afrojet

They say the perfect thing to do during times of economic depravity and plundering budgets is to head back to school, so, I thought I’d give it a shot. O.K. So it’s not exactly school and I’m still not going to be called Doctor Skelton, which I trust some eastern college with a Victorian heritage will rectify by awarding me with an honorary degree soon, but I am going to take a class at the magical and wondefully tactile, Open Book. It’s a typography class that looks like it strikes a good balance between theory and practice. And really, the whole thing is an excuse just to hang out at Open Book amongst all the metal and wood typesets and old school printing press. Ancient to the Future.

The Royal Tenenbaums DVD Criterion Collection is a seven course meal of a DVD and one of the best uses of the medium I have seen yet. It reminds me of old vinyl records that had huge gatefolds, inserts, posters, literature and photos. This stuff was just never possible with VHS or at least no one ever took the trouble to package anything remotely interesting with VHS. The RT DVD is full of great illustrations and house schemas drawn by Wes Anderson’s brother. The director’s commentary is pure pedagogy and the extra footage and interviews, especially the stuff with Bill Murray is brilliant. Is there anyone better than Bill Murray? I can think of no one.

After seeing this Mike Myers video for the upcoming Austin Powers. I am excited to see the third installment of the trilogy. Bring it. High Art all the way. The best part of this Austin Powers will definitely be the infusion and the tipping the hat to the ultimate swinger Michael Caine, who will star as Austin’s father. Caine’s 60’s – 70’s spy action proves that he is the bawdiest British bad ass. The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job (featuring the new passion of the attention deficit American poseur, The Mini), Funeral in Berlin are all excellent Caine fodder.

Afternoon Bike Commute: Cloud Pods.

Gabriel passed me some great investing advice which he found on some board and I am now passing on to you and labeling the Heineken Investment Strategy.

Basically it goes like this:
If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now
be worth $49.00.
With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.00.
With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.
If you had bought $1,000.00 worth of Heineken one year ago, drank all the
beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have
$214.00.

Now that’s just a solid investment. I’m drinking one right now. In fact I may end up investing very heavily today. Perhaps I will wander down to the pub, or what I am now calling, “the trading floor” and ask the barkeep for some of his own homebrewed investment advice. I seriously doubt that it could be any better or worse than what’s coming out of Morgan Stanley.

After I’m done investing I’ll pause to look at the really nice pictures at the San Francisco Gate.

I worked heavily this weekend to build some new book/record/photo album shelves out of some recycled woods from a cannibalized structure. The end result was much better than I had anticipated. I learned much about the subtle art of planning, measuring twice – cutting once, and the subtleties of sanding. Lessons I hope to incorporate into any and all design projects on the work tip.

But the wood crafting pales in comparison to my new hobby – block stamp making. I got hooked up with this Martha Stewart Stamp Kit a couple month ago and now I can’t stop. It’s so damn Zen. It’s very addictive, like booze. I’m a stamp making whore. Chances are, if you send me something nice. I’ll send you a card with an original handcrafted piece of afrojet love.

I must have something delicious in my kitchen. Two uninvited gray squirrels are hopelessly climbing on the screens of my kitchen window with a manic passion to get in. They continue to dance around looking for the opening that’s just not there. As they move they form letters. Perpendicular, they make the letter “T” until one moves a bit and now they are the letter “L”. Are they trying to communicate. T…L…ok, ok, what’s next? TLC? The Learning Channel? Is Trading Spaces on? No, it’s Monday morning. Drat. Damn squirrels got my hopes up there for a second.

It was too hot in my apartment to do anything last night (who wrote: “there are climates for writing and climates for sweating?”) so I walked over to the pub to see if Ichiro could work his magic against the Angels. He couldn’t. And I shouldn’t. My pub is unfortunately too frequented by the Politicos. Junior assistants, researchers, and 26 year old aspiring city council members and such. A boring lot for sure. Not a high risk player among the set. Someone could have taken me for good money last night as I was betting Mariners all the way. I was in a good mood too which is temporally destructive when the wagers are real. The only thing the politicos are good for, especially the aspiring kids who look to hold office in my district, are free drinks. Simple bribery, “How can I vote for you or support your line when you wont even buy a man a fucking beer to hear you talk.” For some reason I find myself in my element around these folks. Maybe it’s because they are trained to be good listeners or perhaps they just enjoy being taken. I figure it’s good practice for them and hey – I’m a citizen.

