Category: Life

Gentle reader, you might have noticed that I did not post but once over the weekend. Well, you might have, my regular gentle reader; those of you who have stopped by based on a Google search for missouri lottery murder might not have noticed. However, my wife and I took a trip to San Francisco to celebrate our anniversary. I know, I know, good bloggers always warn you that when they’re going on a brief hiatus, but I do not, because I want my fellow St. Louis bloggers and blog readers to wonder if I am out of town or am just suffering from writer’s block and spending the day cleaning my guns and filing my rottweiler’s teeth to razor-sharp points.

Such as it is, I offer this humble review of the city of San Francisco.

San Francisco, dear friends, is a city at the northern tip of the southern penninsula in the pair of penninsulas that almost pinch the San Francisco Bay off from the Pacific Ocean. It’s a small, compact city, with about seven square miles of streets amongst which Karl Malden, Michael Douglas, and Richard Hatch earnestly ran, Bullitt sped, and Harry Calahan fired his guns. It’s got plenty of pop-culture familiarity, from the Rice-a-Roni street car to The Presidio. Coming to San Francisco, one would almost feel like one had been there before. Well, maybe not, but one knows what one will get. However, going to the city provides the fine grained detail you don’t get from The Maltese Falcon. Unfortunately, the movies and television shows airbrush a lot of graffiti and litter, prevalent even in the better blocks of San Francisco.

And let’s talk about the better blocks of San Francisco. It’s truly an urban environment, which means that the whole city has a lot of foot traffic and a lot of people moving around in it. It has the plethora of little shops at the ground floor level or parking beneath buildings with office space and residential space above. It completely mixes use throughout, and the difference between South Beach and North Beach and Nob Hill and SoMa was not as pronounced as you get in other cities, where the lush environs of Lindell Boulevard dim to the Central West End, which dims to Forest Park Southeast, which really dims to the southwestern corner of St. Louis City. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the city’s elevated to a nice, middle class or better level like one would expect in the People’s Republic of California. Instead, all ground level windows and doors in all parts of the city have iron, albeit decorative wrought iron, bars over the windows and doors.

Still, my beautiful wife and I had a good time. We spent Thursday evening misinterpreting a tourist pamphlet map (and by we, I mean “I”) and walking due south from Nob Hill to find the Fisherman’s Wharf. Somewhere before the Mission District, we wisened up and turned left (easy to do in San Francisco) and found the San Francisco Bay in South Beach. We had fresh seafood in the first place we found. With a bit of luck and without the map (shredded and discarded as useless somewhere about Fifth and Folsom), we found our way back to our hotel.

We spent Friday on a tour of Sonoma wine country with a tour group and everything. Gentle reader, I shall never again sample chardonnay….well, unless I am really thirsty, or it’s all they have, or if I have a bottle of chardonnay. My beautiful wife and I had more wine than can taste good, but oddly enough, the wines from the fourth (or fifth?) winery we visited were so delectable that we ordered somewhere north of a million dollars’ worth (or perhaps somewhere south of….I didn’t have a good map yet). We’re expecting the tanker truck sometime this week. On Friday night, we took a cab to Pier 39 and had seafood because it is supposed to be fresher on the sea than on the plain. Brother, when fried enough, who can tell?

On Saturday, we hit the used bookstores (and A Clean Well Lighted Place for books), walking a number of miles from the Hilton to points on Van Ness, Post, and whatnot. Fortunately, we had a map this time, which eliminated some of the randomness from our wanderings. After noon, we took a streetcar (impression: it’s just mass transit, with kitsch overtones) to Fisherman’s Wharf, where we had more seafood. Afterwards, we walked along Beach Street, looking into the galleries to see the original art works which are still out of our price range, but close enough that we can dream. Heather wanted to visit the temple of the chocolatier, so we did. We then debated streetcar versus cab, and cab won when we saw lines of tourists waiting for the streetcar. Saturday evening brought a burger and a beer in the Hilton pub, and then we returned.

It was an interesting visit, definitely worth a quarter at a yard sale or the vast sums we spent. Besides, it was our anniversary. While some husbands dole out thousands of dollars of baubles to their wives for their anniversaries, I got on an airplane (which, in retrospect, is no where near as thrilling as a San Francisco cab, which also zooms, twists, and cheats death in three dimensions). Cumulatively, I got onto four airplanes. But I love you, honey, and the following latex tentacle wig thing is a joke. Really. Unless you want to.

C’mon, baby, it was your idea to see the Revenge of the Sith movie. Can’t you just this once put on the latex tentacle wig and plead, “Sith Lord, spare me! I will do anything!”

Today’s word: Twee: Overly precious or nice.

I don’t normally do words of the day, but I’ve encountered this word twice already this morning.

Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote:

(And why don’t men garden in ads? I know lots of guys who garden, who are proud of their tomatoes. I sure am. Is it twee? Come by the office and say that to my face!)

