Ten things I hope never to hear again on a date

I got that job. In Seattle.

I don’t really like other people.

You’re not allergic to cats, are you?

Can I interest you in a Dutch silent film?

All gay people are going to hell.

I could never live in the Midwest.

You’re so happy. Me, I have all this existential angst.

I’m like this cactus. Cute, but you don’t want to get too close.

Want to see my sub-automatic machine gun?

You’re an attractive woman, but you’re a terrible dresser.

Confessions of a middle school spelling bee champion

You know what word I can never manage to spell correctly?

misspell.

Southwest gate B10

I swear I am the only Southwest passenger that doesn't think it's worth queuing for 45 minutes just to get a better seat. You people are all in boarding group C!" I want to yell at them. "Do you think you're really getting an aisle seat?"

I am resigned to sitting in the back row next to the toilet and am enjoying relaxing here in my chair. I'm going to be the very last person on the plane.

I will be on my way to LA in 14 minutes, so you'd better call me tonight if you want to hang out! And by "hang out", I mean "come over and help me pack and take away items from my apartment".

Geraniums, or lack thereof

This is a picture of what used to be a very attractive hanging planter basket. Actually, it was the second such planter. The first, a bodacious basket from the fancy garden store, was stolen from our back porch the day after I bought it. Saddened, I made another, simpler basket of geraniums and sweet potato vine to replace it. That too was stolen within hours, even though I had tied it on with a piece of twine to deter theft, and the thief had to open our gate and come onto the porch to procure it.

I have given up on hanging baskets. But I'm puzzled by the theft. What kind of person steals hanging baskets? A thief, but one that loves FLOWERS?

today's word

from Yourdictionary.com:

Today's Word:
Levirate (verb)

Pronunciation: ['le-vê-reyt, -rêt, le-'vi-rêt]

Definition: The practice of marrying the widow of one's brother, as required by ancient Hebrew law or followed by some native North American nations.

Usage: Not very common any more in the English-speaking world, which explains the uncertainty about the pronuciation.

Suggested Usage: Best used when you want to talk about marrying your brother's wife and only want subscribers to yourDictionary.com's Word of the Day to understand what you are talking about. See also sororate (sê-'ro-rêt) "to marry your wife's sister or sisters, usually after the wife has died or proven barren." Terms like these should allay any concerns that women are making no headway in their struggle for equal rights.

(FYI, today's Spanish word was coño.)

Earth sandwich

Patrick, one of the top ten people in LA (you didn't see the article in LA Magazine?), kindly posted a link to a fun NPR piece, which I will paste below. Patrick wins a prize for the best comment my silly blog has received thus far. The prize is this here free publicity.

If you go to the website http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html (I will fix the link once I download another version of FIrefox. Until then you must copy and paste.), you can find this great tool that allows you to see where you'd have to go on the planet to make an "earth sandwich"--to sandwich the earth between two pieces of bread. Living here in Chicago, if I were to place a piece of bread here on my floor, I'd have to float another one in the ocean east of Australia in order to make an earth sandwich. I find this highly amusing and sadly unlikely to actually happen (oops, I think I just split an infinitive).

Speaking of sandwiches, my roommate Allie tells me that her favorite sandwich as a child was--get this--peanut butter, mayonnaise, and lettuce. "It's an Indonesian flavor," she claims. Allie clearly has a sophisticated palate. My favorite sandwich remains pastrami-cottage cheese-banana bread.

Anyway, here's the article...it mentions Pekin, IL!

*************

Krulwich on Science
By Robert Krulwich

Dig a Hole to China? Try a Sandwich Instead

Weekend Edition - Saturday, June 17, 2006 · Let's suppose -- just for sake of argument -- that you had a drill capable of plowing below where you are standing right now and grinding its way straight through the middle of the planet to the other side. Where would you end up?

Well, for all of you reading this in North America (and specifically in the 48 contiguous states) with very, very (I can't overemphasize this, so make it very, very, very, very) few exceptions, you would come out in the middle of an ocean. The U.S mainland is antipodal to the sea that is west of Australia, down near Antarctica. So if your mother puts you in the backyard and says "Dig a hole to China," bring along a wetsuit.

Unless -- and this is the fun part -- you happen to be standing in three (by my count) lower 48 state locations that are opposite land. They are near a Colorado highway, a Junior College campus also in Colorado and part of a Montana town. In all three spots, you could drill straight through and come up in a place where you might bump into the occasional seal and, in one place if you arrive at the right time of year, a scientist or two.

But don't take my word for it. Wikipedia has a map of world antipodes that you can look at. I found that map -- and a "find the opposite tool" -- on a blog run by Ze Frank.

