Kurisumasu in Japan

Despite the lack of success met by Christian missionaries in Japan, Christmas is almost universally celebrated here. Not as an occasion to mark the birth of Our Savior, but as an excellent excuse to have a party, or, in the case of young couples, an intimate party-of-two of the sort that young couples are best at. In other words, Christmas here is something like Valentine's Day and the Fourth of July combined, with less nationalism and more presents for the kids.

As an adopted holiday, there are a couple of places where the transfer of culture has failed which give Christmas in Japan its own particular flavor.  All of the yuletide action here occurs on Christmas Eve, whether you are an aforementioned young couple or not, and a common tradition for Christmas Eve here is to have cake. There's currently a passion here for all things French; most cheese is marketed under the name Camembert, for instance, no matter what kind of cheese-product it actually is.  Nevertheless, bouche de noel is not the standard, though it's not unheard of. Rather, one tends to get a Japanese-style cake with a few Santa decorations (see above).

One night when faced with my umpteenth meal containing parts of God's creatures I don't normally eat, I asked those of my companions who'd spent time in the U.S. if there were aspects of American cuisine that they found challenging in the same way that an American might struggle with raw octopus. I was disappointed enough in the result of my challenge to launch into the best description of chit'lins I could manage having never eaten them myself, but after more blank looks were exchanged, the only consensus opinion was cake. The color(s), in particular, were a problem. I've seen some unnaturally bright greens and pinks in prepared Japanese food, but I'd have to concede that there's nothing I've seen in the junk food here that would prepare a Japanese innocent for the Lucky-Charms rainbow of artificially colored icing on your average American birthday cake. Having now had Japanese Christmas Eve cake, I can also say that the degree of sweetness expected from cake in Japan and America is altogether different. I have an atrophied sweet-tooth by American standards, which I guess is why Japanese Christmas Eve cake was so agreeable to me, and why the mere mention of American cake elicited tooth-sucking shudders from my hosts.

Another failure of cultural transfer I noted surrounded the name of the occasion. Y-san was astonished, and my choice of that word is not an exaggeration, to learn that the “Eve” in Christmas Eve does not refer to the companion created by God for Adam. The failure of even competent English-speakers here to connect the word “eve” with “evening” is so complete that the translation for the *real* holiday as it's celebrated here is “Eve's night.”

I had a pleasant if low-key christmas holiday consisting of a small house party at Y-san's on Christmas Eve, followed by a late-starting experimental day on Christmas. The big event here, yet to come, turns out to be New Year's.

We Now Return to Our Previously Scheduled Programming

All right, all RIGHT.  Between the settling-in, and the worst flu I've had in 10 years, and getting used to the insane Japanese science work schedule, I'm a little behind in the promised posting here.  

Shut up.  Stop nagging me and read the next post.

Japanese Bureaucracy

Japan is infamous for a dense and arbitrary bureaucratic culture, and from my limited experience so far, I can report an unusual attention paid to paperwork, and a fondness for seeing it multiply.  Virtually everyone who's touched my passport here, which is pretty much everyone who's stood on the other side of a counter from me (except the cafeteria ladies), has made at least one photocopy of it: two at the airport, one at the university, two at city hall (I had to register as a resident foreigner -- they like to keep tabs on us here), one at the bank, one at the hotel.  It would have been three at the apartment company, had Y-----san, my sponsor, not grown impatient and refused on my behalf.

True fact: it is unlawful in Japan to photocopy a passport.

And when it actually comes to the cherished activity of filling out forms, official persons always get a pained or anxious look on their faces when Y-----san explains that I can neither read nor write Japanese and perhaps it would be easier for everyone if I could just use romaji?  Easier, of course, is not really the idea, so usually there can be no romaji.  It is also not to be permitted that I allow Y-----san to fill out the forms on my behalf.  I must do it myself while official person watches.  So I've now several times been through the exercise of standing there while Y-san writes down the Japanese characters for me, and I copy them into the blanks on the forms.  And yet!  While it won't do to have Y-san write in information like my address, etc., the bank official today was perfectly happy to take my signature stamp away from me, go to another room, and use it to sign my name 5 or 6 times out of my sight, on legally binding agreements that she knew I could not read.

But at least there was no cheating on the address part.

There's Plenty of Nothing in Japan, Too

Holy crap!  I'm going to Japan tomorrow!