Mark Steyn wrote:

The score gives you a good clue to the main problem: sometimes it’s grand and epic, at others it’s twee and nudging and determined to jolly along the flattest of gags.

Weird, huh?

From the bizjournals.com: Mastering meetings:

MYTH: Most meetings are a waste of time.

FACT: Every meeting — whether you’re a participant, a presenter, or the chairperson — represents a golden opportunity to increase your visibility as an effective communicator.

Remember, bureaucrat, meetings are not to do something, nor to reach a decision: they’re all about increasing your visibility.

So please pipe up with your eloquent digressions and anecdotes of personal achievement. Because that will serve the real purpose of the meeting.

You know, they say that dogs are pack animals….

When the frightening roofing salesman comes, Tristan hides under the bed:

Badly.

But, honey, look!

It’s a vitamin-fortified danish! It’s good for me!

I think I’ll have two.

Corset piercing.

Ew.

Although I don’t mind corset Peircing, wherein a woman in lingerie extols Pragmatism. Philosophy majors have the strangest kinks, ainna?

When you’re testing and you see a dog breed called Dogo Argentino, you might think that you’re seeing junk data since the Spanish word for Dog is perro.

But it’s not; there really is a breed called Dogo Argentino.

Probably junk data that became institutionalized through repetition.

Someone asserts: "Pretty (cool!) in pink", which not only offers a bright shirt with the caption Tough Guys Wear Pink, but also asserts:

What do baby blankets, bridesmaids, hip-hop artists and skaters have in common?

Pink!

In case you haven’t left the house or turned on MTV in the past 12 months, pink is hot for guys. And girls are hot for guys in pink.

Reminds me of my grandmother’s second wedding. I was an usher, blushing with the responsibility at 19. The wedding colors included pink, and the dictum would indicate I would wear a pink shirt. Acourse, as a poor boy, I didn’t own any pink shirts and didn’t have the fiscal wherewithall to readily acquire one. Besides, I don’t like pink. So I said I’d wear a white shirt, of which I had plenty because in those days, you damn kids, grocery store baggers wore slacks, white shirts, and ties.

“Real men aren’t afraid to wear pink,” my stepmother manipulated.

You see, friends, real men (of whom tough guys are but a subset) don’t follow the dictations of fashion magazines and newspaper columns. Why, every time I look at the style section of FHM or Playboy, I smirk. The guys down at Tap City would beat the cosmopolitan out of me if I tried to real the suggested clothing among them, and I wouldn’t blame them; t-shirts should come free with proofs-of-purchase or should cost under $10 for a brand name advertisement or under $15 for saying something clever. They should not cost $30 to display a fashionplate of an upscale store and should never be worn under a sport coat unless you’re Billy Joel or Billy Jack circa 1979.

You want to know what real men do? They do whatever they want, in a burly fashion.

If they want to wear pink, no one says a word. And if they think pink clothes are fru-fru, they don’t wear them contrary to the prevailing winds of fashion. And they post blog entries about it.

From an unsolicited packet, marked DELIVERY MONITORED! to appeal to paranoid occupants like me, advertising an air purifier:

Oxygen is nature’s beneficial element. It is what makes the sky blue. It is what nature uses to get rid of everything harmful on earth.

Well, oxygen is a key component in fire.

So this thing wants to pump ozone into your house to make your household air pure; it calls ozone “activated oxygen” and pretty much implies they’re throwing in an extra atom of oxygen into when you buy an atom of O₂.

What the hey, have another quote:

The electronic spark ozone air purifiers use an electric spark to produce ozone. The electric spark produces oxides of nitrogen that form an acid in the air which is corrosive and toxic. The electric spark can cause explosions and it can interfere with radio and T.V. signals.

I understand explosions can also adversely impact radio and television reception by themselves.

Perhaps I should read more junk mail. It’s making my afternoon.

Heather has a birthday coming up this summer. Want to know what not to get her?

Approximately 730 bales of styrofoam.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you if she unwraps that gift with your name on it.

Here’s a piece of on-product advertising from Frito-Lay:

The text:

America prefers the taste of Lay’s Stax® Original Potato Crisps Over Pringles® Original Potato Crisps**

Taste for Yourself!

** Among those with a preference

Among those with a preference? You mean amongst the thirty people outside of Lay’s who have heard of the canned Lay’s? Wow, that’s some bandwagon there.

In a related note, America prefers Musings from Brian J. Noggle to Pop-Up Mocker**

** Among those with a preference and who know what a “blog” is and who have heard of either of the aforementioned bottom-feeding blogs.

Hoover, the talking seal.

