Tikaro.com: John Young's Blog

My grandfather, John Randolph ("Slim") Young, was a hell of a fellow. He was an avid fly fisherman, and belonged to a fishing club in the Poconos called the Pohoqualine Fishing Association, which I've blogged about before. Here he is in 1979 with my aunt Becky, relaxing in the white clapboard fishing cottage called "totem home":

Here he is, be-suspendered, on the lawn outside Totem Home, teaching my cousin Beth and I to cast. Ten... and two! Ten... and two!

Here is my aunt Becky, looking incredibly fierce and dashing in her full fly-fishing fig, preparing to cast a dry fly upstream into McMichael's creek. Or perhaps she's waiting for a gaggle of Ralph Lauren photographers to arrive. Could they have been far away? I mean, come ON! Look at those hip waders! JUST LOOK AT THEM!

Anyhow, the reason I posted these pictures from Flickr (you can click on them to see the set, including this picture of eight-year-old me looking just like Lydia), is because I remembered the existence of the chief, the most amazing, the BEST piece of gear in a hobby that's almost entirely built around wonderful little bits of gear. This is the item that I would stand in the stream and play with, mesmerized. I'd take it out of my child-sized fishing vest, provided by my grandfather, and just MARVEL at it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the richard Wheatley Spring-Loaded, Multi-Compartment Window Dry Fly Box Number 1609:

Each little window compartment has a spring behind it, and a little wire catch, so when you touch the catch, the window opens with a satisfying little "FWIP" noise. You can run a fingertp down a column of windows and "FW-W-WIP" open up three in a row. You can run TWO fingers down TWO columns and "FF-WW-IPP" open up two rows of windows. Since the box is stuffed with lots of colorful little flies, it's the most AMAZINGLY SATISFYING THING EVER. I hadn't thought about this box for years and years and years, and now that its existence popped into my head I REALLY REALLY want one again.

Given that JRY was an inveterate gearhead, I realized that this probably was not a cheap item. And it's not - it's two hundred damn dollars. And since I don't fish anymore, I don't even know what I'd put in there. BUT I STILL WANT IT!

Matt got his 1971 BSA Thunderbolt up and running yesterday, and stopped by at dinnertime. There's a line in a Lord Peter Wimsey book where Peter produces a revolver, and immediately is upgraded in the eyes of his nephew from "genial uncle" to "Exalted Uncle", and that's what this picture reminds me of:

Matt is wearing an old-stock waxed-cotton Belstaff jacket, which I think may have been Bob's, and of course the correct pudding-basin helmet with goggles.

The whole family comes by it honestly. Here's a picture of Kate, Bob, and Matt after Bob won the AHRMA grand national championship of the sportsman 750 class in 1987!

Every Lose It or Lose It user (here's my profile; I've lost 26 pounds while on a LIOLI plan so far!) gets a daily reminder: "STEP AWAY FROM THE CHEESEBURGER!" we exhort our users. "DON'T CONCENTRATE ON THAT TWENTY POUNDS, just concentrate on the two pounds you need to lose for your next weigh-in!"

Users can get their reminders either through email or SMS. At least, they could until we discovered that Clickatell, had been accepting our SMS messages for delivery BUT NOT SENDING THEM since February 25th!

Without the SMS reminders, our users were in imminent danger of re-lard-i-fication! What might they do if Randy was not constantly nagging them to make good choices?

Randy heard about Twilio, a cloud-telephony service that lets your website actually call your users on the telephone and play MP3 files to them (that's to start with; there's a whole bunch of XML stuff you can do, too.)  What we needed was an option to replace SMS -- and fast!

So during lunch we ran around the corner to the local AM radio station (WCHE 1520 in West Chester, PA), and asked them to let us record some voice reminders to send as outbound telephone calls through Twilio.  John (on the left) and Randy (on the right) are recording one of the message that YOU will hear on your phone when you sign up for a 10-, 20-, or 30-pound Lose It or Lose It plan!

Here's the message we were recording in the picture above. A LIOLI user has the option to get THIS, or one of a bunch of other random messages, as a call on their phone each day:

MAN, did we have a good time doing this. Especially with JT, the morning-host DJ and studio technician, to clean up our goofy recording and make us sound like we actually know what we are doing. Thanks, JT! We'll be back to record more reminders! And thanks, Twilio, for making it so easy to solve our SMS emergency!

Voice reminders will appear as an option in LIOLI users' preferences starting this weekend -- as soon as Randy stops raging long enough to be able to see his monitor again!