The biggest cliche in life Blogistan is weepy apologies for not posting more often and promises to be better in the future.  So, fine, this is one of those, but with a qualification that means you should take it slightly more seriously than usual.

I am, indeed, going to Japan tomorrow for a not-completely-known period of time (probably 4 months) and since:

1. I speak next to no Japanese, and get the sense that most Japanese people don't speak loads of English, and therefore I will have no-one to talk to;
2. Being on a bit of an adventure will give me something to write about for a change;
3. I've made all sorts of promises I'm not likely to keep about keeping in touch while I'm gone

... this blog is likely to be updated more often and resume its once marginal, as opposed to null, level of interestingness, at least while I'm gone.  The point will, as always, be to record the trivial and pointless, since the important and consequential can be recounted one-on-one at appropriate times without losing anything.  Also, to keep the keeping-in-touch a little more lively, my next project here is to finally start taking advantage of the Flickr page for pictures, and I think I'll even use my iWeb gallery, finally, for pictures that would violate the semi-anonymity I try to maintain here.   Finally, if there's anyone who reads this thing who doesn't pay any attention to the linklist (linkblog? delicious list? I don't know what you call that) on the right or the tumblog (top right), that's where most of the action has been lately.

Imperial Indian Summer Ale

The end of November is pretty late for a "what-I-did-this-summer" kind of post, but since significant adventures are about to ensue, and since I did not post for shit this summer, I feel like a catch-up post is called for before moving on to What Happens Next.  So, among the interesting things I did this summer:

• Went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone, which may not be an option next summer.
• Watched movies in McCarren Park Pool, which also may not be an option next summer.
• Dated a ridiculously great guy, which I hope will generally remain an option in many future summers.
• Ate at the all Mac-n-Cheese restaurant.
• Drank the very best IPA I think I've ever had right nearby at the Brooklyn Brewery.
• Cought a few Sunday afternoon barbecues at the Metropolitan.
• Saw a bunch of friends from times past and places distant.
• Saw the production of Hair in Central Park and got a good taste of why people fall in love with New York City.
• Spent a lovely day at the DIA Beacon, which was nice even for art-grumps like me.
• Spent a lovely day sailing around the New England coast.
• Got myself a jailbroke, busted-ass iPhone (but its busted-assedness only makes me love it more).
• Got a lot of good news about friends makin' babies.
• Gave up, once and for all, trying to learn to fold fitted sheets.
• Learned my way around Korean food.
• Got myself a black president!  (Okay, didn't really happen this summer).
• Last but not least: learned a little (a very little) Japanese.

And no doubt, a whole bunch of other stuff I'm not thinking of at the moment.  I also, for reasons I can't explain, wrote several posts which I never actually posted.  I've decided to go ahead and post them where they would have gone had I posted them at the time, and link back to them from here.  I kind of want to tidy the place up before moving on, because this place is about to get busier... (see last item!)

On the other hand

At latest count, Californians, on the same day, have voted:

• 59.5% - 40.4% to transcend the dark past of America's history of racism and elect a black man as president
• 62.3 % - 37.7% to grant farm animals a marginal improvement in the quality of their short, miserable lives
• 52.5% - 47.5% to rescind the already-granted right for homosexuals to marry the people they love

I loved the time I spent living in California, and I'm glad that Californians, as an electorate, are cool with black people and chickens and cows. I admit, however, that I'm really disappointed to hear that, turns out, they're less okay with fags than they always seemed to let on.

I hope my readers will forgive me for making some targeted asides:
Dear California: I'm never moving back.
Dear Mormons: Fuck you. Seriously. I'm not a violent person, but I am going to punch a mormon in the face before I die.
Dear Straight, Liberal Friends: Thank you for voting my way, although I have to admit, I still find it unsettling to hear you talking about gay marriage as an abstraction.
Dear Straight Everybody Else: WTF is wrong with you?
Dear Florida: Don't even. I do not want to hear a fucking word from you. Sshh, freaks. Just sshhh.

Black people in the White House!

