I’m, like, totally in the “Circuits” section of the NY Times today:
Now Playing, a Digital Brigadoon
I’m most of the way down the first article page. Hot damn, something new to put into The Humility Machine! Someday, I will be one percent as cool as this guy.
My mom was always careful to point out to me that learning a new skill required a lot of careful, patient, and sometimes tedious investment before it started paying off in fun and enjoyment. The example I remember her using was fencing: looks fun, but it takes years of careful, repetitive drilling before it’s really enjoyable.
Boy, was she ever wrong about that. I found this out a few years ago, when I started taking fencing lessons from a short Eastern European Olympian: “Here, wear ze white jacket of a Twenties robber baron. Here eez a sword. Now lunge at ze wall, and make Hungarian noises like me! HUP!” Plus, you get to rip off your mask and snarl like a short-tempered movie villain pretty much from the first lesson, so fencing was, overall, 100% instant gratification for me.
The same turned out to be true for learning karate (they let you wear the uniform and do the double-fist glowering-bow thing from the FIRST DAY of classes!), riding a motorcycle (nobody can tell if you’re an expert motorcyclist or not, as long as you just turn the corner from the people you just fell down in front of), and being a dad (regardless of how hard actually being a good, reliable child-raising husband may be, carry a baby and a diaper bag out of the men’s room and the entire restaurant breaks out into a standing ovation.)
You know where the crap curve is in full effect, though? Buying a house. Like every other big-ticket purchase, when you look at the new house, it’s just some kind of silhouette, surrounded with a dazzling corona of desire: “Look! A fireplace!” “A porch for sitting on!” “There’s a pogo stick in the yard across the street, and chalk drawings on the sidewalk every day!” Once you come away from settlement, though, it’s painfully obvious that you’ve also purchased a metric ton of elderly carpet, naled down with gleeful, rusty abandon by a savage crew of Malay staple gunners, a kitchen larded with rancid grease, and a rusted water service coupling BELOW the main shutoff valve. That coupling made a strong plumber turn pale, tiptoe slowly to his van, and roll slowly and carefully away, not starting the engine until he was a quarter-mile from the house. “Sweet Jesus, I was just two days from retirement!”
Kate, Lydia, and I will move into the new house in about three weeks. Before then, we want to get the floors sanded, stained, and refinished, get the interior painted, and kill the hive of giant, brawling wasps living in the front embankment. We want to get the radiators in the bedroom and upstairs bathroom replaced with cast-iron baseboard, and we want to get the two layers of greasy adhesive tile in the kitchen ripped up and replaced with vinyl floor. We want to get the gutters fixed, add a ridge vent to the peak of the roof, and fix the leak in the chimney that’s causing the plaster to fall down in chunks. And we’ve got to call Philadelphia Sububrban Water and the Holy Roman Catholic Church to come in and see about our water service.
Really, it’s not that bad — I can’t complain with a straight face to my friends with Manhattan landlords who are actively trying to kill them — but I want to do violence on the person of the next do-it-yourself magazine author who blithely says “be sure to get estimates from at least three reputable contractors before proceeding with work.” Oh, sure: “be sure to send at least three human astronauts into Earth orbit before attempting a moon landing.” Mmm-hmm: “Be sure to construct a land bridge between North America and Asia before walking from Alaska to Siberia.”
Perhaps I’ll just run a foil through the vitals of the next person who gives me that “three reputable contractor” advice. It’ll add a nice bit of instant gratification to this tedious, unrewarding grind. HUP!
It’s a super-busy season!
I took Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off of work, and spent them ripping up carpet, rolling it up, and throwing it in the 20-yard dumpster in front of the new house. Which is a dirty job, but the house looks much better now. We’ve got three and a half weeks to get the floors sanded and refinished, the interior painted, the roof fixed, the wall replastered in that one spot. Meanwhile, Lydia has rolled from her back to her stomach, from her stomach to her back, and has learned to chew on her foot!
I’m also working on fulfilling Retropod case orders. So far, I have orders from New York, California, the UK, Scotland, Australia, and Japan — with orders from Japan outnumbering all others.
Oh, yeah, and one other little thing… Lydia started sleeping through the night four nights ago. Kate and I both feel like a million damn dollars.
Kate finished the baby sweater she’s been making for Lydia last night. It’s brownish-gray and cabled, and to my inexpert eye looks like she’s just made a freaking Faberge egg or something. I mean, seriously, look at the freaking cables! (You can click to zoom.) I’m not surprised that so many knitters are computer-geeks and knit bloggers at the same time; knitting appears to be the matrix algebra of crafts — complex results achieved through the patterned repetition of binary choices. Not that that’s surprising, seeing the origin of the first computers..
