allaboutgeorge's unstorytime beta

It’s empty out. I’m coming back from a long day at the newsroom. I’m eastbound at 19th Street, stopped at Telegraph Avenue and waiting for the light to change. Then I notice this couple, her in a lovely summer dress, him suited and booted, standing on the corner and waiting for the light to change.

Times like this, I wish my Nokia N82 still worked. Best cameraphone I ever had, quick on the draw, easy to just swing up out of my pocket and into my hand, flick the lens protector aside with a fingernail tip and pop, just like that, a picture. But the maxim about the best camera in the world being the one in your hand still holds.

So up comes my Samsung Captivate, and there I go frantically touching icons and sliding panels to get the app I want activated, and there goes the shot as the couple steps off the sidewalk and are halfway across Telegraph when the shutter finally goes click.

More talk today with an unexpected connection (re-)made over the weekend: I got to have a beer at The Commonwealth and an extremely interesting conversation with Travis Campbell. I used to read one of his sites, The Black Informant, back in 2006 after I’d started Negrophile.

It turns out he’s moved from Southern California to the East Bay, and he was free to meet me after work today before I had to go to choir practice. He was full of questions about the sites I read nowadays, the opinions I have about certain high-Klout score-holders and the potential of black media and rich content plays. I think

In the wake of last week’s announcements about the coming changes at the newspaper, all sorts of interesting people are appearing. The first one I saw this week was Luke Stangel.

Now, like many folks at the paper, I don’t own an iPad. But I do use the Web, play with a smartphone and consider myself open to looking in on and making content for other people to use online. So when Luke came up to Walnut Creek and showed off the app that his company Tackable has created for the Bay Area News Group, I had to hear more.

I asked a lot of questions. Luke gave me the answers he could give at that point. I have a feeling I’m not done here.

Speaking of places I like to go eat? Ankita and I have had brunch here several times, and she still likes to go by during the day when she can for hot chocolate. I envy her the times she’d stop in and someone like DJ fflood would be spinning.

So it’s Sunday and I wind up running around downtown and my corner of Lake Merritt with laundry and returning a library book and running into a fellow choir member. It’s a wonder I even had time to eat!

I’ve been eating the meatball sub for several years here, but I don’t think I’d ever looked up at the wall and noticed this award. Come here, buy one and give it an order and you’ll see just what can happen.

After brunch at one of those places I can never stop going to (Lynne and Lu’s Escapade Cafe on Grand Avenue — know how I know it’s one of those places? I used to be its Foursquare mayor, and my former boss took someone he was interviewing there, looked it up and saw it and told me, and I hadn’t set foot in the place in weeks), I went over to Scream Sorbet with the homie Amy Gahran.

I’m glad places like this exist. Sure, people would get along just fine without a place where flavors like vanilla and almond, orange and rooibos, lavender and lemon bend and blend together.

But on a day when you feel like stepping outside of typical culinary profiling, I’d miss not seeing the lime-mint combo (which I didn’t see, and would’ve gladly tried) in a scoop — or the plain-but-fancy chocolate I went with, or even Amy’s melon.

Outside in:

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Going to see Dr. Strangelove at the Paramount tomorrow night. Tempted to sneak in a camcorder and bootleg it, just to see the reaction.

August 26, 2011 12:15 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@Sexhammer

Rod VonFleischhammer

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Oh. My. God. Dr. Strangelove is playing in downtown Oakland. MUST. FIND. FRIEND WITH CAR!

August 26, 2011 8:39 am via txtReplyRetweetFavorite

@givergirl

ThAfro

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Happy weekend everybody! I’m hitting Dr. Strangelove at the Paramount tonight - see you there?