Just came back from voting for the first black president.  Took a picture of the line which I'll put up later, but for the moment, a few observations:

1. Long line; the line outside the building moved with deceptive speed.  My polling place is a school, and once you get inside, the line breaks up into separate lines for each district.  These lines move veeeeeeery slowly.
2. All the official signs were printed in English, Chinese, and Korean.  Weird there was no Spanish, but there were a couple of volunteers there helping Spanish-speakers.
3. I don't know why everybody went all crazy for the touch-screen voting machines.  The old mechanical ones they use here work just fine, and make a really satisfying "ker-chunk" sound when you pull the arm at the end.
4. I always heard Williamsburg was chock full o' homos, but I never saw a lot of evidence for it when out & about in the neighborhood.  But!  The homos - they vote!  Next time around, I'll take a shower and shave before I vote...
   

With Deep Regret

After sharing this morning's commute on the L train with a group of teenaged girls talking and laughing loudly, and last night's commute home with a young couple who were teasing, laughing at, and tickling each other over the duration of the ride, and yesterday morning's commute with two schoolboys excitedly recounting stories to their mother, I am sorry to conclude that on the subway, normal and healthy affiliative interactions constitute antisocial behavior.

Thus, my dear fellow New Yorkers, in the future I would ask that while riding the subway, that you please remain in a state of psychic isolation and refrain from reality-testing, gestures of physical affection, and other forms of life-enriching social intercourse until you have exited the train, and ascended the station stairs.

Thank you.

Fat Cats (a post that has nothing to do with Wall Street)

Disclaimer: I like cats and dogs both and tend to roll my eyes when people start talking about how they hate one or the other. (they're just pets, people; you don't like living with 'em, then don't have one, but taking species-specific animal behavior all personally really kind of makes you a dumbass.) That said, by temperament and experience, I admit I'm partial to cats.

When I went across the street today to the Korean sandwich shop, there was a neighborhood lady walking a morbidly obese pug or some kind of stunted bulldog, and I thought, as one will, Haha, dumb ol' fat dog.

After enjoying the fleeting entertainment of watching this dog waddle by with his skinny white lady in tow on the leash, it occurred to me that I've met a good number of pretty waddly cats in my time, too, yet I haven't had the same reaction; in fact, what I thought was something more like, right on, cat, you go on with your fat self and don't take no stuff from anybody and you can tell them to come to me if they got a problem with that.

And so then it occurred to me -- again with the occurring -- that fat dogs are sort of like guys you see at the mall who have huge beer bellies, but whose t-shirts aren't big enough to cover them so there's some belly sticking out all pink underneath (or brown, I'm not racist) and the t-shirt seems like a nice but insufficient gesture. And these guys trudge through the mall with a look of possibly happy/content simpleminded oblivion on their faces, following their wives or girlfriends wherever, relieved not to have to make the decision. You know, like dogs on a leash. And you see them and think, heh, but not in a mean-spirited way, because frankly, they're probably happier than you are and you know it, you elitist jerk.

(Digression: I once watched my aunt's dog, a fat black lab who looked like a painfully overstuffed sausage, sneakily steal a 1lb block of cheese off her coffee table and down it in one gulp. Besides thinking, wow, that dog's not gonna shit for a week, I had a kind of real sympathy for these poor creatures who are driven to vice and iniquity, and thus inevitably shame -- nobody does shame like dogs -- by the fact that all they really want to do is eat. That dog probably knew it was going to be in trouble with its humans for eating that cheese and yet, there was just no question of leaving the cheese alone. It's almost like looking with knowing pity on a teenaged younger brother who you know is a sweetheart and a good kid, but you might have to mercy-kill him because his penis is making him crazy and not fit for social exposure.  You know, I just now finally understood where the "dogs are guy pets, cats are girl pets" thinking comes from: corresponding stereotypes.  It's still dumb, but I understand it now.)

Fat cats, on the other hand, are more like veeeery voluptuous women who happily stuff themselves into revealing dresses and dare you to look at them with anything but humble desire. Just as said women might think something like, I am a beautiful, NATURAL woman and I know REAL men like something to hold onto when they do the love, not just some skinny shit that might as well be a boy, their cat counterparts might think, if this were nature, I'd be killing things every five seconds to be this well fed, but since this ain't nature, thank jesus, I've got a human to do that shit for me, and since we're talking about it, why aren't you on your feet right now, human, opening me another can of the good stuff?

Maybe all this projection comes down to that the hell YOU looking at? face that cats can pull off as a standard feature, but I think I'll finally make this a real blog by bringing it squarely into oversharing territory and observe here that this may be why I like cats a little better, because they can do contempt and dogs can't, and that's important. I mean, who wants to be with somebody who can't bring themselves to hate you a little bit? I know *I* don't.

