tikaro.com

The “Message my phone” input box from the “contact me” link above has been broken for longer that I care to admit, but it’s working now. At least, I *think* it is; now the Voicestream end of the bargain seems to be out of comission. So: if you need a baby delivered in a taxicab, or you need to convince the premier of Russia that the missiles are not really on the way, or if you need help talking a suicidal jumper off a ledge, you might not be able to get a hold of me.

King Geek For a Day

I’ve been trying to observe a seven-day wait period on expensive gadget purchases. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe it successfully. The latest breach of willpower: on Friday, I found out that the incredibly cool wireless Bluetooth headset was available in the US. The headset uses radio to talk to your cellphone, instead of wires, so if you’re wearing the headset and your phone rings, you can just casually reach up, tap the headset, and answer the call WITHOUT TOUCHING THE PHONE IN YOUR POCKET! Or, get this, if your Palm device has a Bluetooth card, you can tap “dial” in your contact list and start talking on your headset, again WITHOUT TOUCHING YOUR PHONE! Oh, this is great. So I found a tiny place on West 38th street where I could buy the new Bluetooth-enabled Ericsson T39 GSM mobile phone. With on-board Bluetooth, GPRS, and a bunch of other cool features, the T39 hasn’t been officially released in the US, which gives me lots of geek points. The phone doesn’t even come with a US charging adapter; it comes with a colossal three-pronged UK plug, and instructions on how to attach the charger to “the mains.” Ha! Then I ran to Penn Station to buy the headset kit and accept the adulation of the cell-phone vendors “Damn, is that the new T39? Can I touch it?” Then I rode to Philly on the train, talking importantly on the headset while the little flashing green light on the end of the microphone boom announces that I am the Uber-Geek, the King Megillah of wireless headphone users, the High Lalapazooza of tiny, expensive, easily breakable devices.

I’m back from Newfoundland, where Kate and I wore sweaters, hiked a lot, watched whales, and ate roast moose! Roast moose tastes like birch, it turns out. Kate tells me that game animals taste like what they eat; while living in Alaska, she ate moose, duck, even bear. Duck was the worst, apparently, because wild ducks taste like, well, algae, and a kitchen where duck is cooking smells like a steamy pond. Yuck, yuck, yuck! Anyhow, I took the Rich Asshole^TM tour, renting a colossal red Ford Explorer and bouncing around the gravel roads while encased in a Gore-Tex parka. Every time I parked the car and walked away, the Explorer would be perched on some seaside cliff or other, making the countryside look like an SUV commercial.

I was in lots of company, though. Earlier this spring, one of the wild alpine meadows about a mile from the house was used as the setting for Qoyle’s house in the Kevin Spacey production of The Shipping News. A new road had been build to the meadow, and dozens of SUV-driving, Gore-Tex wearing crew members had driven out past the house to Fort Point, where they hired fishermen to anchor offshore with fog machines and add to the already-thick Newfie fog. Every local boarding house in the area was hired for the shoot, and the movie brought lots of business into the area. Our neighbor Frank Bartlett, who runs a small dairy farm, opened a small restaurant to cater to the film crew. At seven AM, two production assistants would come in and pre-pay for 150 orders of fish and chips that night. Frank was really happy about the extra business, and I was really glad to hear that nobody had a bad word to say about the production company. They paid all their bills on time, picked up after themselves, and left about six weeks after they had arrived, taking their SUVs and technical parkas with them.

I started going to Newfoundland when I helped my stepbrother Sam build a house for his mom and my dad about ten years ago. The house is almost a hundred percent finished now, with the final installation of a hot-water shower stall. That’s a long haul from the days when Sam and I would mix beer and cool-aid in a plastic vat, cook beef and cheese over a hotplate, and crap in the woods at night.

Kate and I have differing ideas of the perfect vacation. My ideal vacation is one where I can come back with harrowing tales of adventure: height scaled, wrongs righted, Malay pirates beaten back from the rigging until the scuppers run red with blood. Kate prefers a more vacation-y vacation; reading, sleeping late, cooking at home, taking walks. Malay pirates being scarce in Newfoundland, I have to admit that there’s really something to the restful variety of vacation. I came back actually rested, imagine that!

What Dr. Ho SAYS, Dr. Ho DOES.

I got a mysterious envelope in the mail the other day. The return address merely said “Caribbean Online Ltd.” Inside was a shrink-wrapped CD, all in Chinese, with the bold, mysterious name of “Doctor Ho.” The CD carried an allure I haven’t felt much since high school — the allure of something that was kind of illegal, like buying a big butterfly knife in Chinatown or ordering the “Shroom King” mushroom kit out of the back of High Times.

