five tons of flax

November 30

I wrote my first Wikipedia entry today, on metamagnetism. Doesn't it look spiffy? I wrote it because I didn't know what the word meant when I ran across it, and I had a hard time finding out. As they say, no problem should ever have to be solved twice if you can avoid it.

The experiment's proceeding apace. I'm getting something that looks suspiciously like data. I'm sure there's something crazy still in store, though. Hofstadter's law and all that (I try not to think about it too much).

November 10

Reflection: writing for the internet, one runs the risk of being distracted by the internet.

I finished reading this book called "Double Duce" by the famous Aaron Cometbus. It was incredibly enjoyable, but I found myself hard pressed to say exactly why when talking to people about it. It is well and tightly written, of human interest, and gives insight (albeit highly specific) into punk culture. The book is more or less the story of Aaron's life in a punkhouse in Berkeley, and the lives of the crazy people who began to live with him. In Aaron's own words: "writing about miserable things in a way that made other people think they were exciting." The story is told in short, 1-3 page vignettes, each a mini-narrative of some particular event. Here is what makes the writing unique: each vignette is carefully crafted with exactly the right amount of detail and hindsight to make it both vivid and indicative of a larger truth. This is accomplished dozens of times through the book.

Well, it doesn't sound any more convincing in print than in person. Maybe I'm not good at talking about books. But I really liked it a lot. In part this is because of the punk theme, I'm sure. For quite a while I've had some interest and sympathy for the punk culture, without ever being anything like part of it. Between Mitch's comic, Cometbus, and a few punk-oriented shows I've seen lately, I've come into slightly closer contact. My friend Alex asked me to explain punk to him the other day. We were interrupted before I got anywhere, but he made me promise to try again. If I come up with anything that seems convincing, I may put it here.

For the time being, however, I jot down two ideas. First, the idea of "intentional poverty" as expressed in Cometbus. Reading that phrase made me think really hard for a while about a number of things. Second, the idea of Chinese punk rock. While bearing many similarites to its progenitor culture in the West, it seems quite different too, judging from Brain Failure (an admittedly small sample). I noticed in particular that while the themes of working-class pride and alienation from larger society are well represented, there is basically no anti-authoritarianism in the music. I guess it's not too hard to understand, is it? But then, punk usually isn't.

November 2

All signs point to China. More details to come.

October 29

I just returned from an excellent, though very tiring, "Halloween concert". It went from 5 to nearly 10 p.m. I had managed to call WMBR at the right moment to get free tickets, so I went with my friend Danielle, who I had not seen in awhile. It turned out to be good timing: she is moving to California on Monday!

So anyhow, it was a big punk/ska concert. In order of performance: Brain Failure, a punk band from Beijing (!), the Phenomenauts, with whom I was already well acquainted (SCI FI ROCKET ROLL!), River City Rebels, who played ska a big self-indulgently, the Street Dogs who put on a killer set (though with no reference to their Boston Irish punk progenitors, the Dropkick Murphys), and Big D and the Kids Table headlining. I had never heard of Big D before, but they play pretty high quality ska. The only disappointment was the River City Rebels. We spent a lot of time in the pit, fighting off 14 year old mosh fiends and dodging crowd surfers' feet as much as possible. Nonetheless, I got elbowed in the ribs once really hard, and Danielle got kicked in the eye and lost a contact lens. Such is the price of punk rock. Do I make it sound fun? Believe me, it was fun; the bruises are just to remind you the next morning how great it was.

I had planned to go out to a Halloween party too, but getting back to the apartment at 10:30 totally exhausted put the kibosh on that. That the party was out in Jamaica Plain was further disincentive. My awesome detective costume, whomped up at thrift stores in less than an hour, will have to make its debut later. Perhaps I shall wear it to lab on Monday.

Happy Halloween!

October 19

Man, I am planning such an update for this site! I went to China with the Harvard dragon boat club, and I will have lots to say about that, with lots of snazzy pictures, but it is all taking time to put together. At the same time, I am trying to get things into gear so that I will be ready when my experiment finally, finally comes back online after a hiatus of about 2 months. All this while recovering from food poisoning (curse you, Continental Airlines!). So, soon, soon.

September 18

Hurrah! A whole month has passed without web progress. Slow and steady or whatever.