I Squick You Out

For no other reason than misery-loves-company, I just wanted to share with all my readers the fact that I just sliced clean through the webbing between my left pinky and ring fingers. Not only is this a wince-inducing injury to imagine, as you are no doubt experiencing as you read this, but it makes typing kind of a pain, too.

The lesson from this: Always throw away broken or chipped lab glass, people. Pyrex is cheap; lab personnel are... well, we're pretty cheap, too, but Pyrex is still cheaper.

Bad Homo

I did not go to the New York City Gay Pride parade yesterday.

Not because I'm not gay-proud; not because it was raining; not because it was too crowded.

I didn't feel like it.


UPDATE: Well, sumbitch. I just now found the "title" field in this here Blogger thingie. What do you think of the orange?

More Catching Up


If you want to talk about some serious catching up, try THIS on. Remember this picture? Here's what the view from my doorway looks like now:

Notice anything missing?  Since I arrived in New York, my neighborhood has been undergoing a transformation that was just in its early stages when I arrived.  In my first month after I was full time in New York (after that nasty bit of back-and-forth between here and The Woods), I went to a Drinking Liberally event (sadly, and surprisingly, there is no longer a Williamsburg chapter), and the big local political issue was the very contentious zoning change that allowed all of the subsequent development to proceed.  And boy, oh boy, did it proceed.  When I came back from my summer in Beach Town, there were 3 new high-rise buildings in the skyline view from my house that hadn't been there when I left.  Now, while half of the rest of the country is walking away from housing rather than building more, the Williamsburg building boom has reached my own block.  The entire block across from me, save one single 3-story, old-stock residence, has been razed; two houses next to mine have been razed, and construction has begun on both sites.  I now wake up to bed-shaking piledriving every morning.  Within a one-block radius in each direction, there are currently 8 major construction projects that I can think of, and if I were to take it another block out, I couldn't even count them from memory.  By the time I leave here, the Williamsburg I moved into will be utterly plastered over, and the transformation was already well underway when I arrived.  I often try to describe to people the strangeness of having my years in Florida coincide with a transformation of my hometown so complete that while its old, agrarian roots are a palimpsest still legible to me in the body of my own family, they are utterly invisible to nearly everyone else.  I can't imagine what it must be like to be an old-timer here.  I'll be putting up more pictures at the Flickr page later.

Happy Birthday, Cap'n Todd!

Everybody go pay Captain Todd money to ride on his awesome boat. If you do, you'll probably get to see killer whales doin' it*, among many other natural wonders. Go now!

*The Plenty o' Nuttin' legal department has asked me to mention that this may not actually be true. Please do not sue me Captain Todd.

It's "Bring Your Sweaty Clown to Work" Day

Shorts season has definitely arrived in New York and this morning I was happy to put on a pair of wonderfully cool (temperature-wise) red, white, and blue plaid madras shorts I bought last summer. I remember thinking at the time that they looked pretty slick with my black and white "No freedom without dissent" t-shirt. Somehow a clue must have gotten loose in my head in the intervening year because after putting on that very outfit in the zombie fog of morning, I took a look down at myself on the walk to the subway and realized that I was wearing a clown suit to work today. The effect was that much worse because my sandals are in the shop for retreading and so I had to wear my Nike Frees, which are not merely white but actually glowing from the generously-bleached washing they got over the weekend, and I was carrying my lunch in an old Apple-store bag in honor of today's Stevenote at WWDC, and as you may recall, those bags, they're white. I don't know what was in my head last summer when I did this to myself, on purpose, on a regular basis, but I can imagine that maybe if I saw this outfit on, say, a grizzled old african-american guy, it might look kind of badass in a retired-pimp kind of way. On me, it looks dumbass in a dumbass kind of way.

Fortunately, if you're going to go out in public dressed like an idiot, today is just the kind of day to do it. It's a thousand degrees in New York City; when I left the house at 8:00 this morning, there was a guy walking in front of me who had already taken his shirt off just for the walk to the subway. Not a good sign. So, all the people on the street who, on another day, might be wondering if I'm about to bust out a unicycle or a bucket full of confetti, are instead limited to thinking about eating snow or killing someone. If you're going to go out all day looking like a jackass, there's no better time to do it than when everyone else is too absorbed in their own misery to notice.