Anyhow, I probably got the CD because I had put some money down on the outcome of Survivor II. Doctor Ho turns out to be the proprietor of an online casino in Macau that pairs live video feed of buxom Chinese croupiers in tight tank tops with buxom 3D croupier avatars in no tops to speak of. Doctor HO, indeed!

Clicking through Doctor Ho’s site, I found his bio — and was stunned. “Who is Doctor Ho?” the site asks rhetorically, then answers with a barrage of Tony Robbins meets Horatio Alger meets Doctor Evil.

This is the resume to end all resumes:

“In China, he is called Wong Tai Sin – the god who fulfills peoples wishes.

• His dramatic rise to fortune is charted in popular movies and books.
  
• He has been honored by the British Monarchy and His Holiness Pope John Paul II.
  
• He has survived a pirate attack and numerous threats on his life.
  
• He is a highly skilled ballroom dancer and collector of limousines.”
  
  
  (read the rest…)
  

You can see Doctor Ho by clicking here, but be forewarned: looking deep into the red, blinking eye of a papally-honored, ballroom-dancing pirate survivor is deeply unsettling.

Messing with Manhattan’s Control Panel settings

There were two artists crouched outside Lafayette Cleaners this morning, drawing a startingly detailed portrait in charcoal and chalk. It was titled “American Astronaut”, and showed a bald man staring up from the concrete with an inscrutable expression. It’s not rare to see street art in my neigborhood — someone nicknamed “the shadow” has carefully spray-painted around the streetlight silhouette cast by each fire hydrant, each parking sign, and each standpipe. Someone else, lately, has been stenciling “Drop The Rock” in various colors dozens of times at each intersection; something to do with America’s growing prison population.

The messages written by New Yorkers for New Yorkers aren’t limited to art, though. It’s a common practice to see comments scrawled in pen on the posters in the subway station. A poster for Madonna’s tour in the Spring Street station is pretty representative — a speech balloon has been added, with the words “I suck dick!” The sentiment is common on subway posters; local newscasters aren’t on the wall for three nights before they’re assaulted with a fusillade of scrawled phalluses. Other subway comments are wittier: A poster for the U.S. Open now reads “Every Player. Every Emotion. Every Hack Rich Spectator.” Most, though, are simple and heartfelt: an MTA poster reads “Why run for the train? There’s another one just like it on the way.” To this weak joke, New York’s answer is simple: “Fuck You!” in black Sharpie.

I suppose you could call it grafitti, but I think it’s more about communication in the city, a kind of meta-layer that New York residents have superimposed on the city itself. It’s necessary, if the city is to be livable, to tweak things here and there, just like you’d straighten a picture in a hotel room. Except that, here, the hotel room is one thousand degrees, loud and muggy, and the picture is a stupid piece of corporate twaddle thought up by an intern who wasn’t really trying that hard. It’s necessary to push back a little, it seems like, or the city will get the upper hand.

Like the conductor on the new brushed-aluminum six train was doing this morning, fighting with the new computerized recording in the loudspeakers. “This is… Bleecker Street”, announced the train in a cool, recorded voice as we pulled into the Astor Place. “This is NOT Bleecker Street!” cut in the less cool, definitely non-recorded voice of the conductor, background noises almost drowning him out. “This is ASTOR PLACE! ASTOR PLACE! ASTOR PLACE!” At every station up the line, the conductor drowned out the train, superimposing a faster, grittier, and more accurate reality onto the MTA’s, well…

sucky one.

I went to go see the World Famous Pontani Sisters at Marion’s Continental last night. Marion’s is my favorite bar in New York; it’s friendly, has a nice mixture of non-impossibly-hipsterish people, is packed with 1960s kitschy crap, and tries really hard to think of fun things to do. Like on Mondays, when the Pontani sisters come out and do a three-minute burlesque review every twenty minutes. This was Official American Kitsch, too: a grass-skirt number, a fruit-on-the-hat number, a rubber bathing-cap, sequined bikini, and tap shoe number, a Bond Girl kung-fu number.

The funny thing is, even though the costumes are outrageous, the sisters are good, which (oddly) seems to rob the show of the ironic self-referentiality that everyone has come to expect of all things “retro.” And I can’t understand why I’d think of the absence of meta-reference as a “loss.” God knows that the last thing we need is more post-post-postmodern self-referentiality. I guess this is more like an honest-to-goodness revival of burlesque, not an ironic presentation of burlesque’s symbolic trappings. The sisters really seem to own their presentation, too; they’re not tall, and they’re covered in tattoos, so there’s a strong Lower East Side vibe to their routine. Plus, they have a solid, well-executed website. And they seem to have thought the whole thing through carefully; viz. this this article by Angie Pontani.