August 26, 2011 5:15 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@dto510

dto510

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Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) at The Paramount! #nofightinginthewarroom #preciousbodilyfluids

August 26, 2011 7:52 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@timsnelling

Tim Snelling

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Great crowd for Dr. strangelove tonight. Including organist playing “we’ll meet again” (@ Paramount Theatre Oakland) http://t.co/m3JXGfp

August 26, 2011 8:00 pm via picplzReplyRetweetFavorite

@agahran

Amy Gahran

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About to see one of my favorite movies: Dr Strangelove, at the Paramount. I think I know 1/4 of the people here! Hello pals! #mineshaftgap

August 26, 2011 8:10 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@anca

Anca Mosoiu

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Best overheard at Dr. Strangelove screening in Oakland: 30 years later and it’s still true!

August 26, 2011 10:20 pm via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@Kornlock

Jon Korn

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Just saw Dr. Strangelove at The Paramount in #Oakland. Honestly need some time to take it all in acting-wise. #PeterMotherEffingSellers

August 26, 2011 10:42 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@emasitakc

emasita c

Inside out:

I have to wonder what it says about the city, that we can have events like this one along a particular continuum of taste and vision and affinity, and that these events tend to occur in certain neighborhoods at certain times. Even if the crowd looks and sounds diverse, it doesn’t always feel that way.

I miss the Parkway Theater. I want a new Parkway. I want movies like this all over Oakland, not just on Friday, and crowds clamoring like this, not just on Broadway, and I want it all by tomorrow.

I thought I was going to get to go hang out with geek comedian Heather Gold, who was in town for several days. We keep trying to meet up to go out and sing karaoke. I made it over to the Deco Lounge around 8 p.m. so I could get right on at 9 p.m. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Deco plays host to Eileen Murphy, who can sing anything and whose Annie’s Social Club stints made many TechKaraoke SF monthly singalongs all the more memorable.

Things I remember:

• Leading off the night with Radiohead’s “Nude” (I don’t sing or often hear slow songs that aren’t already standards; I can get through it pretty passably as long as I remember to pace my breathing the longer the song lasts) and Toto’s “Africa” (I tried it on during the sendoff for an Oakland Soft Rock Choir member last weekend; the conversational-register verses turned out to contrast well with belt-along choruses).
• Getting annoyed at the guy who guessed I’d be singing Michael Jackson songs in honor of what would have been his 53rd birthday.
• The usual lovely and sublime experience of seeing people sing songs I didn’t necessarily expect to hear.

Purple Platybus at Wal-Mart

I need to remember to make the decision — the next one, the fateful one, the one that means retaining control of myself when it is the right thing to do or relinquishing control when it is the right thing to do or both.

After yesterday, I had two reminders of that need. I was heading east on Highway 24, uphill toward the Caldecott Tunnel, when I saw this big purple schoolbus with a platypus painted on the back. Its school-bus door on the passenger side was flapping open. In the backup before the tunnel, I managed to pull up to it in slow traffic, roll down my window and holler “Can I ride?”

The driver double-took at me. Then his friend leaned out the door and hollered if I knew where a Walmart was. I said “Follow me.”

I led the bus through the tunnel, then east along 24, north onto 680 and west along Highway 4 to Martinez, off at Muir and then along a frontage road to Arnold Road where it was. The bus followed me into the lot and the two men aboard bounded out of the bus and over to my car to give me bear hugs. They had Australian accents. They had driven overnight up from Los Angeles, and they said that their GPS system had started acting up when they left I-5 and headed over along I-580 and into Oakland and onto 24 where I saw them.

Steve Jobs resignation on Twitter

Then I go to the office and, later on, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announces his resignation. We set up a live chat using the tool we’ve used so often, Cover It Live. But then I did something I shouldn’t have done. I added Twitter hashtags #SteveJobs and #Apple to the feed so they would automatically show up. Naturally, the screen is just spewing a firehose of tweets and retweets and lame jokes and scammers posting links hoping for random clicks.

Then a would-be commenter said:

I took the hashtags out of the chat setup. Then I started trying to talk to the dozen or so viewers who remained. They were staring at the screen, I guess, just waiting for someone to say something. For the firehose to stop spewing. For anything real to happen. So I started throwing out a few links and asking a few questions, and eventually one person asked a question and another one joined in, and something like a dialogue, something better than a feed came into view.