This weekend was momentous, for it was my last dragon boat festival of the season. Others on the team are going to China in about two weeks, but I am not. So our day in Hartford was it. We drove down in the morning without any bad luck -- perhaps an ill omen in itself, as I shall relate. On the way, we saw another Tim Horton's, and Zoe made another excited call to her asleep boyfriend. Remarkably, the race organizers saw fit to have the local teams race early and the travelling teams later in the morning. This is not how it usually goes (Montreal, I am looking at you!). We were short-handed, so we borrowed four paddlers from a New Jersey breast-cancer survivors' team, as well as two more from some other team. Our first heat was great! We clocked the sixth-fastest time of the morning, putting us into the A-level bracket. Unfortunately, several of us had not paddled since Montreal, or at least not much, and we were not as commanding for the rest of the day. We ultimately placed eighth overall after two not really close but at least not embarrassing losses. It was not very helpful that one of the race officials decided to call us on our attempt to borrow paddlers from other teams -- technically forbidden, but something like half the teams either borrowed or lent people -- and then didn't bother to enforce the rule for everyone else. I also didn't get any good pictures. But I don't mean to sound cranky. A good time was had by all (generally speaking).

The ride back was more exciting. Somewhere just past Worchester, the fan belt in Mike's car broke, which takes out the power steering and the alternator, which in turn makes the engine quit pretty soon after. Luckily Mike had the most complete car repair kit I've ever seen, including two replacement fan belts. (This was after a notorious misadventure when his fan belt snapped in rural Maine, in January, at night.) After an uncomfortable and greasy 20 minutes on the freeway shoulder, we got things back in order and made it to Zoe's house in the Boston suburbs, at which point the rear door broke one of its struts. The previous week I was steering for a practice, and two team members got badly cut on a random metal piece of the boat. And now my bike is acting up. Did I offend some travel demi-god or something?

August 18

My least indie moment ever:

It is 6 p. m. on a Thursday. By chance, I happen to be down on the esplanade as a concert is beginning. No one seems to know for sure who's playing now (it's Longwave), but the rumor is that famed indie rockers Spoon will come on later. The night is fine, the acoustics are good, the price (free) is right, and the hipsters are out in force.

I turn my back on all this and participate in team athletics. I paddle a dragon boat up and down the lagoon with four other maniacs. We do "time trials" because we don't have enough people to do a real practice. By the time we return to the dock, the concert is in its last throes. By the time I change my drenched t-shirt and don my flannel, it is over. -100 scene points.

August 1

The Montreal dragon boat festival was good. I drove there with Other Mark, Elissa, and Zoe. We immediately got lost while leaving Cambridge and drove around Arlington and Medford for about 30 minutes, until O. M. remembered he had a good map in the car. People who left at the same time as we did, but didn't get lost, sat in traffic instead, so whatever. The car trip was lively, as Zoe is a chatterbox and O. M. and I turned out to like similar music. Zoe also instructed us about Quebec and Montreal, having spent four epic years at McGill. We got into the city around 11:30 p. m. , and she was totally floored by a Tim Horton's that had been built in her old neighborhood while she was gone. Floored to the point of calling up her boyfriend on the spot to enthuse. I've never been to a Tim Horton's, but after that I have put it on my list.

It turned out that our first race on Saturday was at 8:10 a. m. We stayed in a hotel in downtown Montreal, while the festival took place on an island at the old site of the summer Olympics. Last year, some team members had come within minutes of missing their race, so the team organizers insisted we leave at 6:30, which was not much fun. So we were all tired after a long drive (and one car had left around midnight and driven all night), and not warmed up yet, and we completely sucked it up on our first race. Our second race a couple of hours later was a substantial improvement, but still not actually good. Luckily these were time trials for seeding, not directly related to final standing, so we ended up in the rookie bracket (of three) but otherwise no worse for wear. By noon our work for the day was done, and we set off to paint the town red!

Actually, the first thing we did was set off in search of lunch. Apparently there is this world-famous Montreal-style Jewish smoked meat, which you can get at a place called Chez Schwarz. About half the team, three cars' worth, decided this sounded good (even though Zoe disdained it as too touristy). O. M. , Elissa and I followed one of these cars, since they had the address and seemed to know where the thing was; they had kindly provided us a map too, which turned out to be important. The first sign of trouble should have been when they missed the exit from the F-1 track that serves as the road around the Olympic site, and we blithely followed them all the way around the island twice. Next thing we knew, they had led us down Autoroute 10 in the wrong direction, away from the city, which we figured out far too late to avoid going over the very long bridge across the St. Lawrence. By the time we looped a cloverleaf and got back into Montreal, we had completely lost our "guides". We then got confused by poorly mapped one-way streets (nonetheless kinder than those in Boston), parked in what may have been a bus stop (judging from the parking ticket we received), and arrived breathless at Chez Schwarz to find a 45-minute line out the door. We debated going in, noticed our other partner-car in getting lost, and opted for an airy little bar and grill across the street. The car-full who had never gotten lost had arrived before the lunch rush, gotten seats easily, and later waxed eloquent about a spectacular lunch. Next year, next year. . . .

