Monday linkage – Akanksha Tillinghast edition

Three blogs that absorbed all my free time over the weekend…

In other news, did you know that in the past 18 months 36 ships were scuttled in L.A. harbor?

Akanksha Tillinghast? He/she/it spammed off my mail server over the weekend but I can’t be annoyed too much because that name is so terrific sounding.

Dreams

It’s uncommon enough for me to remember my dreams, but what’s incredibly unusual is the amount of vivid dreams I’ve been having – almost every night now. Maybe it’s the anxiety or something. Anyway, here are three recent ones from the past week or so:

1. Me and a friend who passed away last year had a substantial discussion of our favorite models of vintage Volkswagens. He preferred Vanagons (he camped a lot) while I went on about Squarebacks. We both agreed that Things are the coolest though neither of us wanted one.

2. I found myself walking down a very wide and flat beach that sloped up shallowly inland to some rocky bluffs. Nothing too disimilar from places I’ve been at along the Queensland coast of Australia or even New Jersey but for some reason it felt European. A jeep drove up to me, Terry Gilliam hopped out and asked me if I wanted to be in a scene in a movie. “Sure!” I answered, and he told me that all I needed to do was to open up the trap door at my feet and then pull a plug out of a drain. I looked down and sure enough, there was a foot-square wooden door there with a slight film of wet sand over it. Gilliam hopped back in the jeep, reminded me to “Don’t pull it yet until I give you the signal,” and then sped off. I stood around for a bit and then I hear a tremendous and startling “ACTION!” that seemed to come from inside my head. Suddenly a couple dozen SUVs and minivans speed down the beach – not towards me, just parallel to the coast. Gilliam calls out “OK, PULL THE PLUG!” in that same pseudo-telepathic voice and I pull up the door and find a rusty metal sink underneath it. There’s no water in it, but the stopper is in the drain. I pull the plug out and I hear a rumble from onshore – it’s a giant wave of water that rushes over the rocks and washes all the vehicles out to sea. Gilliam intones “PERFECT!” and I continue walking down the beach.

3. I was in an airport in Germany. Well, I’m not exactly sure that it was Germany, but the signage was all in German. I had just missed my plane (I don’t remember what my destination was) and there wasn’t another flight for several days. The woman at the ticket counter motioned out the window and said “there’s always that,” pointing to a pristine-condition 1920s-era zeppelin anchored at the far end of the airport. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, so I thanked her for her help and ran out of the terminal towards it. The zeppelin was crewed entirely by German-speaking racoons of all sizes and shapes… Captain Racoon was almost as tall as I was and with enough broken English on their part (I don’t know any German) we figured out that where I was going was along their route and so off we went. Pretty opulent ship I gotta say, my cabin was very posh for 1920s-standard travel and after a full day and night of travel I departed somewhere in the Alps. Smooth flight, about the only event was that some baby racoons got into my luggage at some point and scattered loose change about the cabin.

Someday I’m going to write a children’s book about that last one…

Reading the Apple tea leaves

OK, so there’s already an army of Apple watchers out there who are blogging the minutest speck of black or white smoke coming out of the chimneys of 1 Infinite Loop so the last thing I want to do is add to the hype surrounding this non-product that may or may not exist.

video_ipod_fake

However, since my career wagon has been hitched up to Apple for so long I do have to comment on the rumored touch-screen iPod. The various mockups all look cool, but I have to go all Donald Norman here for a minute. One thing that I’ve liked about the iPod’s design (I’ll ignore the aberrent 3rd-gen iPod) is how it feedbacks to you – the “click” noise it makes when you scroll and the decisive “whunk” when you make a selection on the contoured click wheel. Stuff like this is a big deal for me because without glasses or contacts I’m effectively blind. I often listen to my iPod as I’m falling asleep and navigating blind is easy: I know where to go to skip a song, go up a level, move ahead, and so on all without having to physically look at it. I wonder how the heck I’m going to find the mark on one of these touch-screen models.