I walked out the door of the Oakland Tribune office on Oakport Street earlier today after looking at this front page. Without a doubt, it stands as a Bay Area newspaper’s finest hour — so says the Pulitzer Prize committee.

I know I should be saying something practical and serious, something in keeping with the very real bloodshed on the way, the undesired separation many talented reporters and editors and photographers and online folks face from their livelihoods and community standings.

But I left to go over to the Contra Costa Times building in Walnut Creek and attend the all-hands meeting explaining what management could explain, and as I went, all I could think about was the ground trembling underneath my feet and the ceaselessly blue Tuesday sky overhead.

Any Sunday night, you can salt and bring water to boil, break strands of spaghetti into halves and toss them under the surface of a now-roiling pot.

You can find the Swiss chard from the Berkeley farmers market that Ankita chopped up, add them to the organic marinara spaghetti sauce and the absolutely amazing vegetarian Italian sausages you’ve probably eaten more of than anything this year.

You can eat well for an entire week, if you pack a Tupperware container every morning before you leave for work, and the cafeteria workers will ask you if you’ve been on vacation when they see you pass through randomly.

All of these pictures we’ve been taking of each other

We make them look older than they naturally do

All of these pictures coworkers lovers and brothers

Mini-mementos so we don’t forget me and you

Are we supposed to revisit them later on in this life

or post and then doublecheck so we know that it was real

Are we supposed to bone up in case of a pop quiz

Mini-mementos in case we need to look and feel

As we compose our shots and press on our shutters

Ossify everything opposite our eyes for all time

Think of the last time you’ll do it and try not to shudder

Your documentation convicts you of a high crime

Too often, I take pictures and they’re just pictures. Sometimes they’re merely documents. Often they’re useful place-holders. Occasionally I’ll try to take a picture that might work as art, or an obviously aesthetically effort-laden approach. I have had the good fortune to hang out with James Knox, Gwen Harlow or a Thomas Hawk.

I don’t usually recognize the best pictures I take for something other than an image, unexpectedly representative of larger forces and processes, until much later. And maybe I’m just looking at this image in several of what may be many wrong-headed, clumsy, ham-fisted ways. I could be overthinking a plate of beans. But something about this picture speaks to me. Its not a technically brilliant or clear capture, but I’m pretty sure I’d favorite it if I came across it in someone else’s photo-stream.

I don’t need a Foursquare page to tell me that I’m guilty of eating out at the same half-dozen places over and over in Oakland (or Berkeley or San Francisco). What I do apparently need — what it takes — is to read about a closing restaurant in Oakland Local and then for Ankita to suggest we go there.

So we pull off I-980 into downtown and thread the streets we’re able to get through because 14th Street is blocked off for the Art and Soul Festival. Eventually we park over at the corner of 17th and Franklin streets, and walk down to the door. We get seated and we stare at the menu. I get a beer and think about just how hungry I am.

Ankita’s dinner and my own pancit take a while to arrive, as business has picked up in the half-hour since our arrival. Both are delicious.

Leaving the restaurant afterward, I do a double-take a few doors down at the iCamera shop that has gone out of business. I had been taking my cameras to them since the late 1990s. There is a lesson here for me if I can focus long enough.

Cup of tea and iPhone

I don’t think I’ve talked all that often about living in a mixed household.

It’s not that hard a slog, or even that noteworthy. We get by just like folks from the same tribe do.

We just wind up stopping more often to ask questions and process answers.

We may not always have the same vocabulary for mutual experiences. That just means we work a little harder. But the work’s worth it. We both come away with a renewed appreciation for our differences.

I mean, an Android owner like me can always get something out of time spent with other kinds of mobile users, even if it’s just lulz. And an iPhone user like her can point and laugh at me whenever my phone seizes up and needs rebooting for the nth time.

It’s really very simple: She likes the ease and convenience her phone offers. I like the ability to tinker — and the constraints that come with having a non-default device.

Heh. Bet you thought I was going to talk about a different kind of mixed household, huh?

