valentines Day Massacre – Starling Electric
14. A Crimson Grail – Rhys Chatham (featuring me and 199 other guitarists at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival)
15. What to Do – OK Go (on handbells)
And as a bonus, an awesome video of Robert Plant jamming with friends on “Calling to You” featuring my friend Tom on keys.
I know I’m not a New Yorker yet because I still notice things that no one else seems to.
1.) Something that would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Here are a few brief videos of things I’ve done and seen in the last few weeks.
All year I’ve been saying that by October I’d have some clearer idea about whether or not I would stay in New York. Here we are halfway through October and I’m still at an impasse. For me, Little Rock and New York are essentially the same in terms of net appeal. There are things each has that the other does not. I guess my only option is to give it more time and see if something comes up to pull me strongly in one direction or the other.
That said, I had a great time being back in Arkansas. I caught up with a few friends, had a small family reunion at my uncle’s birthday gathering, and attended a wedding (Jessie and Tiffany’s pictures are better than mine).
One side effect of being stuck on where I belong is that I haven’t been motivated to write or play guitar much. Limbo does not lend itself to creativity. Most days when I get home from work I just watch a DVD and goof off on the web[1]. I haven’t even gotten much reading done.
As of tomorrow I will have been working at American Express for one year. I don’t want to procrastinate on a decision, because time is moving ever faster these days. One thing I can say is that I should stick with the job until I’ve paid off the heating/cooling unit that Trey had installed earlier this year. I’ve got a few more thousand to go on my Amex card to do that. Then I’d like to have something saved up for travel if/when I move back, so really, I’m going to put off a decision until early next year.
1.) I actually spent an hour or so last night looking at photos of streetlights, traffic lights and power lines. I find this level of esoterica endlessly fascinating. I think I’m becoming addicted to information.
So my division has moved up to the 43rd floor, and the views are amazing. But my new cubicle is half the size of my old one. Contractors are assigned smaller cubes because the assumption is they work part-time, but I’m a full-time contractor, so we’ve put in a request to move me to a larger space. There’s an empty one right across from me. I’m thinking of moving in and seeing if anybody cares.
I’m also excited to have a new computer whose processing speed doesn’t make we want to drill rusty nails through my eyelids, even if it is a smaller laptop. I can now run Photoshop, Excel, Firefox and Lotus Notes at the same time without generating memory leaks or “virtual memory is too low” messages. I’m glad I saw the slow demise coming; it took almost two months to get the new computer delivered.
After working at American Express for almost a year now, I’ve discovered something about our view to the north. When we look out the window, we see what looks like a large brick deco building with two antennae on top. What we are actually seeing is a brick deco building with a near-identical yet larger brick deco building directly behind it with two antennae.
I discovered this on Saturday when I attended a rooftop gathering in Tribeca. Here is the view of the same building from the back. Note my office in the back on the right, and the lack of antennae. The building we see is 60 Hudson St. The building behind it is 32 Avenue of the Americas.
Looking at google maps, I see that the signtline from our office to both buildings is a completely straight line.
This drove me nuts for quite some time. I could never be sure if I was looking at 60 Hudson or 32 Avenue of the Americas. Turns out, it was both.
But the fun doesn’t stop there! The fun part is the 60 Hudson is the old Western Union building, but has been converted into a carrier hotel, meaning that it primarily houses telecommunications hardware – fiber optic lines, switches, servers, etc. There’s very little office space in there. In a similar fashion, 33 Thomas Street is a massive telephone exchange building. I had often wondered what the story was with this scary, monolithic, windowless building. Who would want to work in there? Well, very few people do. In fact, the top section is mostly empty space for ventilation.
A similar purpose is served by Verizon’s 374 Pearl St. So that’s a total of four buildings in lower Manhattan that serve mainly as technology and telecommunications hubs. 60 Hudson, in fact, has so much diesel fuel in it for the emergency generators that it’s making the now-residential Tribeca neighbors very nervous, post 9/11.
In other news, that gathering I mentioned was a book launch and charity fundraiser for XKCD.com’s new comic strip compilation. I had never seen a picture of cartoonist Randall Munroe, so when I was mingling on the rooftop with a few dozen other lucky geeks, I struck up a conversation with a couple of guys, one named Derek and one named Randall. I asked them what they did for a living and they said, “we do this.” I didn’t get it. Did I mention I’m retarded at social gatherings when I’m by myself? I never thought THE Randall would just be mingling with the crowd, but I guess a lot of folks didn’t know what he looked like, either. So, life lesson: if you’re at a small party for a book release and you don’t know what the author looks like, and you meet someone with the same first name as the author, chances are good you just met the author.
I’ve lived in New York for a year and a half now and still haven’t really taken advantage of the fact that I live near three major airports. I’ve had to play catch-up on finances, so I haven’t really been able to afford much in the way of vacationing. But that finally changed, sort of, and since it’s been more than 5 years since I was last in the UK, I figured that needed addressing. So I booked a flight with little to no planning beyond the purchase of tickets.
In addition to the many important lessons learned on my last voyage, this trip gave me still more opportunity for informative error. The first was booking a flight out of Newark at 8:00 a.m. I had debated taking the subway to Penn to Newark Liberty, but rail travel so early in the day is fraught with unknowns. So I took a car service. This was fortuitous because, while I had dutifully set my phone’s alarm for 4 a.m., I had neglected to remember that my alarm is set only to go off on weekdays. My wake-up call was the car service at 5 a.m. Fortunately for me, in the wisdom that only comes as one drifts off into sleep, I had decided I should take a shower in the evening rather than the morning. I was up and out the door in five minutes.
I could have sworn I posted this back in July, but apparently not…
My cousin David has been quoted in a few prominent media outlets recently, namely, the New York Times and Yahoo Sports. He’s a rabid fan of the LA Galaxy soccer club, and is a regular fixture with the team’s superfans, The Riot Squad, in the southeast corner of the stadium at every game. I always kind of figured David would be famous some day, but I never in a million years thought it would be for dissing the name amongst names, David Beckham.
The David-on-David action began when cousin David and another member of the squad got into a heated exchange with Beckham after last Sunday’s game. The die hard, bleed-Galaxy-blue fans were severely miffed that Beckham has recently been on loan to an Italian team, and that Beckham may be giving up his job with the Galaxy. Foul words were exchanged. Cousin David’s associate on the squad was arrested for jumping onto the field.
You might think this would reflect poorly on my cousin, but in his defense, soccer has a unique tradition of drunken, abusive buffoonery from the crowd. Soccer hooliganism has a rich and colorful history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_hooliganism
In a way, he’s excelling at that particular position. Just as hockey has made fights an essential part of the action, so soccer has made hooliganism an integral part of the game, taking what should by all rights be the most boring spectator sport in the world[1], and making it into something altogether more participatory.
It’s not like he did it at a baseball, basketball or football game. That’s where it would be wholly inappropriate.
1.) And most likely is, short of golf.
Kottke mentioned a hilarious site that lists uncomfortable plot summaries of popular movies. It’s a great example of how perspective works. There are any number of ways to describe something based on personal bias. My favorite example on the site is, naturally, the one for Star Wars:
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
This got me thinking about how even the simplest and most harmless things can be described in ways that are disturbing:
