Tikaro.com: John Young's Blog

For twenty years, my very favorite bathing suit has been a pair of simple nylon board shorts made by Birdwell Beach Britches. I was turning over a pile of big, floppy, neon-colored Jams in a surf shop on South Padre Island, Texas (this was maybe 1991), and underneath them was a single pair of black, square-cut shorts with red lining, constrasting stitches, and a really fantastic woven label: "BIRDWELL BEACH BRITCHES since 1961", and an American flag. And three grommets. Basically, they were (and are) the simplest, most badass shorts ever, and they have remained my favorites ever since, though I haven't been able to fit into them for fifteen of those twenty years.

I'm in Avalon, NJ, right now, on vacation, which is one of the many epicenters of American surf/prep culture. Kate's dad Bob was a member of the hallowed Avalon Beach Patrol -- sitting on white wooden lifeguard thrones, rowing heavy wooden boats out into the surf, and generally exuding coolness.

The Avalon Beach Patroll is still here, and still cool. I was admiring their really cool square-cut nylon jackets with issue numbers on the back (because the patrol doesn't get to KEEP the jackets, you see, the jackets are too sacred for that.)

On the waistband of the jackets, I noticed a familiar woven label -- WAT OMG Birdwell makes jackets!? -- sure enough, the label on the band was Birdy, and the Avalon Beach Patrol jackets (hooded, flannel-lined) were genuine Birdwells.

So naturally I started spazzing out, because that's what I do, and started Googling for "Birdwell Jackets." I discovered that even though Birdwell has been in business since 1961, and at one time the jackets were a staple of every west-coast surf team, they are so niche that the only good photos are in Japanese style-research magalogs, reblogged by American traditionalists. It's no surprise, either -- the jacket the square Ken-doll cut that you could expect to see in Take Ivy.

So I'm spazzing out about Birdwell jackets at least as much as I did over my grandfather's Iceland salmon-fishing jacket. Fortunately, Birdwell is very much alive and well and making clothes, which you can see at their defiantly low-tech website.

Right now, I'm navigating the intimidating, fifty-foot wall that is the ordering form. I've traded a couple of emails with Evelyn Birdwell, who has nicely agreed to send some Surfnyl swatches, and I can't wait to have a jacket made and sent out for the fall! Whoo!

You might remember that Nerd Merit Badges thing was predicated by how awesome Susan's girl-scout sash is. We've had a lot of fun imitating scout badges, trying to stay faithful to their size, the consistent color pallette, the whole ethos.

We made a golden-pirate skull Nerd Merit Badge for a javascript conference (JSConf 2010). We used one of Noah Scallin's Skull-A-Day fonts for the design, with his kind permission.

This is where things get awesome: actual Girl Scouts in California liked the badge, and asked if they could use it as their troop quest. HELL yes, they could! So we re-made the badge in the oval shape of a troop quest.

And now, for the first time, we get to see them! Here's Troop 202 (The "Skull Scouts!") at their end-of-year awards ceremony, which of course they held at a Victorian graveyard:

There were homemade skull cookies, and the scouts write about their personal bucket lists and their thoughts about mortality. What a GREAT troop, and what a wonderful, serendipitous thing to be involved in!

I'm utterly convinced that after these pictures were taken, the troop went out and solved crimes. Possibly by finding a coffee can in the grass containing mysterious microfilm, or maybe by leaning against the handle that opens the hatch to the underground counterfeiting press. There's really no way that could not happen, based on these pictures.

Thanks for sending the pictures, you guys, and I hope you enjoy your crest!

Last Saturday night, the Guerilla Drive-In showed Jurassic Park on the side of the Hall of Dinosaurs

at the Delaware Museum of Natural History, at their kind invitation.

WOW, what a great place for a movie. The Delaware Museum of Natural History is a wonderful, small jewel of a science museum, directly across the road from Winterthur. It was founded in the Fifties by John E. du Pont, who was a zoologist and (among other newsworthy events in his life), was also responsible for bringing triathalon competition to the United States(!)