Maybe early next week I’ll take a swing at jotting down some things that have occurred to me in nearly 13 months since switching over from Symbian.

My badge

I’ve driven by the building once or twice. Drive-by sightseeing doesn’t really cut it though, does it? Not that I tried to make it stand in or stand up, make it more than it was. So when Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig emailed the invite, I said yes. Working out of the San Jose Mercury News newsroom meant it was mostly a straight shot over to Mountain View, barring the moment or two when I got turned around trying to actually find Highway 101.

And then I was there, pulling into the parking lot, dodging clouds of low-flying employees on those little baby-BMX bicycles and dashing over to the lobby of Building 43 to join members from the San Francisco Bay Area Black Journalists Association, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (Nor-Cal) and the Asian American Journalists Association (San Francisco Bay Area Chapter).

Google for journalists

Before the presentation

Then came forty-five minutes of tips and tricks about using Google more efficiently:

• Don’t worry about capitalization
• Remove results from your query by using a minus sign
• Use Control-F to find a phrase quickly (90% didn’t know to use function)
• Use quotations for specific phrase (“A Google A Day”)
• Search by file type (filetype:.doc, filetype:.pdf, filetype:.ppt) or site type (site:.gov, site:.au)
• Search within specific sites: site:apple.com, site:pizzahut.com
• Look for and use timing and location filters on left side of search-result page
• Currency conversion: “50 dollars in euros”
• Unit conversion: “500 kilometers in miles”
• Calculator: “194.43 + 73.17 + 20 + 3.25”
• Weather forecast for locations, local movie times, stock quotes
• Sort searches by relevance or by subject (size, color, type)
• Search by image (Google Goggles)
• Find academic and research documents in Scholar.google.com
• Google Translate (or the Translate app) for language tools — translated search, text, Web page
• Hit Google Trends and Google Insights for Search (seasonality of searches: “wedding planning” peaks in late December; regionality of searches; google.com/publicdata to search/visualize public data “unemployment rate”; Google Fusion Tables)
• Google Maps: directions, but also reporting to include visuals in stories
• Google Street View (parking, landmarks, screenshots of buildings “before” imagery — look for updates: followyourworld.appspot.com (asked about Google Earth layers)
• Visit YouTube (stats: 48+ hrs. of video every minute, 2 billion videos watched each day, #3 site in U.S., #2 search engine, 70% of traffic is international)
• Check out youtube.com/citizentube to highlight citizen news.
• Visit youtube.com/trends (most searched for name for pronunciation: “Kesha”)
• To embed a video at a certain point, use this formula at the end of the YouTube.com link (“#t=23m15s”) like so:

I kept taking notes, despite looking away every now and then to see stuff like this volleyball game outside.

Michelle Fitzhugh Craig

Group shot at evening’s end

Amphitheatre Parkway

I pay for the Wall Street Journal (though lately I’m regretting that). I don’t pay for the New York Times (though lately I’m regretting that). I work for the Bay Area News Group (though lately … I bet you thought I was going to repeat myself, now, didn’t you?).

I know what I’m willing to pay for. More and more, that willingness is being driven by what I see inside and outside organizations that set them up.

I know Vallejo and Vacaville residents are making similar calculations, using the same cold equations driving everybody: where to spend their attention, their time, their money?

I hope they make the right call, for their sake and for mine.

Related articles

• Porous Paywalls (futurelab.net)
• Paywalls Will Not Save Journalism (slog.thestranger.com)
• Blocking the new version of the NYTimes paywall (gist.github.com)
• More U.S. newspapers installing paywalls as trend of charging for online content continues (knightcenter.utexas.edu)

From transcript:

If you or someone you know ride San Francisco’s BART transportation system, take a listen to this. You may have just been hacked. Dan Simon is live in San Francisco with the story.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GRIFFIN: The hacking group Anonymous strikes again, this time targeting BART’s San Francisco Bay Area rapid transit system. It appears that the names and phone numbers were hacked from the BART Web site and posted online. The group took credit for the breach in a YouTube message.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have been watching the actions of San Francisco, blocking communication of cell phone devices is unacceptable. The Bay Area Rapid Transit has decided that blocking cellular communication is the correct way to scare off protesters.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GRIFFIN: Dan Simon covering the story for us in San Francisco.

