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Over at Lose It or Lose It, we’ve been making short videos demonstrating what we’re doing with the money that folks forfeit when they miss a weigh-in. We mean to be funny and upbeat — Randy is going out and making people happy with the money, but he is getting the credit. The point is that you should keep your money by hitting your goals, so you can go out and make people happy!

In our first video, Randy went out and tipped big at Salad Stop and Fennario with JP Toto’s forfeited fifteen bucks, and in the video below, Randy donates fifty bucks from Corey Floyd to the United Way:

We’re thinking about what else Randy can do: stand at Wally’s Wiener World and buy everyone’s hot dogs? “Thanks, RANDY!” folks will say to the camera. “You’re the best, RANDY!” Or, for instance, Randy can feed all the parking meters up and down Gay street in West Chester, becoming a hero to the townsfolk.

While we were discussing the parking-meter idea, the nice woman behind the counter at Salad Stop told us “you know, it’s actually illegal to do that. It’s illegal to feed someone else’s meter. Crazy, huh?”

I was intrigued. This sounded an awful lot like urban folklore (no, it’s not really illegal to write on a dollar bill, for instance.) So I Googled up the phone number for the West Chester Parking Department and asked the woman who answered the telephone if it was illegal. “Why would you that?” she asked, laughing. “Can I have the money instead? Anyhow, I don’t know, I’ll ask the manager.”

A pause of a minute, and then a gruff male voice came on the line. “Why would you do that?” he asked. Except he wasn’t laughing. “No, really — WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?.”

The bizarre thing was, he really sounded angry, as if I had offended him. I told him it was just a hypothetical question, that we were talking about it and it sounded like urban folklore to me. Was it true that-

“Yes, it’s true”, he said, “and if we see you doing it, we’ll call the police and have you arrested.”

Now, let me be clear — this is not a blog post about a parking services manager being grouchy. Fine, the guy was grouchy, I’d expect that. But why did he sound so deeply angered? What previous history was I unaware of? Had West Chester been beset by a lawless gang of Bolshevik meter-feeders in the sixties, and this fellow was duty-sworn to enforce the draconian meter-bolshevik measures enacted forty years ago?

The answer, says Snopes, is “maybe”. In some towns, apparently, folks would follow ahead of the meter-readers, stuffing quarters in the expired meters, then putting an envelope under the windshield wiper announcing what had been done and asking for a donation – more than a quarter, less than the fine that had just been avoided. If I were a meter-reader, I would be annoyed by that. Was that the explanation?

After reading Chapter 104 of the West Chester Ordinances, I can’t see anything about feeding someone else’s meter at all — only a prohibition on feeding a meter so that a car overstays its maximum time. For instance, if you’re parked on Gay street in West Chester, you’re only supposed to stay for two hours max. If the car had been there for an hour and forty-five minutes, and I went up and pumped the meter so that an hour remains, I’d be violating the ordinance by allowing the car to overstay its welcome. Is that what the problem is?

Or is it just as simple as “full meters don’t generate tickets, and tickets are where the money is?

UPDATE: some more googling reveals this Jackass clip of “The Meter Fairy” involving a mincing ballerina. A lot of Jackass stunts started as Camp Kill Yourself pranks here in West Chester… yeah, that might explain the anger.

This weekend, Kate had a sewing retreat with her friend Ericka. When that happens, I flip out and try to pack as much adventure as I can into the daddy-daughter weekend. This is probably genetically-coded behavior. Anyhow, this weekend was a doozy!

First, we went to the Philadelphia Zoo, where I discovered that in the couple of years since we’ve been here, zoos have started using aquarium technology so that you can get INCHES AWAY FROM THE GIANT TIGER, who of course is acting all cool and collected like it doesn’t notice all the kids just a whisker away:

Sunday morning, we got up at the crack of dawn to drive down to Delaware City, so we could make the trip through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal with Will and Stephanie, as a part of their trip from Maine to the Bahamas!

Will and Stephanie’s 37-foot Benetau cruising sailboat is SO FREAKING FANTASTIC. I’ve lived in Manhattan apartments that were smaller, and that were not cunningly integrated with propane stoves, and diesel engines, and folding tables and all sorts of awesomeness. Seriously, as you can see in this short video, I think this is the closest you can get to living on the Firefly. Except Everybody is nice like Kaylee (well, except for Euonym the cat, who is a candidate for Jayne.)

We motored through the canal from Delaware City to Chesapeake City (you can see more photos in the photoset here), eating Stephanie’s cranberry scones and drinking hot chocolate, then took a taxi back to our car. What a GREAT day!

Back home in WC, we helped my dad finish cleaning out his house before a real-estate sale on Tuesday, and he re-discovered my grandfather’s fox-hunting evening scarlet. This is the tailcoat that I wore to my high-school graduation:

Phew, what a weekend! I’m glad Kate is home now — I’m worn out!

I was inspired by Mr. Simo’s Boomcases — self-contained amplifiers and speakers built into old luggage. This would be a great portable sound system for the Guerilla Drive-In.

Mocked up to scale above: a 10″ subwoofer and speakers, set into my Hepco Becker panniers. Christopher Thompson already made one, because he’s a badass when it comes to making things.

Then, I just have to figure out music to play while riding along in my gorilla suit. I think I have six, maybe eight months before Lydia dies of embarrassment.

After a brisk 3-mile jog this morning, I got on my WiThings scale and it measured me at 214.4. That’s a BMI of 29.9, which according to WHO’s classification, brings me down from “Obese” into “Overweight” for the first time in my adult memory.

I’m overweight, not obese! Overweight! Isn’t it wonderful? I want to run through the streets of West Chester like Jimmy Stewart, shouting “Hello, Iron Hill! Hey, Kaly emporium! I’m overweight! Isn’t it FANTASTIC?!”

You can compare the overweight John shown above with Obese John from last summer in this break.com piece about the Guerilla Drive-In. Hey, I’ll be damned, I have lost a lot of weight! Here’s my progress since then:

I’m just a whisker from three-fourths of the way to my goal of 200 pounds. Once I get there, my next goal is going to probably be 185. But I’ve noticed something; when I started Lose It or Lose It, my goal was to run so I’d lose weight. Now, my goal has been changing — I want to lose weight so I can run faster. Whether or not my goal becomes a number on the scale, a clothing size, or ripped guns, I’m incredibly happy with the progress I’ve made. Thanks, Lose It or Lose It, for making me overweight!

After dropping off Lydia for her first day of first grade (hurrah!), Kate and I walked over to the newly-opened Chestnut Street parking garage. We visited the truly-odd-looking bicycle sarcophagi, and then went up to the top to admire the view. Which is wonderful! And it gave me an idea.

From the top of the Chestnut Street garage, you can clearly see the tops of the Bicentennial garage over on High and Market, and the Justice Center garage over on Darlington. With a clear line-of-sight like that over the rooftops in West Chester, we clearly need to send some flag semaphore messages:

So all we need to do is gather up nine people (one to wave the flags, one to look through binoculars, and one to write stuff down at each spot), and, y’know, learn semaphore. Here’s the area covered:

Who’s in? I’m thinking that we could do this some Saturday this fall: we meet in the morning, send a message from the Bicentennial Garage to the Justice Center garage, to the Chestnut Street garage, and tweet the results. World’s least convenient tweet! Then we get some breakfast.

OOOH, HEY: maybe we could use semaphore to send our breakfast order from Chestnut, to Bicentennial, to Justice, and then to Nudy’s Cafe, right across the street from the Justice Center garage, and then we’ll go eat the food! Sound like a plan? You can at me on Twitter or send me a message on Facebook if you want to join!

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!