The museum stayed open for us, and we got to go inside and gape at the actual dinosaur skeletons and the African Animals exhibit, which is full of the old-school style of taxidermy: the animals look incredibly dangerous, and highly pissed off. I can only imagine how every Delaware Great White Hunter bequeathed the contents of their trophy room to the museum, all of which had been mounted in traditional ripsnorting-yarn style.

Here's a timelapse movie that Andrew Keyes took of us setting up, the mist rolling in, and the sky darkening. The last two-thirds are pretty uneventful, but the series of sparkles are from when the projector exploded, and master projectionist Eric Lewis had to rebuild it using every spare part in our box:

The movie was TERRIFYING. Seriously — Jurassic Park might be cute on the TV screen, but when the T-Rex is life-size, and it's bellowing out its freight-train roar through a Lee Jackson hair-metal guitar amplifier... I was clutching Kate all the way through. And afterwards, museum director Halsey Spruance took us up to the third floor for a midnight behind-the-scenes tour of the shell collection (the fifth largest in the world!) and the rest of the taxidermy not on display, like the colossal polar bear in between the library cases:

We had a wonderful time, and I'm really happy that a number of folks were introduced to the museum that hadn't seen it. They do actual science there, curating the bird and shell collections (which they specialize in), and doing field work. For instance, we heard about the cephalopod research they're currently engaged in off the coast of Nova Scotia, which is important for understanding all sorts of things, including climate change.

By all means, if you're in the area, stop by the Delaware Museum of Natural History and say hi to the dinosaurs, the birds, the shells, and the snarling animals!

A writer in Australia emailed and told me they saw the projector in, of all places, Ripley's Believe It or Not!!

The link is here: comics.com/ripleys_believe_it_or_not/2009-10-05/

Wow, what a suprise! And I'm in august company, with the TEETH OF STEAL man and the diner made from the fuselage of a B-29!

I took yesterday off from work, and we all drove out towards Morgantown and Lancaster to look at stuff in anqtique/junk shops. LBY and I ended up playing minigolf while Kate went for the bonus expert round of shop-looking. If there's anything better than the little portals in the fabric of spacetime at minigolf courses, I'm sure I don't know what it is:

I found a small cardboard box stuffed with cryptic, lustrous little silk ribbons. The ribbons have intricate woven designs. Each is labeled "Egyptienne Luxury" and "Factory no. 7 3rd District State N.Y.":

They fall into four groups: US states, countries, colleges and universities, and secret societies(!), like "B.R.R. Trainmen" and "Golden Fleece."

Some Googling reveals that these are giveaways that you would get with the purchase of Egyptienne Luxury cigarettes. The factory was in New York City, which at one time had several THOUSAND(!!!) cigar and cigarette factories, which is why they were broken into tax "districts" entirely on the island of Manhattan.

What a fun day!

As a "thank you" for building a kitchen set and shooting a movie in our garage, filmmaker friend Susie baked us a pan of fresh, homemade apple dumplings. With a bottle of cinnamon-sugar sauce. And a bottle of bourbon to top it with:

OH MY GOD, were they good. We are seriously, egregiously over-thanked here. We'd feel guilty, but it's hard to feel too guilty when your mouth is stuffed full of delicious apple dumpling with cinnamon-sugar bourbon sauce. WOW.

The kitchen in the garage, built of insulation board and wallpaper. And cabinets scrounged from Habitat for Humanity. I took this picture before Kevin and Jim hung green screen across the window-wall and filled up the remaining space with lights and camera equipment (and craft-service tables.) It looked cool!

We've got a kitchen renovation underway in our house; when the neighbors walked by in the alley and saw Jim and Kevin working to set this kitchen up, they shook their heads "Goddamn, how many kitchens does that family NEED? Are they gonna rent the garage to college students?"

This is the interior of the kitchen set, with wallpaper up. The wallpaper was stained to look old, with lighter spots where pictures used to hang. I think it looks very stylish!