And, Dan, I got to be honest with you. I do not understand what Anonymous is so ticked off about here.

DAN SIMON, CNN SILICON VALLEY CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is what anonymous likes to do. They like to target organizations who they perceive are limiting free speech.

And as you heard there in the clip, there was a situation last week where BART shut down the cell phone communication for all the riders, all of its passengers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And the reason why they did that is there was supposed to be a protest last week. BART has been battling an image problem for sometime. There are people that believe that its police department has been overzealous. There were a couple high profile incidents, most recent one occurring just last month where BART police shot and killed a homeless man who was allegedly wielding a knife.

Well, despite all that, people think that BART has gone overboard, and there was supposed to be this. Well, to thwart that protest BART shut down the cell phone communication for all of the passengers and that ticked off Anonymous. So, they decided to hack into its Web site — and that’s exactly what they did.

GRIFFIN: And what kind of information has been released because of that?

SIMON: Well, this was an external Web site, not the main BART Web site, but where people have log-in information, where people set up accounts. And so, what they did is they went into that Web site, and it’s called mybart.org. And they published all the users, names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. No financial information compromised.

But, you know, if you have an account of this people who has an account, you know, it may aggravate you to see your name and e-mail address and phone number up on a public venue.

GRIFFIN: YES. And so, now, what’s going to happen today? There’s some warning for riders today?

SIMON: Well, Anonymous has said, we want to have a protest. So, today, at 5:00, it asked everybody who was upset about this, about shutting down the cell phones to show up at a San Francisco BART station at 5:00, and their goal is to try to disrupt service for commuters.

BART obviously is concerned about this, and they have not announced their plans to try prevent the protest and keep everything running on time. But nonetheless, you know, there’s going to be this protest at 5:00 local time in San Francisco. So, stay tuned.

GRIFFIN: And we will. Thanks a lot, Dan. Appreciate that. Interesting story.

Related articles

• Anonymous hacks BART after wireless shutdown; protests planned for Monday (boingboing.net)

It would be silly of me to try to pull some deeper meaning out of winning both of the pub-trivia contests I entered this summer: one in early June at The Den at The Fox in Oakland, and another one tonight at The Albatross in Berkeley.

I got there, and met Dawn and Jay eating some barbecue and trying to come up with a good team name. We went with Jay’s first pass at it, a play on Chomsky’s classic treatise “Manufacturing Consent.” Their friend Janet, who turned out to be a former Oakland Tribune writer from the paper’s Robert Maynard days, asked me “Are you smart?” I just smiled.

Dawn explained how she’d met me after choir rehearsal at The Den’s contest, and I filled in with the lucky bit about the assist I got from the random guy who turned out to run his own contest Mondays in San Francisco’s Mission District.

I look at many of my friends, many of whom possess and manifest several kinds of intelligences before lifting a finger to get out of bed each day, with gratitude and admiration, and I ought to try to remember their examples when I put myself in situations that reward reasoning, memory, good guesses and luck.

I think I’m going to try to treat more situations as if they were pub-trivia contests, and as if the people around me are on my team (or on competing teams). You can say “gamification” if that’s what it makes you think of. Maybe it’s just a more enjoyable model for gaming than what’s going lately.

Showing up means you’ll be there when she lands, even if you’re early and she was explicit about when her flight was going to land.

It means you get the gifts of parking off to the side of the waiting point and watching travelers reunite at all manner of speeds: the slow zombie shuffle, the all-business cheek-peck and carry-on luggage clean-and-jerk, the extended-family flood-the-zone swarm.

And it means that when you see her gliding down the escalator, glassy-eyed and glum after hours in the air, she will never see you barreling bullet-time-stylee between bodies toward her.