I blame this……….tron_desk

Ever since that damned desk showed up in Tron, tech manufacturers have been obsessed over impressive-looking touch-screen controls that are utterly non-usuable. I still have nightmares trying to code on the Atari 400 which has the most user-hostile keyboard of any computer ever made. Remember the all-black stereo craze of the 1990s? They all looked great in a stereo store, but the controls were impossible to see or use in anything other than direct sunlight.

I wonder if there’s also a “non-brightness” mode to the screen. Call it reverse-aesthetics… I want to be able to use it without having a television screen light up. I’ll give you even money that the next iPod accessory line will be a red translucent bag for amateur astronomers to put their iPod in.

Anyway, I hope there’s a slight contour to the “screen wheel” in the new iPod (if there is in fact a new one on the way). If there are any Apple engineers out there that run across this, please give us mole-visioned a break. k thx bye!

What is your iTunes signature?

iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.

So I fed it my music collection and got the following mp3 file:

Play

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Backup Against The Wall

Here’s a question for everyone… When was the last time you backed up your computer?

Can you remember when? If you can’t then please do me and everyone a favor, pick up a cheapo hard drive and copy your existing hard drive over to it. Last week my laptop drive blew itself out, complete with an intensely scary sand-and-grinding-metal sound. It’s doubly scary because that same drive also has several years worth of pictures, source code, archived email lists, writing, art, and on and on. The punch line is that I had just run a full backup the night before – at most I’ve only thing I’ve lost is time.

Anyway, consider this a public service announcement… How much is all that stuff worth to you? A $1000 minimum to rummage through the wreckage?

Aside: AppleCare just paid for itself. I made an appointment at my local AppleStore (Glendale Galleria) to drop my laptop off and I’ll have it back in a week or so.

Survival Research Labs goes fishing

Flamethrower again I can trace it to one specific point in space-time: 1984 at the old Music Machine on Pico Blvd. while waiting for Social Distortion to go on. In between sets the club dropped a screen down from the ceiling and ran videos on it. Most of the videos were limited to things like Target Video’s California punk compiliations or abstract Bauhaus performances, but there was one short clip that stood out – someone or something called Survival Research Laboratories that had outfitted go-karts with flamethrowers and gone nutzo with them in some post-industrial parking lot. One part The Road Warrior, one part Art, and stir carefully with a strong helping of old-fashioned “You Can Have Fun Faster And Better When Fire Is Involved.”

It all made sense several years later when I picked up RE/Search’s Pranks! book and got to meet Mark Pauline in person at the release party at the old Amok Books in Silverlake. I’d seen a couple more full-length recordings of the performances which by then had scaled way beyond weapons-grade mayhem to some sort of higher-level perversity. Maybe it was sonic cannon that shot a ring of compressed air that could break glass.

Twenty-two years after seeing flamethrower go kart video, I still hadn’t ever seen a SRL show. Usually I didn’t hear about it until the show was over (or more likely cancelled prematurely by Authorities) but there have been some close calls – the biggest disappointment being the cancellation of the big 2004 show in Las Vegas which you think would be perfect for both involved, but apparently not for the LVFD.

So when I heard that SRL has planned another Los Angeles show (entitled “The Fish Boy’s Dream”) was planned (this one coinciding with the exhibition/fund-raiser at Fringe Exhibitions) I simply assumed that it would be shut down a few microseconds after the noise violated some sort of local arms-control treaty. Surprisingly that wasn’t the case, if LA police and fire were there, they were invisible, especially as the whole proceedings, audience, robots, flames and all were stuff into a Chinatown parking lot.