The buttons are from Kate’s grandmother GiGi, who had a French accent (because she was French), and married a member of the Sac and Fox nation. So I think it’s a pretty damn cool sweater.
Almost as cool, in fact, as the Lydia’s next sweater is going to be! Oh, man, I can’t wait.
The RetroPod is busy conquering the tech-blog world, with links on gizmodo and boingboing. It’s fun to watch the site get reviewed in German and (I think) Finnish.
Which all seems pretty important until you get home and put your daughter in the bouncy sling for the first time. She’s so big! Holy cow! Kate’s mom says this is how you end up with two babies: “remember last week, when the baby was so small?”
Kate has been working on her own stuff as well, with huge success. Oh, and we’re selling our house. So all in all, we’re pretty busy!
My friends Consuelo and Oraia consented to model in Madison Square Park yesterday for some Retropod product shots. I really wanted the Retropod on a punk-rock leather belt, and they delivered!
I also wanted a couple of postcard shots, with kind of a Billy Idol plus Richard Cheese thing. Again, C&O fired on all eight cylinders:
Next, Kate’s brother Matt is going to style the Retropod site, we’ll make some postcards and send ’em around, and then wait for the checks to start rolling in.
…From Eastern Europe, most likely.
I’m posting this blog entry as I’m riding west on 27th street, in the back of a Manhattan Rickshaw Pedicab. My driver’s name is Trevor; I made an arrangement with him to pick me up at precisely 4:39 and take me to Penn station.
Man, it was everything I could have hoped for. Trevor had the pedicab neatly parked on the wide sidewalk in front of the building; I walked out of my lobby, through a dense, pinstriped cloud of executives vying for taxis, shook Trevor’s hand, hopped in the back of his rickshaw, and off we went. “Hey, what the hell’s that?” asked Jeff, our security guard.
That, my friend, is just a reflection of my station in life. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to close my computer and start shouting into my cellphone. “Sell that! Sell it!”
(Actually, believe it or not, a rickshaw is the very fastest way to get from East 25th to West 32nd at this time of day — sweating visibly, Trevor got us across town in 10 minutes flat. The jealous attention is great; I’m going to have to make this a Friday afternoon ritual. Next time, I’m gonna wear a top hat and a diamond stickpin, and I’m going to throw nickels to all the unsuccessful taxi-waving Hamptons escapees as I roll on by.
I’ve got a handful of Gmail invitations to give away. Earlier this morning, I went to Gmail swap and traded an address to a fellow who promised, in return, to change his hamster’s name to a name of my choosing. I have chosen the name “Imprimatur”, so that I can give cryptic answers later on when people ask how my high-school-yearbook hidden-obscenity review service panned out. “Oh, it’s doing fine; just running on the wheel, running on the wheel.”
Anyhow, I have a couple invitations left: AIM me if you want one!
UPDATE: Ell, new Gmail user, sent me a picture of Imprimatur, his newly-renamed hamster:
I’m fairly sure that I’m the ONLY Gmailer who has traded an invitation to have an English rodent named after a defunct teenage obscenity-consulting enterprise. Well, at least only the second or third one, anyhow.
Can I give a PowerPoint presentation while wearing a burlap robe?
Okay, so some excellent names have been suggested: “Spic-n-spannual”, from Kate, or “Extra-Censory” from Jonathan Stern. However, I need something that can be totally deadpan for when we go on Oprah and talk to PTA meetings in Texas (travel expenses to be paid up front, naturally.) Here’s what popped into my head upon waking up this morning:
Imprimatur, Incorporated
The word has heavy bureaucratic/religious overtones, since it’s the term used by the Roman Catholic Church when approving a book for publication (literally, “let it be printed.”) We can use that spurious quote attributed to Plato about the dissolution of youth as a company motto, and a nice drab color scheme (evocative of burlap) accented by slashes of angry color (evocative of the scourging of the penitent.) IMPRIMATUR!
Here’s what the front page of the website could look like:
Okay, it wouldn’t really be that much Uncle Shelby, but it could be close. That way, each double deuce in the background of the AV Club page can be presented with the correct air of moral gravity. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to draw your attention to the twelve ways that the middle finger can be introduced into your yearbook. Dating back to the 1200s, the middle finger is also called the ‘bird.’ [next slide] In combination with the pinky, it’s called the ‘white-knuckle willy.’ When held upside down, the resulting combination is called the ‘pittsburgh plowshare.’”
Making up obscene gestures will, of course, be half the fun — I’ll have to delete these Blog postings so Google doesn’t give the game away. Update: Actually, according to google, Imprimatur’s services risk actually being useful to somebody. Try reading between the lines (it’s not hard) in this report on the 136 complaints received about this Norwalk, Connecticut high school’s 2001 yearbook!
tikaro.com 