All she will remember is you materializing against her, all unexpected arms carefully cradling you, ready to drive north — and then, after about fifteen minutes, exiting the highway at an unfamiliar area the instant you realize exactly why inbound city traffic won’t work, driving south again past the airport and east across the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge to the East Bay.

Later, when you’re home and your cat has finally deigned to remember her, and the two are curled up and softly snoring in tandem nearby, you can think about all of those songs you’ve been singing recently.

Hours later, you do the showing-up thing at a restaurant in the Temescal neighborhood of North Oakland.

It means you get to warm up by singing in public on a street-corner.

It means passers-by will look back as they pass, or pause respectfully and clap when songs end. It means getting your fellow choir-members to stand in a doorway and look a little like the louche, up-for-it entertainers they forget that they look like because they’re too busy with their open throats singing Bryan Adams and Paul Young and Peter Cetera and George Michael.

It means walking back to a semi-private room when the cake is brought out and crowbaring your mouth open and surprising the soft-rock out of someone celebrating turning 40 among friends and family.

And it means walking back to your car after a really good margherita pizza topped with arugula leaves and a couple of glasses of Linden Street Brewery Burning Oak Black Lager and a renewed appreciation for what can happen when you show up.

I’ve only ever used the wireless service connection a few times inside BART stations. Before its arrival, being underground was just something to suffer through. What did it matter? I was just like everyone else, heading somewhere where there’d be a signal. Without it, I was just using the phone in my hand or my laptop to play music or write or zone out.

But BART has changed, not least since January 1, 2009. And as shocked and irritated as I am about the cut-off switch that BART officials threw in advance of a protest that never really materialized, it’s really par for the course. This is how things are now. On the way up to Oregon last month, after stopping for the night near Mt. Shasta, I look in on Twitter and I see people talking about BART police shooting another man. It’s not the service interruption that I worry about on the rarer and rarer occasions I choose to ride trains.

Because you are sitting at the table even when the table and its participants merit overturning. Because policy matters, and much pain is worth Bene Gesserit-ing through in order for the best possible policy to evolve and eventually exist. Because no one owns anything anymore, not least because where would we put it all? Because in this new terrain, no one owns their co-workers, their fans, their supporters, not even their enemies. Because the extent to which you are passively or actively ignorant of these things is the exact extent to which you and all those above you will be owned. Because if you are careless toward small audiences, how can whatever you think you are saying to large audiences be trusted, and why should you be let anywhere near the responsibility and honor of speech toward both kinds of audiences?

Micah and Valerie

I don’t know what to tell you about nights like last night, except that they exist. If the philosophers are right, and I have no empirical evidence that they are not (but plenty of hope and, even, after a fashion, faith that they are), nights like last night never stop existing. They exist in an endless thrumming present, ceaselessly vivid.

In my memory of one of those nights, there will always be a short, compact, powerfully built young black man wearing a loose white knit cap and singing along with the karaoke machine at the White Horse Inn on Telegraph Avenue to the Dixie Chicks‘ “Goodbye Earl,” and something in me will marvel at this choice of song and his poise in its performance. There will be a young black woman hiding her face as I take her picture one moment, and then bounding up to a microphone to sing David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” There will be another young black woman, dark-skinned and lean with blonde streaks flecking her hairline, who will essay and exceed expectations with renditions of Amy Winehouse‘s “Valerie” (offered explicitly in memoriam) and Adele‘s “Rolling In The Deep.”

But it’s not forever

I go for these moments. I don’t always know or notice when they happen. I try to pay attention, observe them as they pass, inhabit them and watch them disappear. Trapped in amber, they do no one any good.

More often, I get the moments with the three young women wearing thin summer dresses over jeans or tights, shouting along in unison to Kings of Leon‘s ”Sex on Fire.” Those moments are still fun. I just don’t find them as transfixing. They don’t feel so powerful to me. They aren’t beacons broadcasting to some part of me that isn’t still or yet aware that it is mid-2011, that there are dozens of opportunities and millions of ways to inhabit and perform and live in and among bits of music, to try on pleasure and try out identity and register fandom.