Tallying up the carnage, we had:

  • A giant half-metal tower Fisherlizard of Prometheus who wielded fire and power-speared the hell out of a drum of fish.
  • A couple of hapless “Sneaky Soldier” robots, forever crawling forward towards fiery Doom.
  • A fork-lift mounted BFF (Big Fucking Flamethrower) – the chief foe of the Fisherlizard. I noticed that the fork-lift was a rental. I wonder if the rental company ever wonders what their equipment gets used for.
  • A clawed walkerbot. It walks! It claws!
  • A truly evil hovercraft propelled by four “sonic horns” (for lack of a better description). Early in the performance it worked it’s way over close to the main audience and then cut loose on them with a full blast of sound. Ever see a shock wave work its way through people? Towards the end of the action, the hovercraft celebrated its victory over civilization by catching on fire.
  • A drum which exploded several dozen voodoo dolls up in the air.
  • A wheeled bot (which, if anything reminded me of an antique steamroller) which seemed to have some control difficulty. Early casualty of war I suppose.

In short… Ummmm goddamn, now I understand what all the fun is about! Anyway, here’s the obligatory Flickr photo set with more commentary.

A nice synchronistic touch was noticing that the license plate on the dead Impala in the parking lot began with “RUR.” I wonder what Capek would have made of all this?

Aero Market

There are two different kinds of bar-be-que in the world. I’m not talking about regional differences, dry rub versus vinegar, or ribs versus chop, but gourmet versus gritty – the difference between a champion bar-be-que that’s been worked over with hickory and a couple dozen spice combos and something that was grilled over an old split drum split in a parking lot. Both are terrific but think of it this way, sometimes you want a cappuccino and other times you just want a cup of joe.

There used to be an auto parts store on Victory Blvd. in Burbank that had terrific bar-be-que. No joke, you would walk in and in between the stacks of part manuals and engine innards was a bar-be-que menu. The guy at the counter took your order for piston rings or tri tip and then disappeared out the back door, returning with some fantastic bar-be-que. Couple weeks ago I was driving on Victory Blvd. and got to thinking about bar-be-que again and immediately see a “Special BBQ Beef” sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of a liquor store and a grill in the side parking lot. So what the hell?

Ummm… Wow! I got the bar-be-que tri tip sandwich and it was just outstanding – just enough sauce without overpowering and some great bread that stands up to the meat.

Aero MarketAero Market BBQ

Who knew that anonymous liquor store I’ve been driving past hid such great food? I was enjoying my sandwich too much to check out the decorations of old airplane parts and vintage photos of Valley aviation. Anyway, I dug around a bit and it turns out the Aero Market has been around since 1947 when Grand Central Airport, Los Angeles Airport, and the Lockheed plant were all active.

Aero Market
1609 Victory Blvd., Glendale (just north of the 134 freeway and Riverside Dr.)

Things I Like – “I Skipped December” January 2006 edition

1. Aaron Koblin’s “Flight Patterns” – alternative visualizations of US air traffic.

flight_patterns

 

2. Op-Art artist Bridget Riley

 

bridgetriley bridgetriley_785bg

3. The iPod edition of the Yule Log

 

yulelog_ipod

4. The second wave of retrocars, especially the concepts for the Dodge Challenger (I’ll take one in “Vanishing Point” white please) and Lamborghini Miura.

 

dodge_retrochallengerlamborghini_retromiura

5. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle. This turned up on one of the cable networks a couple days ago and annoyingly it’s not on DVD yet. I started watching it because of Robert Mitchum, who’s terrific in it, but the movie’s real star is the grimy New England industrial autumn – lots of faded overcast grey, brown, flat green, battered strip malls, faded cars from the 70s, – barely a blue sky or primary color to be found. It’s a hell of a cracking good 70s-era existential noir movie too.

friends_of_eddie_coyle

Starbucks Mysteries

I’m rarely in a Starbucks so I don’t know how well this works, but it might be worth a shot if you’re stuck in an airport or just need an emergency shot of caffeine somewhere…

Here’s a little secret that Starbucks doesn’t want you to know: They will serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it. Ask for it in any Starbucks and the barista will comply without batting an eye. The puzzle is to work out why.

The drink in question is the elusive “short cappuccino”—at 8 ounces, a third smaller than the smallest size on the official menu, the “tall,” and dwarfed by what Starbucks calls the “customer-preferred” size, the “Venti,” which weighs in at 20 ounces and more than 200 calories before you add the sugar.