Here's the trailer for another award-winning short film "Jacob and Death", which Kevin and Jim (and other folks) made last year and which you can buy here:

By the way, the kitchen-set movie is the same one that we helped make fake, edible bars of soap out of chocolate a few weeks ago! I can't wait to see how it turns out! I especially can't wait to do any old little favor I can for Susie.

In 2008, I blogged about a visit to the Chester County Hospital May Fair, on a wet and rainy morning. This year, the weather was amazingly magnificent. While Kate and her mom tried to whip the house into shape, I diverted LBY by taking her! Here are some iPhone videos I took:

The truck-portable ferris wheel, held together with tiny wires!

A fifty-foot-wide wading pool, in which floated hamster balls! (Will Ronco wanted to use one of these for a treadmill on his boat, but I think each one only holds about twenty minutes of oxygen):

The Tilt-A-Whirl, which causes thirty-nine-year-old men to hoot "wheeee!" like little girls, and little girls to say "I'm going on this again, man" like jaded thirty-nine-year-old men!

The terrifying scrambler thingy! Which the six-year-old was Not Interested In At All!

I. Love. The. Fair.

In celebration of spring, I am posting my favorite UNCHAIN THE AWESOME videos, from one I just discovered today ("Grocery Groove", below), to my favorite thing in the whole entire world, animal, vegetable, or mineral -- the Bill Irwin video from Sesame Street at the bottom. See, his Charleston really was THAT amazing the whole time; it just took the friendly, supportive teamwork of the two other fellows to UNLOCK THE ROCK for all three of them! Okay, here goes:

Honorable mention: the amazing Prisencolinensinainciusol, which was written to sound like what English sounds like to non-english speakers, and William Shatner's unexpectedly affecting cover of Common People!

I've been doing the Couch to 5K beginning (and returning) runners' plan since January, and yesterday, I finished it and ran a 5K race for the first time in, uh... oh, wow: twenty years!

C25K is pretty straightforward, though there's a lot of stuff to keep track of. You start by jogging one minute, then walking ninety seconds, then repeating -- then, in the next week, you jog a little bit more and walk a little bit less. In the past, this meant lots of time spent scrutinizing your stopwatch. But I've been using Felt Tip's C25K iPhone app, which tracks all the details and just gives you "run now!" "okay, walk" messages through your headphones. In fact, the "RUN NOW WOOP WOOP WOOP" message is kind of startling, like an "all hands" general alarm, which is great for getting you to leap off the blocks when it's time to start jogging again. You can run it on top of the Nike+ application on the iPhone, which IN TURN runs on top of your iPod, so you can chug along, listening to your music, just obey the "walk now" and "run now" commands, and when you're done you get all kinds of telemetry about your runs uploaded to the Nike+ website.

Here's the graph of all the runs I did for C25K, on the Nike+ site. Since C25K gradually replaces brisk walking with jogging, the mileage doesn't go up steeply, or anything. But it's nice to have such a big collection of green bars!

Up until just a few days ago, all of those runs were on the second-floor gym track at the YMCA Youth Program Center on Chestnut street. Around, and around, and around the track!

Yesterday, I graduated with my first 5K run! I signed up for the St. Pat's 5K race, held by the really excellent local Chester County Runners' Store. Kevin Kelly, the co-owner of the store, was actually my cross-country coach in high school, and he puts together a whole bunch of clinics, group runs, workshops, and friendly, mellow runs like this one.

The run was held on the West Chester Downtown Loop, which is two mile-and-a-half-ish loops around town. It's square, and flattish, and there are volunteers standing at each corner to stop traffic, even when the rain is slashing down sideways like it was yesterday. ("Seems like we'll have a nice tailwind by the park", wrote Coach Kevin in an email Saturday morning to let us know the race was still on.) I ran in a gore-tex jacket, and felt very hard-core running through a nor'-easter, but those folks stand in one place for the same duration, braving the weather just so we can have a nice, flat, untinterrupted jog.

Anyhow, I'm very happy to have completed ten weeks of C25K, and I'm looking forward to many runs in West Chester! Hurrah!

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!