Speaking of Catching Up

I'm finally working my way through a stack of old New Yorkers loaned to me by a lab mate, and I have to share this great sentence from last July by George Packer, on the subject of a Bloomberg presidential bid, back when some people -- not me, never me! -- were able to take the idea of such a thing seriously:

If a five-foot-seven divorced Jew with a nasal whine is taken seriously as a Presidential candidate, it would at the very least diminish the power of faux symbols in our political life; and a Clinton-Giuliani-Bloomberg race would so thoroughly explode the Sun Belt's lock on the White House that an entirely new kind of politics might be possible, in which evolution is not at issue, no one has to pretend to like pork rinds, and the past tense of "drag" is "dragged."

As the bloggers say: "heh."

Happy Belated Sarah Vaughan's Birthday

Lots of catching up to do now that The Dark Time is over. For starters, while it's a little late, I want everyone to know that I had a perfect Sarah Vaughan's birthday:

• Started with a swim in the morning and a cup of the very best coffee that I'm aware of in all of New York (made by the cutest barista that I'm aware of in all of New York, which doesn't hurt.)
• Spent the day at work enjoyably fine-tuning the configuration on my new, lightning-fast Mac Pro w/gigantic monitor, hereafter know as “Teh Sex Machine” (get on up!).
• Had a dee-licious pimento cheese sandwich, my first since last summer, for lunch
• Ditched work early for a happy hour downtown that features bluepoint oysters for $1 each, a phenomenal price in NYC, only to be surprised that my co-happyhourists had rallied a whole crowd of birthday well-wishers to join us. Had a vat-sized Hendrick's martini to go with my oysters.
• Went from there to see one of my very favorite movies (Contempt), in a new restored print & on the big screen for the first time since it first came out in the 60's. After the movie, I found I had a string of voicemail well-wishes from my sweet little mama, other assorted friends and family types, and the guy who asked me out the week before (don't even know how he knew it was my birthday).
• Finished the evening gabbing until the wee hours about two of my favorite subjects: the movie we'd just seen, and beer nerdery, the latter having been prompted by a book on the subject written by Brooklyn Brewery's brewmaster, (BB is 2 blocks from my house) that was a Sarah Vaughan's birthday gift.
• And, capping off the birthday-weekend, and celebrating the nice spring weather which is part of my annual Sarah Vaughan's birthday present from god, on Saturday I had the first pink wine of the season.

And of course, the best Sarah Vaughan's birthday present was yet to come (see previous post).

You Know That Scene in Wizard of Oz Where Everything Goes to Technicolor?

Crazy Roommate, she gone.

(More later - this is the post that stupid MarsEdit ate).

But Not For Me

Hm, I keep reading all these things about how great MarsEdit is for blog editing, but in my first session with the trial download, I can't get prettymuch anything to work.  Won't talk to the blog, won't save the draft.  Could be cockpit trouble, I suppose.  Maybe I should try again after I've made the switch (sigh) to Leopard.  Then again, I also hear that Coda is supposed to be teh hotness for web-everythinging, and it does more stuff, so maybe I should give that a try.  And you know, this post is going to be interesting to exactly no-one who ever reads this blog.  In fact, it isn't even interesting for me.

Update, 4/1/08 (and no, this is not an April Fool's): Tried MarsEdit again on my fancy, new, Leopard-runnin' Sex Machine.  Sucks even worse.  Ate a very long post without warning.  Off the island, MarsEdit!

Good Riddance (and: TOTBAW #1: Steamroller Edition)

Spitzer's out, good.  What a dumbass.  What a disappointment.  What an arrogant stooge.  Could there possibly be anything more foolhardy than to make your reputation by antagonizing the rich and powerful, and then turn around and take insane risks that make you vulnerable to the very same enemies that you worked so hard to earn?  The voters sent Spitzer to Albany to kick Joe Bruno in the nuts, and all he ever did was trip over his own.  There really ought to be a word for the indignation caused by an offense, not because of its proximal harm, but because of its violation of the hopes invested in the offender.  That word is all I could feel when I first heard about this.

And you know, I like the "there ought to be a word" idea so much, I do believe I'll make it a series.

As a silver lining, Spitzer's replacement sounds pretty good so far.  From Gothamist: "As the first black NYS Senate minority leader, Paterson was an advocate for tougher domestic violence laws, a $1 billion voter-approved stem cell research initiative, and a statewide alternative energy strategy."