The short cappuccino has the same amount of espresso as the 12-ounce tall, meaning a bolder coffee taste, and also a better one. The World Barista Championship rules, for example, define a traditional cappuccino as a “five- to six-ounce beverage.” This is also the size of cappuccino served by many continental cafés. Within reason, the shorter the cappuccino, the better.

The problem with large cappuccinos is that it’s impossible to make the fine-bubbled milk froth (“microfoam,” in the lingo) in large quantities, no matter how skilled the barista. A 20-ounce cappuccino is an oxymoron. Having sampled the short cappuccino in a number of Starbucks across the world, I can confirm that it is a better drink than the buckets of warm milk—topped with a veneer of froth—that the coffee chain advertises on its menus.

This secret cappuccino is cheaper, too—at my local Starbucks, $2.35 instead of $2.65. But why does this cheaper, better drink—along with its sisters, the short latte and the short coffee—languish unadvertised? The official line from Starbucks is that there is no room on the menu board, although this doesn’t explain why the short cappuccino is also unmentioned on the comprehensive Starbucks Web site, nor why the baristas will serve you in a whisper rather than the usual practice of singing your order to the heavens.

This also give me a chance to reprint something I’ve been saving from the old Los Angeles Cacophony Society email list.

I was speaking to a friend of mine who has the peculiar misfortune of working for Starbucks about an article I saw in the LA Times about the various ways customers customize their latte. Apparently there is a complex code that the employees follow to keep track of custom orders. He casually mentioned that he had come up with a drink that was completely within Starbucks guidelines and drinkable, but which took no less than fifteen minutes to make, and which necessitated the trashing of almost a quart of milk just to make the one drink.

My ears instantly perked up… I asked if anyone had ever ordered it, and he explained that no one had, but if they did, the manager would assign a standby person to make it so the rest of the store wouldn’t be held up. My ears perked up again… “What would happen if one person at each register ordered one? …and if the people following them in line said ‘Hey! That looks good. I’ll have one too!’ …and what if this was in the middle of morning rush hour?”

“Total chaos” was the answer. He claims that with this drink order, nine people could incapacitate a Starbucks for nearly an hour. The drinks would be more than the average latte, but would cost much less than the labor and materials it took to make them.

And the Order Of Doom (in “Starbucks Speak”) is called:

Quarter-caf, Quad Three-Decaf-Luongo One-Ristretto Grande-in-double-Venti wax-paper, Two-pump-hazelnut, One-pump-sugar-free-vanilla, half-pump-Irish Creme, Quarter-Percent, Quarter-Soy, Half-Heavy-Whipping-Cream Breve, Half-pack-Sweet-and-Low, Quarter-pack-Equal, Two-and-a-third-Honey, One-Raw-Sugar, Light-Extra-Foam, Thick-Whole-Foam, No-Whip, Six-ice-cube, 186-degree, Caramel Sauce-top-and-bottom, three-pump-Ebony, Mocha Valencia Macchiato

Translated into English…

Three quarters of the total espresso is decaf, four shots total: 3 of which are manually pulled decaf luongo and one manually pulled ristretto. 16 oz total drink size in a double cupped 20 ounce cup covered with wax paper before lidding to prevent spilling. Three and a half pumps of flavored syrups added before milk or espresso. One quarter of the total milk is 2% lowfat, one quarter non-dairy soy and half heavy whipping cream. Various sweeteners added. Thick, whole milk foam (not whipped cream) six ice cubes, 186 degree milk (which scalds the milk), Caramel sauce on the bottom and floated on the top. Three pumps of Ebony Mocha with orange and chocolate flavor and shredded orange peel on top. (Valencia) Espresso shots poured into cup after everything else
(Macchiado).

This is in order… If you give them the recipe out of order, they will have to sort the requests into the proper order for the barista, requiring them to write it all down and figure it out. That would be good for another four or five minutes easy.

I have no idea if that’s a valid Starbucks order, but it hasn’t propagated enough to warrant a Snopes entry so who knows. Anyone want to try?