Dirge for a Dot-Com Dinosaur

I’ve been reading a lot of Mark Twain; by way of Tom Swift and G.A. Henty, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After that, not wanting to leave the Mississippi, I downloaded Life on the Mississippi, and discovered the chapters on Twain’s apprenticeship as a Mississippi riverboat pilot:

“If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”

Over the course of thirty years, the steamboat trade mushroomed into a giant, thriving industry, and the men who could store the technical knowledge about the location of every rock, shoal, branch, channel, and current — both by day and by night, in high water and low — were the kings of the steamboat economy, commanding princely salaries, loafing in pool halls under salary while in port, and sneering at mere captains, underwriters, engineers, and passengers. Riverboat pilots formed a powerful and union, demanded astronomical wages, and strictly controlled the influx of new apprentices.

The Civil War brought the steamboat trade to a sudden halt; when the war was over, the railroads had sprung up to take the place of the river boats. A skilled profession had vanished, almost overnight. Twenty years after leaving his job as a river pilot, Twain returned to find the industry all but vanished.

Like Twain, I stumbled into a booming industry at the right time — my home-grown HTML skills were good enough to get me on the first rung of the ladder. It’s been a fast climb, too — and, for a while now, it seems like every time I reach a new rung, the last rung is burned away under me. Not so long ago, I had a fairly sizeable team: my people had people of their own, and I would make jokes about my role as a petty tyrant. These days, it’s just me and my technical specification decks. And the laptop I’m writing this on; I’m using a 128Kbps Ricochet modem, which is one of the coolest manifestations of wireless technology out there. My laptop acts like it’s plugged into an Ethernet jack – my Internet connection is that fast – but it’s plugged into a gray radio modem velcroed to the back. The company that operates the service went out of business this month, and they’ll be turning all the transmitters off on August 8th. Like Kozmo and UrbanFetch, I’ll really miss Metricom.

So on Saturday, I continued out another 75 miles or so to the Susquehanna river, where I stopped at a boat ramp and saw various folks in various stages of sunburn putting boats that had cost various amounts of money into the water. They were all pretty normal inland-river-holiday type boats except for one tiny purple job that looked like an amusement-park ride, all raw fiberglass and bolted aluminum struts across the inside. It was painted “never grow up” on the side, and it had a massive outboard bolted to the back. The outboard’s casing had been drilled in many places, and there were many mysterious tubes running into the engine. When the boat’s owner put it into the water and started the engine, it shrieked with a wicked goblin howl that brought people running (literally, running! Adult people!) to see what the hell was going on. I’ve never heard an engine do that before. There’s a funny passage in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men In a Boat where he spends five pages convincing the reader that rescue did, indeed come “just as they had given up all hope”, and it springs to mind whenever I’m living a cliche, like I did just then, listening to this unearthly roar that this kiddie-park-demon-from-hell boat was putting out. What, did the guy run it on hairspray and plutonium or something?

I’m in the middle of Lancaster county, in front of the Strasburg Country Store (“Soft Black Raspberry – Reputation Unrivalled”.) I’m having a Genuine Motorcycle Experience, having gotten up at the crack of dawn, put on my new elkskin gloves, and ridden out on back roads to the small towns where there are grooves on the right side of the asphalt from the horse-drawn buggies. My GME was completed when something small and easily fixed broke on the bike that I could pull over and FIX WITH MY BARE HANDS! (The speedometer cable came unscrewed.)

…and now I’m writing about it on my iPaq with a wireless Omnisky modem. Take me now, Lord! Take me now!

My friend Jessica Bassett told me that she had a spare ticket to see Dwight Yokakam yesterday night, and wanted to know if I wanted to go. This is evidence to support one of my hypothesis that I would love to be true — that life runs in a series of themes, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. This was one of the not-so-subtle times: my recent voracious reading of boys’ adventure fiction of the 19th century had led to voracious reading of adventure fiction in general, and so to Westerns; I’d just finished reading two Zane Grey books, (tip to the reader; don’t read two Zane Grey books back to back), which led to the purchase of a pair of ranchhand’s barbed-wire-handling elkskin gloves for my motorcycle, which led to going to go see a country singer belt out a song called “yippie kie-yay, yippie cow cow cow”.

Of course, the country singer was from Kentucky by way of California, there were only about three cowboy hats in the room (the rest seemed to be a mixture of subdued couples from Jersey and enthusiastic non-butch lesbians), and the opening singer who delivered the yodeling song quoted above had moussed hair and a big-collared shirt straight outta the N’Sync Wardrobe Manual. So if the theme of this past week was the Wild West, maybe the theme for the next week and a half will be Big Collars or something.