I Know What I'm Doing for My Birthday This Year

Oh, man.  The first time I saw Contempt, I was literally slack-jawed by the time it was over.  Not only was it visually mesmerizing, but it was engaging in a way I'd never experienced with a movie before, as if this movie about the dissolution of a relationship actually was the dissolution of a relationship that I was in.  That's what was so stunning about it; the narrative itself was almost (but not quite) beside the point.  Instead, what it offered was a sort of communication between the director and viewer about the experience of directing and watching movies.  Only, not in a "we're-in-on-the-same-joke-aren't-we-clever" kind of postmodern way.  Rather, in a "directors-and-viewers-are-actually-humans-and-we-have-an-actual-relationship-even-if-you're-distracted-from-it-by-the-story" kind of way.  I was (and am) not a particularly sophisticated viewer in terms of film history or theory, yet picked up on this very quickly; it was unmistakable.  I was emotionally wrung out by the end of the famous long apartment scene, but still ached for all that beauty onscreen -- of Bardot, of the Mediterranean, of the Modernist dream embodied in the Villa Malaparte, of a thrilling era that I just missed -- just like you might ache for the body of a lover long after you know the relationship's doomed.  I would actually catch myself holding my breath at times while I watched.

Damn, what a movie.  And that was when I saw it on the small screen...

A Bad Start, an Ugly End

So I'm giving contact lenses another try, what with the hot new technology out for astigmatics like me, and had a totally comfortable and unblurry test drive yesterday.  But it probably wasn't a good start to stay up late and fall asleep with the things in on my first day, dammit.

Also, I wonder if strangers and friends alike whom I see during the day notice the fact that I'm wearing two totally different-colored socks, and see right through to my dirty little secret, that I am at the very, very, desperate end of my laundry cycle.

(Seriously, though, I really am wearing clean underwear.  Really.)

Better Than I Deserve

As some of you are aware, I am currently experiencing a bit of difficulty with my roommate.  Living with the level of toxicity that's developed right in my home, and the anxiety over my future living situation, has surely been trying, but I must say there's been one hell of a silver lining to the whole business.  The amount of support, both moral and material, that has been offered by my friends has really blown me away, particularly since there's no argument to be made that I had it coming.  So, thanks everybody.  Clearly, I'd better start being a hell of a good person or the karmic load is going to squash me like a bug.

A Brief Comment

You know, this blog looks like ass.  I have to learn some CSS or something.

I Could Be Even Geekier

I haven't taken much interest in video games since Tempest (although there were those very fun few days in the mid-90's when all I did at work was play Myst).

This, however, could make a gamer out of me yet: create your own primitive life form, and take it all the way through evolution to interplanetary travel.  On a Mac, no less.  How can I resist that?

This is What You Call Structural Change

This policy outline by Obama, and this endorsement of him, make me feel better about the prospect of an Obama presidency than anything else I've read or heard. The candidates have all kinds of dreamy stuff to say about what they're gonna do in office, but if the underlying problems with our system are ever going to be fixed, this is the kind of thing it will take. My biggest fear about the post-Bush era is that as much of an improvement as any not-Bush president will be, the mess he's leaving with respect to balance-of-power might never be cleaned up.

Democracy has to cure in sunlight if you really want it to adhere well and endure.

Riddle Me This

Okay, I have a question. Why do I keep hearing news stories where people (either “experts,” or men-on-the-street) are asked whether they think we're experiencing a recession? Why does it matter what anybody thinks about this? A recession is a thing with a definition: two successive quarters with declining GDP. So, the economy either fits that criterion, or it doesn't, and that's what determines whether we're in a recession, no matter what anybody thinks. Asking people whether they think we're having a recession is like asking people whether they think it's snowing it's snowing outside; great if you want some kind of guessing game, but if you want to know if it's snowing, you go to weather.com. (Oh, right, I guess you could look outside, too. I always forget about that option).

I guess the question reporters are really asking is something like, “does the economy look shitty from where you're sitting, and does it look like it's going to get shittier?” Which is conceivably an interesting question, because it gets to people's psychology about the economy, and to whom, specifically, the economy is likely to seem shitty (i.e., who's doing well at the moment and who isn't). But that's exactly why we have this defined thing called a “recession,” because the economy always looks different depending on where you're sitting, and if you actually want to know what the economy is doing as a whole, instead of just who's getting ahead and who isn't, you come up with a defined way of measuring that.