But the moments that are beacons matter. At least, that’s what I remember feeling when the whole room was shouting along to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and I snuck out to my car, popped the trunk and pulled out the electric guitar I’d used in a gig earlier that evening, snuck back into the bar and waited for Beelzebub and his infamous, inevitable devil-put-aside-for-me.

With the stock market doing that rollercoaster thing lately (even for a guy like me with zero stock-market exposure), it’s disorienting to consider talk of alost decade. It reminds me that ten years ago today, I got laid off from Salon(just a day after writing one of those tech-gadget stories that feels really disorienting to look back on from this vantage). It took me a month to find a new gig (copy-editing and page-designing at the Contra Costa Times). I must’ve been really distracted then. I feel sure I would have remembered reading something like this New York Times article about then-President Bush and the Clinton budget surplus.

It does feel a little strange to have stuck with it even after it caught on and went wide and then huge. That’s how it felt like it happened: first it was narrow and then it went wide; first it was tiny and then it became this huge thing, encompassing rhythms and revolutions and more. When I start going back through the Internet Archive’s version of how I spent the last 11 years, it’ll be interesting to look at posts’ word counts and see how many posts could have been tweets. And that reminds me: I need to set up ThinkUp again.

I’ve lost about twenty pounds since I started half-heartedly going to the gym a few months ago. I’m down a pants size (now 40 waist, 30 inseam). At some point, I’ll have the glasses I want; for now, the glasses I have work well and the contacts I’ll soon acquire should help me see more clearly and comfortably.

I’ve done lots of stuff to my hair, but I think I may be happiest with what I’ve had the last year: a mohawk. I can maintain it with a beard-trimmer, my bathroom mirror and a lot of squinting. It’s been a pleasant addition to my residual self-image. I don’t think I’ll mind (years from now) looking back at pictures of myself all that much.

It’s been about two-and-a-half months since I saw that dratted documentary and stopped eating a bunch of stuff. I don’t think the smaller of the “v” words is exactly what I’m doing, but it’s fairly close.

Though there’s plenty of room for improvement, I think I like how I look and feel — I think I’m closer to how I should look at this age.

Yesterday I stood in the backyard of a house on MacArthur Boulevard on the edge of Trestle Glen just off Lake Merritt and sang in public for the first time as part of the Oakland Soft Rock Choir.

I’d heard of the choir for a couple of years, but I couldn’t help but gush about them when a member stopped by the Den at the Fox’s trivia night in early June. I’d remembered seeing a note on a certain social network about their recent auditions, and it turned out they were losing a guy. So a few weeks later, after I’d returned from a mid-month trip to Las Vegas, I made it to a Tuesday practice. It’s been nothing but love, fun and classic tunes since, and I can’t wait for the next gig.

Value Your Love by allaboutgeorge

I don’t understand all that much about Wall Street

That much money might as well be in a Vegas casino

I don’t understand all that much about capital

Born yesterday and still they say ‘what does he know?’

And so I know I value your love

I’m gonna show I value your love

Perform like a pro ’cause I value your love

Oh, baby, oh how I value your love

I can’t claim to comprehend market ups and downs

But I recognize a solid investment when I spot it

I can’t claim to comprehend pennies or pounds

But I resonate when you resound: proof that you got it

And so I know I value your love

I’m gonna show I value your love

Perform like a pro ’cause I value your love

Oh, baby, oh how I value your love

But as little as I know about money

I’ve only been dumber about one thing

That’s been letting go of your love, honey

When I should’ve been telling and showing

Every day how I value your love

In every way how I value your love

Can’t play ’cause I value your love

Gotta pay ’cause I value your love

Formerloverism by allaboutgeorge

When I met you I agreed that you could do anything. I took you for a friend, an ally and a confidant. Then you said those words, like you could say anything. I took you for an enemy, the one you didn’t want. And my words don’t match your rhythm: formerloverism. I looked all around me, saw my friends side with you. They said I made mistakes, and my mistakes were plain. I looked all around you as they called on me to change. You say I frightened you. Now everyone is under strain. Call you by a name not given: formerloverism. I spell. I cast. I run my mouth real fast. I throw these stones. I hide my hands. I keep looking for words that will last but where I stand, it slips on sand.