Ze is a perfomer, satirist, essayist, composer, dancer and wonderfully weird guy who challenged his audience last month to create the world's first "Earth sandwich."

To make an Earth sandwich you must:

1. Put a piece of bread on the ground.

2. Have someone else put a piece of bread on the ground directly on the other side of the Earth from you.

3. Do this at the same exact time, so the Earth at that moment is "sandwiched" between two pieces of bread.

To inspire his audience, Ze composed a ballad, "If the Earth were a sandwich…"

It's hummable. Beautiful even.

So for the last few weeks, all over the world people have been rushing about, emailing, texting and trekking in an effort to arrange a simultaneous sandwich moment. This past week, apparently, it happened. Somebody in Spain put half a roll on the ground, and somebody in New Zealand put something breadlike opposite. Ta Dah!

(Except, instead of lying parallel as they would on a normal sandwich, the two pieces of bread may have been perpendicular to each other, making a kind of X-like structure. But... who's quibbling?)

It was Ze's challenge that got me thinking about antipodal Earth geography.

I found two towns in Illinois that were founded in the 1820s by settlers who thought they were on prairie directly opposite Chinese cities: Peking, Ill., and Canton, Ill. (Thank you, Ian Frazier, for writing an essay on this subject in The New Yorker.)

With my engineer, Manoli Wetherell, and help from my NPR colleague Robert Smith, we decided to see where you would have to go on this planet to be able to dig a whole straight through to China.

So if you happen one day to be in Concordia, Argentina, which is about 150 miles north of Buenos Aires near the Uruguayan border, a concerted effort at digging would have you emerging somewhere pretty close to downtown Shanghai. Don't everybody buy a ticket there at once.

If you want to serve sandwiches along that route, I'd suggest something like chow mein tapas, on a roll

Take my furniture, please

I'm getting ready to head back to LA and pack up my belongings to bring back to Chicago. The problem is that I rented a minivan for the trip back, which means I have a LOT of stuff that won't fit, and only one week to get rid of it all! I am stressing! So if you're in LA and see anything in this picture you want, please make me an offer! C'mon, you need another bookshelf, don't you?

Happy birthday, Alex

My friend Alex recently celebrated his birthday. Upon learning that I was moving to Chicago, Alex had made a rather odd request of me: "You'll be in Illinois! You have to go to Pekin!"

Pekin is a small town about 3 hours downstate of Chicago. I'd never heard of it and couldn't imagine why Alex so desperately wanted me to visit it. He explained that Pekin's fame derives from the fact that, until 1980, it had an unusual high school mascot...horrifyingly, Pekin was the home of the Chinks. Moreover, a quick Google search revealed that the Chinks continue to have such a fierce loyalty among Pekin alumni that it is still possible to buy Chinks t-shirts in the back room of a Pekin apparel shop. Alex was determined to get his hands on some item of Chinks memorabilia and saw me as his only hope in procuring it.

My friend's fascination with Pekin may seem a little weird, especially given that he is Chinese-American. But he has a taste for irony, and the very revolting nature of such a mascot held an odd appeal. Perhaps he wants to reclaim the Chink label just as gays have reclaimed "queer". Or perhaps he just finds the idea hilarious that an item produced for midwestern racists could find its way into the hands of an Asian American in Los Angeles. Either way, he was determined to press me into his services. Given my midwestern upbringing, he thought I could easily pass as a racist and thus purchase the offending shirt: "I could never go to Pekin and get it myself," he argued, "but YOU can pretend your dad went to Pekin High!"

That is how I came to find myself driving into Pekin, IL a couple of weeks ago. I felt like some undercover agent trying to expose the seedy racist underbelly of a sleepy town. There wasn't much in Pekin: a few antique stores, a cafe, a senior home. I couldn't even find the high school that is now home to the Pekin Dragons. But I was determined not to leave until I had thoroughly inspected the place. I was losing hope of finding any trace of the Chinks when I drove by a t-shirt shop on the edge of downtown. They were about to close, so I pulled up and went in to check it out. I saw a lot of Pekin t-shirts, but nary a Chink.

"Can I help you?" asked the lady at the silk-screening counter.
"I'm, um, looking for a present for my godfather. He went to school in Pekin and I was passing by and thought I'd get him something that said 'Pekin' on it."
"You mean the Pekin CHINKS?"

I gulped, uncomfortable with the way she so nonchalantly pronounced the offending word.

"Uh, I guess it would've been the Chinks at that time..."

She motioned me to an unmarked door at the back of the shop.

"This is where we keep the Chinks stuff. I guess we oughta keep it locked, heh."

She opened the door, and I gaped. The inside of the room was lined with shelves of red and grey t-shirts, each printed with 'Pekin Chinks.'