Last Wednesday, the snow was coming down thick and fast. It had been snowing for, what, three days in a row, and I think by that point it was drifting up to seven or eight feet, on top of the twelve or thirteen that we already had. West Chester was totally shut down — AGAIN — after the huge snowstorm over the weekend. I had cabin fever something fierce, and so needed to get out and work at the office.

I suited up and spent the day working at the Barcode Building, which was great. As the day progressed, things just got more and more snowy. Until finally it was like a comedy snowstorm out there. Good thing I was wearing comedy snowstorm clothes. I wrapped up in a scarf, jammed my pith helmet on my head (hey, a blizzard is sort of like a sandstorm, right?), and began the walk back.

New street (pictured above) was completely empty, except for fellows on quads and snowmobiles, careening up and down at fifty miles an hour, warlike hoots muffled by their Cabela's balaclavas. Everything was closed downtown....

Everything, that is, except for Éclat Chocolate, the world's finest truffle maker! The storefront was brightly lit, the case was full of freshly-made ginger caramels, whiskey truffles, and all sorts of great stuff that a fellow should bring home after Braving Nature's Wrath. Dana even posed with a plate of valentine hearts, so I could tweet my luck:

Then, back out into the snow. Here's Sharpless Street, heading west:

As I'm writing this, there is MORE snow coming down. Sheesh! But I'm delighted that West Chester's local businesses are helping us through the season by providing the necessities of life.

It's condom, man, random, domination and condiment rolled into one word! (Says my friend and colleague Claudia.) I cannot possibly do justice to these commercials in words, so I will not even try. Simply BEHOLD.

MANDOM commercial number six, in which Charles Bronson demonstrates that "the world loves a lover" by going home alone, sticking his dress shirt to the ceiling, and rubbing scented oil all over his body:

MANDOM commercial number four, in which Charles Bronson tames a wild helicopter:

MANDOM commercial number eight, for men with guts, he-men, men of action:

OMG, Mandom is still sold! I'm going to get some. BANG! KAPOW! WHINNY!

Since the beginning of October, I've lost just over twenty pounds by carefully monitoring my calorie intake and working out 4-5 times a week. The lion's share of my weight loss has been spurred by my friend and colleague Randy Schmidt's brilliant new website, Lose It or Lose It, which has a simple, effective premise:

1. Set a weight loss goal
2. Give Randy lots of money
3. Check in every week. If you've made your target, you keep all your money.
4. At the end of the ten-week plan, get your money back! And now you're skinnier! Whoo!

I put up fifteen hundred dollars in November against the goal of losing twenty pounds in ten weeks. I was 251 when I started, and I'm right around 236 now, with all my trendlines going steadily downwards. You can see pictures of each week's weigh-in here.

The great thing about Randy's program is that it provides the missing ingredient of immediate, specific, and consistent motivation. I'm not trying to avoid eating that cheeseburger based on some nebulous beach goal seven months away; I'm avoiding that cheeseburger because if I eat it, I lose a hundred bucks on Monday! You don't have to risk as much as me, but I really like cheeseburgers, so I put the figure pretty high. So far, it's worked great, and I'm starting to get to the point where people are noticing and commenting that I'm looking skinnier.

On Wednesday, CBS3 technology reporter Nicole Brewer called Randy about doing a story on New Years' resolutions and technology. Lose It or Lose It's official Philly celebrity geek Blankbaby couldn't make it, so I filled in. Kate, Lydia, and I drove in to the city, met Nicole and her camera operator in the lobby of the sporting club at the Bellevue, and even got a workout in for the camera! (I burned 14 calories during the shoot; Kate burned 12. So, you know, we got our morning exercise in!)

Here's the piece that Nicole made!

I had a great time talking to Nicole, and I'm glad that the piece worked out well for Randy, with the URL getting carefully spelled out on TV and everything. Hurrah!

PS. After we were finished shooting, we stepped outside the Bellevue on our way to the Academy of Music to take Lydia to the Nutcracker. I stopped and turned in an uncertain circle. "Uh... which way, honey?" I said, my iPhone grasping for satellites. Kate pointed: "Let's follow all the girls in red velvet dresses", gesturing at a sidewalk FILLED with six, seven, and eight-year-olds all headed one way, decked out in velvet trim. The Nutcracker was GREAT, and the trip to Max Brenner's afterwards was FANTASTIC. What a day!

Imagine NINJA MOUNTAIN, where all the most sage, venerable, and deadliest ninja masters go to practice their craft. Ninja mountain is not in the middle of the capital city, because the bustle and high rent of a capital city are only good for the showiest ninja masters, for the crowd-pleasers, for the ones trying to get their facemask on the cover of Ninja Magazine — not for those that are deeply committed to their art. On Ninja Mountain, the quiet bamboo groves are filled with the quiet whisper of DELICIOUS PASTRIES.