That’s actually not a bad representation. I’m not one of those people who loves or loathes his looks. I don’t mind accuracy. I’d just like to not be bored. Somehow this manages it.

Today I’m thinking of those glasses that Superman dons in order to pretend to be Clark Kent, and of that “Cowboys and Aliens” movie.

Other things I am thinking about include Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times “X-Men: First Class” column and Charles M. Blow’s New York Times “Captain America” column and Jeff Yang’s San Francisco Chronicle “Captain America” column. I’m thinking of Darren Franich’s Entertainment Weekly column about Laurence Fishburne as the next Perry White. I’m thinking of my co-worker Randy who’s working through Grant Morrison’s “Supergods.”

And (thanks to Bernard Tarver) I’m thinking of a certain webseries.

But both pairs of my glasses failed today. And the One True Frames I want are on back-order with an estimated time-of-arrival of a month.

And there was this brief exchange with tech support at my hosting service:

Please wait for a site operator to respond.

You are now chatting with ‘xxxx’

xxxx: Hi. How may I help?

George: I’ve got trouble.

George: I can’t access any of my domains.

George: Type them into a browser? Nothing shows up.

George: I get “Error establishing a database connection”

George: And that’s if I get anything at all.

xxxx: checking

George: Actually, scratch that. One still works: notherethere.com

George: But allaboutgeorge.com and negrophile.com don’t work

xxxx: overloaded machine

George: Huh. Saintandkings.com still works.

xxxx: sys admins are looking at it

xxxx: it is not super high

George: What’s overloaded it?

George: Is overloading common?

xxxx: so some stuff will do it

xxxx: probably another customer

George: … am I the customer? o_0

George: I didn’t do it, did I?

xxxx: there are multiple vps’s on the physical machine

xxxx: do you have a suspicion about a particular domain?

George: No.

George: I don’t know any of my virtual neighbors.

xxxx: that would be normal…

xxxx: being a ‘V’ps, you have a virtual machine on a physical machine, and

xxxx: there are others on it

xxxx: so it is more isolated than shared hosting

xxxx: but not as bulletproof as a dedicated physical machine

George: And I haven’t uploaded any content lately (if ever) that might tip things over

George: *nods* That makes sense.

xxxx: it is probably due in part to us upgrading the operating system recently

xxxx: we are working the bugs out,

xxxx: but it could be another cust

xxxx: which we hunt down and stop

George: Is it possible to tell when it happened?

George: Might that be useful in some way?

xxxx: if you shoot me an email i’ll let you know when they let me know

xxxx: xxxxx@dreamhost.com from the email address of your acct

Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

So, yeah.

I can’t believe I still get to log into this thing and post any­thing I want. It’s not as if I for­get that I pay for the right. It feels like this rarely exer­cised priv­i­lege. I was going to say it feels like vot­ing, but (even today — espe­cially today) that’s still a right.
There wouldn’t even be this post with­out me notic­ing Ursula’s 30-day blog­ging chal­lenge on a cer­tain social net­work. I might have a few more posts in me this month; stranger things have hap­pened. At the very least, it will be an excuse to see just how dis­in­ter­me­di­ated my atten­tion span has got­ten lately with so many won­der­ful toys ser­vices around and about on the Internets.

I woke up way too early after a busy week­end where I did as lit­tle as pos­si­ble unless it was extremely plea­sur­able. I made it over to the air­port and saw her off. I will see her when I see her, slightly less than a fort­night from now.

I think instead of lis­ten­ing to me try­ing not to sneeze, you should press play on this video. Or you press play on this Sound­cloud file. Don’t do both: it’ll just dis­tract you. If I get around to upload­ing the unholy union of the two, that’ll be just peachy. I like mak­ing music, I do, I do: another nice lit­tle self-reminder. Those are pleas­ant, aren’t they?

Shamsher vs. headphones by allaboutgeorge