"Wow," I said, "You still print these?"

"Oh, yeah, the alumni want the old Chinks stuff. Nobody wanted to change the name. We've got travel mugs, too!"

With her help, I selected a complete set of Chinks items: a t-shirt, coffee mug, "Once a Chink, always a Chink" travel mug, and a beer cozy reading "Official Chink Drink." I thanked her for her help ("My godfather will love these!") and left the store, feeling kind of dirty as I clutched my bag of Chinks crap. Before heading out, I stopped by the Fast Dragon Chinese restaurant, confirming that there were indeed actual Asian people living in Pekin. I didn't ask the restaurant employees what they thought about Pekin alums wandering through town in Chinks garb, but their presence in town reinforced the fact that using a racial slur for a high school mascot is just not okay.

Once home, I packed up Alex's birthday box and pondered what it all meant. Racism runs deep in the heartland. But how should I feel about buying this stuff? I decided that the birthday present was in some way a mockery of anyone who would view such items with nostalgia, a way of making ridiculous the fact that anyone would actually buy a Chinks shirt from the back room of a seedy little shop in a dead little town. Rather than simply denouncing racism, Alex makes it into something absurd, a farce. Ridicule is perhaps the more powerful tactic.

urban canoeing

Since I'm not cycling, I suddenly have all this time for non-bike related activities. I am ticking things off my to-do list. Free concert in Millenium Park...check. Summerdance...check. Item #3 was to canoe down the Chicago river. On Friday the household (Allie, summer houseguest Douglas, and me) plus one Luke rented canoes next to the river near Belmont and paddled down to Lake Street, a 4-hour round trip if you're a slightly lazy canoeist. The trip got pretty interesting as we headed downtown, passing under all the major streets, rounding the Greyhound station at Goose Island, and finally ending up lunching on peanut butter sandwiches while dodging architecture tour boats and barges in the city center.

Betty and the Virgen

This is my favorite storefront in Pilsen: a place that sells perfumes and cosmetics. I love the fact that Betty Boop shares equal billing with the Virgen of Guadalupe. The dark-skinned Virgen (who supposedly appeared to Juan Diego in 1531, speaking to him in his native Indian language of Nahuatl), is an important symbol of Mexican identity and Mexican feminism. In the 1810 war for independence, Miguel Hidalgo's army carried images of the Virgen. When Zapata's troops entered Mexico City in 1914, they carried Guadalupan banners. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers also employed images of the Virgen.

What does Betty Boop, the animated vixen from the 1930s, have to do with the Virgen? Surely the juxtaposition of the two can't be random. I think they're going for some sort of madonna/whore duality.

busy, sort of...

Watching soccer at Efebos cafe in Pilsen.


I haven't posted all week. I've had to follow both the World Cup AND the Tour, so who has time? The Tour is a little blemished this year by the suspension of the two favorites and Valverde's crash, but I haven't lost any interest. I love these "boring" early stages where the lesser-known riders try for a lucky breakaway that earns their sponsor a little camera time (Did you know that Agritubel makes tubular metal products for livestock pens? And that Bouygues Telecom is a French mobile phone company?). Then comes the agony of the riders off the front as the sprinters' teams reel them in a minute at a time...Can they hang on for a surprise victory? Maybe...? Nope! The dynamics of these flat stages and the sprinter's competition aren't changed at all by the absence of some of the general classification contenders.

It's a good thing I have lots of cycling to follow on the internet, because I haven't been able to ride my bike at all since I did a road race in Whitewater, WI a couple of weeks ago. My right knee, which had been feeling reasonably okay all spring, got sore and remains so. I'm not going to ride on it like this, so I am suspending myself indefinitely. Unfortunately I had to miss the state championships last weekend, which I'd been targeting for months. Pbbbbt. It is back to the pool and yoga class. I don't imagine I will ever be able to really ride again. I am dealing with that about as poorly as you might expect.

On the positive side, however, I am using the "free" time to work on a fundraiser for the radio station of the Oaxaca Teacher's union. It's going to be July 23 from 2-8PM at 1821 S. Allport. We're going to grill some carne asada and sell beer and have some music by local groups here in Pilsen. It should be fun, and hopefully we'll make enough money to buy some new equipment for the station, which was destroyed when state police violently broke up a teacher's strike on June 14. You can read more about that here:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/15/1411208

I have to go around the neighborhood this afternoon and try to hit people up for raffle donations. We'll see how that goes!

What is that thing?

The only dog my niece has ever seen is Rufus, the 100 pound Rhodesian Ridgeback. Can this creature be of the same species? Perhaps it is a big rat?