Saw a great little animated short on Public Television yesterday. I only caught the end of it and didn’t catch the title. It was by Paj Pindal. The style was very early eighties, School House Rock animation. The kind of thing where each frame looked like it would have made a dope T-shirt in itself. The theme of the short was about automobiles taking over the planet. The narrator kept referring to automobiles as the dominant species and to humans as pest, and rodents, who should be eliminated from the landscape to make room for more automobiles. And it was the job of the working class to do this. The working class of course were Bulldozers, Tractors, Crain’s, etc. Very clever. There was a great sequence on “how automobiles reproduce”, which was an elaborate and inventive setup that was reminiscent of the old game mouse trap. From looking at Paj Pindal’s past work it looks like he’s always had a little bit of a bent to his writing. I’d love to see more of it.

Saturday morning. Lot’s of rain. A huge day of power tools and book case building ahead of me today.

I’m so bummed that Amazon Light had to get rid of their serendipity button. I was having a lot of fun playing with that over the last couple of days. Regardless, it’s still a great app. It’s too bad that the kings over at google put a Cease and Desist order on their blatant google UI. But man for a day there, we saw the best of both worlds colliding into a great app.

Amazon in general has been a lot of fun lately. ‘My Recommendations’ has gotten to a point where it’s frightening how well they know me. Especially for music. I’ve always relied on friends and magazines for music recommendations, lots of tapes and burned CD’s have passed through the mail to enlighten different parties and I’ve always appreciated and will always appreciate the musical dialog between friends. I mean Amazon may be on point with a lot of rec’s but it’s no fun to say, “Wow, Amazon thanks for the hook-up on that rare Middle Eastern Polk Dance Classics reissue, I had no idea that was out yet.” But lately, Amazon’s recommendation have been truly of a different sort. The powerful algorithms that match D.C. punk with 70’s funk and then off the cuff throw in a trip to brazil for serendipity sake – well I’m hooked.

Another app that boasts superior brain power is Synapse. An Mp3 player with a brain. For now they’ve only developed a PC version for download. But I got an email from one of the developers who said they were ‘thinking’ about a version for the Macintosh OS. Let’s hope. Or perhaps Apple will just steal it from them. But a music app that claims to “know what you want and how you want it”?? Sounds enticing.

Larger than life snaps like this of Tony Hawk, make it hard to sit and and concentrate on the indoor activities of work today. I should be stealing someone’s skateboard, putting on the clae’s, rocking a new hat, or an old hat, pumping some suicidal and crushing the habitat.

But nay, instead I am sitting behind the wheel of this power book, counting the number of companies and developers that Apple is cannibalizing into its brand new iapps. Now I’m pretending to talk like Corky St. Clair from Waiting for Guffman when he’s being laughed at by the city council members of Blain, “shame on you people, your just bastard people”. Well, it’s like that, except I’m saying it to Apple for some less than cool business tactics. The Watson v. Sherlock 3 incident is only one. Man the developers at Watson should go grab their boards and go shred all over up those Apple heads.

And when they are done with that they should go celebrate the first use of vinyl for software distribution. It was only a matter of time till people learned that vinyl was a technology very ahead of its time.

I wish we had a remote lounge in Minneapolis. It’s like a little play toy lounge bar room for grown ups with a strong geeky side. Check out the consol pictures. Especially the scandalous ones. A lot of the people in the consol photos look like moby. The designers of the lounge, Jordan Parnass Digital Architectures have some very nice stuff too.

My favorite part about running this site is being able to say stuff like: The White Stripes are intensely over rated and make really bad music. Don’t be fooled.

Morning Bike Commute: Loring Park

Fuck what a morning. Waking up to cat barf. Blew a power circuit twice. Then it’s time to force feed the sick cat with a syringe the size of my arm. 30 cc’s of the stinkiest cat food you ever smelt. Most of it ends up on my shorts my shirt the slip cover, etc. etc. he hates it and claws at me for freedom. Whilst trying to feed the cat and clean the goop off myself, I watch a little news and find out that more people got blowed up in Israel and there is a serial killer loose in California. The news people interview the friend of the latest victim. Her simple child understanding and recounting of this horribly chickenshit act brings tears too my eyes and now I’m crying trying to force feed a cat. It’s not even 8:30AM. It’s enough to make you want to go right back to bed.

Excellent. Everything’s clean. Back on the horse. Thanks to the PC junkies for your feedback. Much appreciated. And thanks to Sara for sending me the link that dives into the conspiracy theory about Macintoshes new Darwin Operating System and the unholy crusade behind its worldwide implementation. In short, Darwin is to Anti-God as Open Source is to…ummm…Communisms? Who knew?