Wait, I got my metaphors tangled up there. My point is that West Chester, PA, is CHOCOLATE MOUNTAIN, because... wait, hang on a second, damn. Let me start over.

World-class chocolatier Chris Curtin owns Eclát Chocolate on High street. It is a tiny shop with a case up front, a window filled with AMAZING cast chocolate, and a stainless-steel door that leads to the kitchen.

Chris started Eclát after studying in Old World master chocolate ninja kitchens, and makes amazing AMAZING chocolate. That's an easy phrase to throw around, but check this out: Jeffrey Steingarten said that Chris makes "World's greatest caramels", in Vogue magazine. His flavors are INCREDIBLE: "Oh, mint? Yeah, that's cool, let me just try th- DEAR GOD I UNDERSTAND NOW. UNTIL THIS MOMENT I HAVE NEVER EATEN A MINT CHOCOLATE."

Randy took the picture above while I was talking to Chris about molds, and the picture at right because he (Randy) is running a promotion over at Lose It or Lose It where if you sign up and make a commitment to lose weight, Randy will reward you with delicious Eclát chocolates. If you lived in West Chester, this world-class choclatier is, you know, right on the walk home!

But that's the thing -- West Chester is packed with amazing restaurants. For example, down at the end of Gay street, there's Gilmore's Restaurant, whose chef Peter Gilmore spent 22 years at Le Bec-Fin ("Why did Georges Perrier ever let this man leave?" wonders Zagat.) You can see lots of them at West Chester Dish, Mary Bigham's West Chester restaurant website.

See, the thing is, there's SO MUCH amazing food here on NINJA MOUNTAIN, that you can't run a simple errand without stumbling on really amazing world-class food. This morning, Kate and I picked up a box of croissants at the Strawberry Bakery in Frazer. Lydia needed to use the bathroom, so Kate walked her back, and I spent a few minutes watching them assemble really AMAZING-looking fruit tarts, while owner Jean Pierre Bournazel negotiated with customers over the phone via his assistant, in the most amazing Central Casting French accent I have ever heard: "Tell zem... tell zem I could do a QWAAART-er of zat!"

I asked if I could blog the process: "Say, Jean Pierre, may I take a picture of the tarts?" "Yes! Of course! Zey even smile! SMILE FOR ZE CAMERA!"

Jean Pierre opened the Strawberry Bakery in 2004, and teaches baking classes in his kitchen, through the Chester County Night School. Here's a review of the class, in French. I see that there's a Christmas Cookie class coming up on December 13th -- is anyone interested in going?

Anyhow, the point I'm making is that, here in West Chester, PA, there's a world-class chef, baker, or choclatier in every quiet bamboo grove. And not just Old Guard French, either -- as the sizable Mexican population starts to open up their own businesses, there's a crop of really amazing authentic Mexican restaurants coming along. YOU SHOULD SERIOUSLY LIVE HERE.

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Previous reasons why you should move to West Chester:

• #5: Downtown Beer Lab
• #4: Northbrook Canoe Company
• #3: Secret Mobile Robotic Pipe Organs
• #2: Rescue robots
• #1: Secret Skate Parks and Awesome Tack Shops

On Saturday night, Kate's brother Matt got married to the wonderful Kristen Seidle (you might remember her as the Tequila dance teacher at the Guerilla Drive-In) at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. We went in on Friday for the rehearsal, and stayed at the Loews for two nights so we would be in town for everything.

"Everything" turned out to be more than we expected — after seeing two roller-derby bumper stickers on the way in to the city, followed by a woman on the street corner wearing a "Donna Matrix" Jersey, we discovered that the Roller Derby Nationals were in town, right across the street at the convention center. On Saturday, while Kate and Barb went to get their hair done, Lydia and I walked over to watch skaters like "Heavy Flo" from the Rocky Mountain Roller Girls and "Violet Temper" from the Philadelphia Liberty Belles battle it out in what (I think) was a quarterfinal:

Roller derby is now an amateur, DIY sport, with rules an awful lot like Quidditch, and a great sense of humor — there's a national registry of handles, so when you come up with your awesome nickname: "Correctional Felicity!", you can be the only one. The convention center was filled with lots of smiling, enthusiastic rockabilly feminists in purple sequined socks, ripped fishnets, ace bandages, and Betty Page bangs (and just about anything else you can imagine; the teams and skaters are similar to each other only in their exuberant, kick-ass creativity.)

The roller girls were mixed on the convention-center escalators with mitre-carrying bishops from the Episcopal Diocese convention (Ballroom 2), and four-foot karatekas competing in the Amerikick tournament upstairs. These last were staggering under the weight of five-foot trophies. What a great visit to the Convention Center!