I spent the afternoon with a Dutch teammate named Ronald. We initally set off in search of a cafe to sit in, but were instantly sidetracked by a big street fair. This was the "Divers Cité / Pride Parade" (many things have two names in Quebec), and there was a lot going on even at 3 p. m. We stayed the longest at a big stage where there was a really cool live/electronic music performance. Three musicians played a variety of instruments through a variety of looping and processing equipment. The thing that totally captivated me was the guy playing the digeridoo!I had never even considered digeridoo in techno, but it is a perfectly suited instrument. Ronald said something about "Australian levellers", but I don't know what that means, and neither does Wikipedia. We also saw many other things. The least cool was a group doing country line dancing in full-on cowboy gear.

The rest of the evening was quite fine. Many refreshing beverages were consumed before, during, and after dinner. We made noise and dropped things at Le Gourmet Grec. We collectively went through some four to five bottles of wine in the street, because apparently there are no actual laws in Montreal. We walked across the entire damn city because it was the final night of some international fireworks competition, and Charles claimed that he "knows a place" where we could get a good view; what he really knew was which direction the waterfront was, but we never reached it before the show started. We stood on train tracks and made crazy toasts with Bordeaux as the sky lit up ahead of us. As the finale began, we got a call from our more responsible teammates, who informed us that our first race the next day was 7:20 a. m. We would have to get up again in only six hours. We packed it in for the night once the fireworks were over, and our more responsible teammates hit the club scene.

The next morning we were more prepared than the previous. We did a practice start on the way to the starting line, to get the blood pumping. We put our heads down, paddled madly for 2 1/3 minutes, and left all the other boats in our wake. Awesome! We had placed into the top-level final of the rookie bracket. But more importantly, our next race was not going to be for another five hours, so we could go find some real breakfast and then take a nap.
After this round of semi-finals, all the seeding had been accomplished, and all the final rounds were very close races. Ours was no exception. In a word, we were outclassed, but not by much, and arguably because our team was short-handed. We came in sixth out of six, some five seconds behind the leaders; the top three boats placed with a spread of only 0. 11 seconds. Not the result we had been hoping for, but on the bright side it meant we didn't have to stay until 5 p.m. to collect trophies.

The drive home was much quieter, probably because we didn't have Zoe. We did get stopped at the border for no reason we ever figured out. The border guards pulled us over, checked our passports and scrutinized our none-too-complicated stories, and searched our trunk twice. I bet we spent the next half hour, once we were driving again, trying to figure out just what they expected to find.

When we finally got back into Boston, we missed our exit off the freeway and got stuck on the wrong side of the river for 20 minutes. Of course.

July 27

Well, still no web-presence. I will write this thing anyway, someone will read it eventually.

Man it is hot. I haven't felt like doing anything since I got home this evening. I had gone by bike to get some clothes (my khakis spontaneously destroyed themselves while I was playing ultimate frisbee some weeks ago, and my swim trunks are probably like 8 years old), and I came home and basically just stopped. I was going to finally email out some pictures I'd promised, and then the internet broke. I think this is a sign: weather like this is not made for getting useful work done.
On the other hand: rain!

July 9

I am just about ready to put this sucker on the Web for all to see. Placeholders are in place or nearly so, I've learned how to write templates, and I have a great scheme to write scripts for updating things. I only have a few more minutes before I head out to make a fool of myself in a public dancing establishment, but Mission of Burma and Hüsker Dü make one foolhardy, so I am confident it will all work out nicely.

I have just learned that templates are more confusing than I thought at first. They appear to subscribe to a vi-like system in which the letters you type do not appear at the position of the cursor, but instead at the least convenient spot available. This may be less simple than I thought at first. . . .

July 6

Hello World!

Welcome to my humble webpage. I'm still figuring out what to do with it, so it will be perpetually under construction until further notice (if that ever happens -- ask me about the theremin some time).