Large amounts of yelling outside on my street last night. Kids having arguments at two in the morning walking home from the pub. So much yelling. What’s the deal? It seems to me that everybody’s looking to be heard. Everyone is raising their voice and jabbering on and on at top volume. Every time I turn on Fox News they have these huge screaming headlines that take up a third of the screen. The first word of the title is almost always “Crisis”. Jesus, I hit that channel and jump right our of my seat. The world is ending. More attacks. What? What? But more often than not it’s “Crisis: Martha Stewart may or may not be going to jail and may or may not be making crafts anymore”. Huh? Or, “Crisis: gallop polls indicate that more and more people are switching to decaffeinated coffee, and switching their interior design schema from Feng Shui to Indian Vastu.

And it’s not just Fox News. There’s one station with some bald headed guy whose name I think is Chris and he literally just shouts headlines and yells at guests. I can take about one minute of that before I feel my brain start to protest and pound double fisted against my skull. I’ve even noticed it on the weather channel, where the forecaster stops just short of a full blown Armageddon like tone to introduce the hazy skies that will “darken Minneapolis” as a result of the galactic fires burning out west.

The yelling phenomenon is starting to poison print too. The use of the exclamation mark, something that was once used with caution and temperance, is now used as often as the comma and the period. My personal favorite is the multiple exclamation mark!!!!! Oh, so you really mean it huh? And that’s to say nothing of the emails that I get where for some reason the sender has elected to lean in hard on the caps lock key. As part of my work I used to get a lot of email from lawyers where every word was capitalized. That was tough. Maybe lawyers are professional yellers?

Man, I’m starting to sound like an old man with this post. Am I telling? Naw, there’s nothing wrong with a little curmudgeon complaining now and again as long as it’s kept to a nice conversation (inside voices now Johnny) level.

I’m just going to try and and figure out strategies for a simpler, minimal, less noisy existence. Take pleasure in minimal html and the silence of cats, the quietness of wood and the joy of headphones. Shhh….

Bear with me. I’m doing a bit of a html scrubbing up in this piece. afrojets done got a little dusty. So excuse any mess you see here over the next day. PC users let me know if you see any problems here. I threw all my grey box towers off the the eighth floor of my Washington Ave office building (it’s part of my new “break therapy” routine), so all my PC test machines are now lying maimed on the sidewalk.

Well it’s official. Mac users are smarter than PC users. That’s right. We went to better schools, we dress better, listen to our mothers better, and shave our beards better than your typical dark-circles-under-the-eyes-hasn’t-changed-his-clothes-in-four-days joe(jane) shmoe PC user.

To wit, we watch much better MTV than PC users do. I am so please by two, stand out golden nuggets of pop cinema on the vid box right now, that as a Macintosh user I must share them with you. First is Weezer’s video for Keep Fishin with red hot muppet action that features leagandry skin man, Aminal, working his chops behind the drum kit. He’s still got it. The second is by P.O.D. the group that sings that song “Alive” and the video for their new single, BOOM which features all the members engaged in stylish Ping Pong action, asain grips, and butterfly mallets abound. What a great concept. The video works really well with the song.

Coming Home: Lake Michigan [enlarge photo]

Ohhh the glories of business travel. Yuck! Business travel is just not glamorous. Not anymore anyway. Was it ever? Yes I was signaled out for a “random” security check at MPLS airport. Fewer things are as embarrassing as removing your belt and having people grope you while only a few feet away the security lottery winners gaze askew and wonder what kind of detonation device is built into the hard drive of your power book. For the rest of the flight, I’m now a marked man. I have some sort of security born plague. Tinny forgotten coins lurking deep in my pockets give off alarming beeps and twerps when passed under the sweeping detection devices. I can only think of Spinal Tap, let out a hint of laughter, and get probed and groped more forcefully as a result. Denver.

An hour and a half later still bruised and malignant, we touch down in Chicago. Whoooaaa!! Not once, but twice, three times, the plane now leaning heavily left. The pilot corrects and we bounce again. Four in total. Holy Shit the pilot literally bounced the plane on landing. I’ve done my fair share of airtime. This was beyond amateur. It was a ghetto landing. Worse yet, the pilot comes over the intercom and says his usual bit about “I hope you enjoy your stay in Chicago…etc, etc,” and then says, “No charge for the extra couple of landing”. Jigga what? Jokes? I’m still in shock and scribing a letter to ATA airlines the minute this missive is brought to a close.

But enough negativity. Philly was incredible. From what I saw. For many reasons, everything pretty much looked like this. The train system was super. fast. It made me realize how much we need that sorta thing in the Twin Cities. The Downtown was very cosmopolitan. Lots of street activity at night, very pedestrian friendly. People actually stay in the city at night and it’s easy to walk from pub to ice cream shop, to the really well named record store, Funk-O-Matic. The train stop Market East has a really wonderful mosaic mural too.

Upstate Pennsylvania was really lush and rolling. I’d love to go back and do some hiking and camping in those hills. But maybe I’ll take the train out there next time. The flying thing has lost all its romanticism.