Now, for two weeks, Kate has been working carefully on Lydia's black velvet flower-girl dress. First, she made a muslin, determining that the sizing needed to be adjusted here and here, and then spent a marathon few days at fellow Last Call Bags sewer Ericka's house, cutting velvet, sewing linings, and stitching tulle. The end result was WONDERFUL:
You can click the photo to see many more pictures of the dress on Flickr.

Lydia is normally very camera-shy, but when she put on this dress for the first time on Saturday afternoon, she just beamed, and would happily stand in front of any camera for any length of time, holding her bouquet and smiling from ear to ear.

Kate estimated that about forty hours' worth of skilled labor went into creating this simple, small, dress, which just goes to show you that this stuff is not easy, I guess, and there's a reason why good suits cost a lot of money.

I'm going to continue to gush, here. Everyone looked beautiful: here's a picture of Kate, Lydia, and Barb (and Ariadne) before the ceremony:

Shortly after that picture was taken, I walked Barb up PAFA's front stairs to her seat, Lydia walked Matt out to his place in front of the assembled group, and Kate performed a reading during the ceremony. Matt looked amazing in a bespoke Edwardian-cut suit that he had made for the wedding, and Kristen was absolutely stunning in HER gown. (I don't have any pictures of the ceremony, but there were any number of stylish pant-suited photographers there, so I think my few iPhone attempts will soon be replaced.)

I realize that I may be going on like an Evelyn Waugh society writer here, but it was clearly catching: check out this portrait of George Washington over the bar that makes Bill Clinton's look positively demure. There were LOTS of stylish folks wandering around under the art. Including a huge, action-packed twenty-by-thirty-foot painting of Death on the Pale Horse that was rescued from a burning building by volunteer firefighters who cut it from the smoldering frame.

PHEW and then there was dinner! And a toast, by me! And dancing! And that's when we saw the BEST DANCER IN THE ROOM: Matt's good friend Craig, who (says Matt) at age 22 decided to turn his self-described "inability to dance" into an asset, and MAN did he succeed. Look at this free-form awesomeness, which I personally think has enough raw, vital material for five new dance crazes, including "The Moose" and (as Michele Melcher called it) "The Shrimp":

Please note that I am not being sarcastic or derisive. If we could bottle the awesome on display here, we could solve the world's problems. This is the closest thing to an actual human version of the Snoopy dance that I ever hope to see.

And THEN the next day we went to the Reading Terminal Market for coffee, and then after THAT we went to the amazing Fante's Kitchen Wares Shop in the Italian Market, which I had never been to before, and was a lot like NY Cake and Baking Supply was in NYC, except much MUCH nicer, and with "Mister G." sitting there right behind the table so you can ask him what the liquer flavoring "caffe sport" or "strega" tastes like, and he smiles and says, in a thick Italian accent, "It tastes like... caffé, but... sporty", which (and I am not trying to be sarcastic) manages to be somehow a completely accurate description of something that you would really very much like to own. Oh, MAN, so then we got back in the car and came back out to West Chester, and I figured if I didn't get this blog post done tonight it would NEVER get done, because how do you synthesize roller derby, homemade couture, a beautiful, elegant wedding, and the mind-blowingness of Philadelphia in one place? You don't, I guess, you just put it all next to each other and see what happens. If you'd like to see more pictures, you can check out the photoset on Flickr.

Congratulations, Matt and Kristen, and thanks for a wonderful weekend! I am honored to be a part of such a fun and creative family!

Marching bands are like mana for small-town awesomeness, I think. The little girl in the stroller certainly thinks so!



That's Bayard Rustin's high school marching band. The West Chester Halloween Parade is organized by West Chester Parks and Rec, and they did a great job. Coming up, the Christmas parade is organized by none other than Todd Marcocci, who I talk all about in the post below. It's fantastic, and you should not miss it!

I wrote this post in 2002, back when you capitalized "Blog", and "my homepage" was still something you said with a straight face. I published this story as a bunch of short pages, but then they got lost in series of site reshuffles. I've stitched them together here, with horizontal lines to show the page breaks. I hope you enjoy it!

The house that Kate and I bought in April is a small, 1950s-style ranch. It's in a quiet working-class neighborhood: our left-hand neighbor, Jerry, has a long, grizzled beard, cool merchant-marine tattoos, and an elderly springer spaniel (our catsitter, I think, has a crush on him.) Our right-hand neighbor, Todd, is an event producer, and has been sprucing up his small house with bright white and blue paint, low-voltage lighting, concrete benches, flags, and a hot tub. He also owns every two-stroke gas-powered yard tool that Home Depot has to offer.