Why is this so hard? Shorter version of this post: Media, please stop being stupid, again.

PS. We are not currently in a recession. Know how I know? I looked it up, because you can do that on the internets. I didn't ask anybody what they think.

Make of it what you will

Now that the iTunes is doing the rentals, you might wonder what's available for your almost-instant-gratification viewing needs.  It's early days yet, the Steve said the magic was sposeda happen in February, but His Steveness did throw us a few scraps to keep us busy in the meantime.

If you go to the iTunes store and use the "power search" function (new to me), you can use an "available for rental" checkbox to find all the rental movies, which number in the low hundreds.  I figured, there wouldn't be much selection yet, and what was there would be your big, dumb, over-promoted Hollywood brain-deactivators, and it's true that Live Free or Die Hard was right there on the front page.  But the one big, dumb brain-deactivator I was actually willing to sit through for the selfless purpose of evaluating iTunes movie rentals and reporting back to you'se all, Shooter, was available for overpriced purchase, but not overpriced rental.  Oh well.

Looking through the search results was kind of fascinating, though, because, if you make a game of guessing what 300-ish movies might be offered right upfront, out of all the movies out there, you will lose that game.

Here's what I'm talking about:

First, there's the obvious ones: Live Free or Die Hard, The Simpsons Movie, Disturbia, A Mighty Heart.  Recent, mainstream.

Also obvious: the old reliables, your undefeatable lowbrow sequels: Iron Eagle IV,  The Hills Have Eyes II,  F/X II, Star Trek several different roman numerals, Alien vs. Predator, etc., etc.

Then, there are some classics for all your octagenarians who are down with the new technology and are chomping at the bit to try out Apple's new download service on their broadband internets... ehh... anyway: Gallipoli, The Magnificent Seven, Man of La Mancha, and even one of The Duke's last movies, The Shootist.  I know my grandmother (Hi, Nana!) will be jazzed about these.

Surprisingly, a few edgier numbers for the movie snobs: Barton Fink, Dogville, Lair of the White Worm, Chuck & Buck.  I mean, Dogville! -- that one really was a surprise, no joke.

But... I kept noticing these few titles jumping out at me... apparently someone at Apple is, like myself, an admirer of the Blaxploitation genre.  I mean, add Sweet Sweetback, Shaft, and The Mack, and you've got the entire cannon here: Coffy, Foxy Brown, Black Caesar, Across 110th Street, and Blacula, for chrissakes.  Can it possibly be by chance that of ALL the first iTunes rentals available, 4 movies of interest *only* to blaxploitation fans are represented?  Brother, I think you can work it out.

And I couldn't fail to mention:  When I saw "And God Created Woman," of course I thought of the 1956 classic that introduced a generation of helplessly randy American men to Brigitte Bardot (who, by the way, has turned into one nasty piece of business in her old age.  But there's no denying she was sex on wheels in '56).  I thought wrong.  Rather, on offer among the iTunes rentals debut selection, is this masterpiece.  I don't want to spoil the surprise, so please -- go to iTunes and watch the trailer.  But hey - same director!

Insult to Injury

While falling off a building, in general, ranks fairly low on my list of ways I'd rather go,  being able to spend my last tens of seconds aware that my demise had come while erecting a Trump building -- in SoHo, no less-- would definitely peg it down somewhere in the "devoured by wild pigs" range.

Impulse Control

As of yesterday, the L train was continuing its uninterrupted week+ record of consecutive days with delays. I was blessed on Sunday when I just missed getting onto a packed train... which ended up getting stuck in the tunnel for 15 minutes or so. Never been so happy to miss a train, because there's nothing more miserable than being packed onto a stopped crowded train, having no idea how long you're going to be standing there.

With all the development in Williamsburg, it's only going to get worse, and I see potential for daily commute-catastrophes when you squish grumpy, insufficiently caffeinated people together like that on a regular basis. Why, just yesterday, riding in on the usual sardine-a-palooza, I was forced to stare at the crown of this short guy's head for the whole ride, and he had this one, thick, grey hair sticking almost straight up, all by itself. My hand was already moving, and my fingers already formed into a pinch gesture before I realized and stopped myself from plucking the little rogue right out. That could have been ugly.