Well, it’s Saturday, so I’ve got nothing better to do than to expose you to a representative of my well-used bookmark collection. It’s really only a collection because the bookmarks are accumulating in the nightstand drawer, not because I’m actively seeking new and exotic bookmarks. If I were, I’d undoubtedly have better items than the collection of Amazon, used book store, and “here’s a gift, send us money” unsolicited fundraiser bookmarks I’ve got. Still, some of the bookmarks merit comment, including this one:

This bookmark comes to us from 1985, and it’s geared to students. Check out the fellow depicted upon the front of the bookmark. He’s got a flattop haircut undoubtedly helped out with a liberal dose of gel. By 1985, we were moving out of the heavily-teased hair styles for the most part and into more natural looks. At least we were in the middle of America; perhaps the Flock of Seagulls thing persisted in pockets on the coasts (although the mullet has yet to go out of style in Jefferson County, Missouri). This kid’s wearing a t-shirt with his own picture on it, the very latest thing available from the malls, and a pair of the oversized shorts they called jams. Me, I never had a pair of jams, although I liked to call the patterned oversized swimming trunks I acquired via hand-me-down-from-outside-the-family or parental garage sale purchase “jams” simply because they had a design upon them. This kid’s also wearing a pair of untied Converse or some other non-Nike brand of high-tops, all the rage amongst the rural toughies in the area in which I went to high school. Toughies whom the urban toughs that I spent my early years would have eaten alive (and probably have in prison by now, or so I hope in the remainder of my adolescent revenge fantasies). The text of this bookmark reads, “It’s cool to be you!” The irony, of course, lies in that this self-esteem-boosting message lies on a bookmark. Cool kids, or at least those of the soc or jock or hooter/stoner mentality would not be privy to this particular boost. The very fact that this message appears on a bookmark implies that the adults-that-be, or at least the adults-that-were expected that young people with books needed self-esteem boosts to make up for the slights and the lacks of dates and for all the other various and sundry humiliations levied against those who preferred books to television and the assorted social and physical vandalism that represents the high school experience…. well, a simple I’m OK, You’re OK from a bookmark wouldn’t do a thing for a teenager, who would see through its facetiousness and condescensious consolation. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously as encouragement had I owned this bookmark in 1985; since I got it sometime as part of a yard sale book purchase, where it was wedged between the incompletely-read pages of some adult book, it helped me even less than a “It’s cool to be a middle-aged suburban subdivision dweller” bookmark more geared to my demographic. Crikey, I hope no teenager has thrown a belt over a rafter as a result of the loss of this security blanket.

The back of this particular bookmark indicates that I’m not lying when I say it’s circa 1985; as a matter of fact, the text indicates it’s copyright, which I am no doubt violating terribly since you gentle readers could blow up the pictures, print them on the new-fangled photo-quality color ink jets whose abilities we could only see in movies in 1985 while we listened to our dot-matrix printers chattering away or the daisy wheels pounding on paper. Please, do not send me a nickel when you do so, for you’d just be an obvious plant from the copyright holder’s lawyers. The brand name, Tab-Marks, would indicate that this bookmark was the product of one of the big three book clubs of the era. Come on, Generation X, you know what I am talking about. The single sheet of full-color (not the Weekly Reader, you pre-addled baby boomleters) front and back distributed in class that allowed those of us who needed ego-booster bookmarks to choose from a menu of paperback books for a buck or two each. Arrow, Tab, and Scholastic fliers made the rounds at my elementary and junior high (although in Missouri, they call them middle school) classes. Kinda like Columbia House for kids, with nothing required to buy in the future. It was always a big deal, as our family was rather, um, undercapitalized, to get to order books from these services. I did, on occasion; after a couple of weeks, I got some books that were mine and not the library’s. Wholesome youth entertainment like Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary (I consider it a testament to the power of these book clubs, and the library, that I still score 8 of 10 on the Harry Huggins trivia quiz). Do kids still get these circulars? We don’t have children yet, so I don’t know whether schools fit them in yet amongst the year-round fundraisers to which those pimping schools subject their students. Perhaps children of the twenty-first century don’t need pencils to make checkmarks and ticks on full-color order forms when they can use their cellular phones to order the books directly from Amazon.com. I hope one or the other is the case; I’d hate to think that no children spend rainy afternoons in overstuffed recliners with simple paperbacks extolling the adventures of anyone not named Potter. Mainly because my dream is to open a used book store, and to be honest, the Greatest Generation, who stocked their post WWII homes with New American Library editions of the classics, the few Baby Boomers not into free love and protests, and the few straggling, under-self-esteemed (apparently) Generation Xers are dying off faster than I can accummulate the wealth and stock to start the money-losing dream-come-true.

Remarkable, ainna, that bookmarks can jog as many memories and reflections, sometimes, as the books into which we stick them? So many people just jam notes, slips of paper, and bank privacy notices (hem, well, perhaps only for technical, business-related books, you see) into books because reading doesn’t require the pomp and circumstance of true bookmarks.

Although, oddly, perhaps that would merit a better sign of books’ ubiquitousness….

Australian columnist Phillip Adams calls the Oscars a symbol of American hegemony. To alter the quote of a more famous Australian, that’s not a symbol of American hegemony, this is a symbol of American hegemony:

(Link seen on Tim Blair.)