Some other stuff...

From LITWC...check this out. It's an interesting piece -- Joshua Bell pretends to be a street musician at a train station in DC -- and nobody stops. Duh. It's the morning -- people have to be at work, and most employers don't appreciate it when their employees show up late. Simple as that.

I wanted to point it out, however, because it's one of the best uses of multimedia that I've seen in a newspaper -- edited sections of video are used to illustrate points from the story. This is the reason why we're not going to be reading the news on paper anymore. It's an effective use of media; it has the "you are there" quality of video without the "you are an idiot" effect of mass-media TV news.

So...this is the first truly legit latte art that I've been able to make...you can see that a few of the bubbles have started to pop there, because instead of drinking it immediately, I ran and grabbed the camera (obviously) and let Brett take a pic (you might be able to tell that too, from the quality of the picture).

Anyway I was pretty jazzed, but I haven't been able to do anything quite this rad since.

I bet Mayer couldn't do that.

Finished!

OK -- I think we both knew that we weren't finished with this.

Customarily going for overkill, I bought a NOS (that's new old stock, meaning an unused vintage part) 5" Zenith speaker and popped it in there; then, a plain brown shipping box and voila! A totally finished practice amp that runs off a 9-volt, gets loud enough to annoy my faithful girlfriend, and can still be used to store some stuff.

It seriously sounds bitchin' too; I'm sure I'll post some sounds up at some point.

In other news, www.3than.com is up again, though without much stuff on it at this point. Stay tuned.

MAKE my day, punk

That, my friends, is my latest creation. I'll admit that I didn't come up with it, but hey, it still rocks. You can also see the my level of handiwork: I couldn't get it to fit in the box (because I chose the box last, so it was a random shape) so I just stuck everything on one side of a stoned wheat cracker box.

Continuing the nerdiness, I quickly jammed out a couple .mp3s with it. Check it out here or here. Not bad for around $20 of parts per amp, huh?

Oh, and check out my rippin' guitar shredding. AND THAT'S NOTHING, BTW, JOHN MAYER!

About the recording: that's an Audio Technica at2020 condenser near the speaker (as pictured, maybe 8-10 inches away) and the left channel is a directional condenser (MXL 993) pointed at my strat. The second .mp3 also as my Maxon OD909 running. There's no processing on the tracks, except for normalization on the first one.

The speaker is a tiny, tinny driver stolen from my old pc. I think I may get a larger speaker to unleash this tiny monster.

Yeah, Make rocks. Now I'm going to rip open my other b-day gift (the year one box set) and drool over some more projects.

OK, so it's been a long time.

Oh, I know what you've been thinking: that other whine country blog has got me licked. Or maybe I read Living in the Whine Country, and just put my tail between my legs and gave up.

Not so.

I checked that first one in late August last year, and I thought to myself, "Shit, this guy is posting all the damn time -- he's totally going to win the "best blog with the name Whine Country" award or some crap. But look who's on top now in a google search. Me. Ok, I'm not up there with litwc, but shit man, that guy has like five posts from the last two days. And at least two of them have fairly cool stuff (ruggedized military usb drive, insanely creepy video of a chick with two heads).

Whereas those other blogs may well post more often than I do, and sure, they're probably better written and stuff, but I have one thing going for me: I AM COMPLETELY INSANE.

Which is why I am taking this moment to announce the identity of my arch-enemy: John Mayer.

Sure, he's got the fame, the money, the women. The custom stratocasters. The guitar trio.

IT SHOULD BE ME, DAMMIT!!! I could have written those crap pop songs. Your body is a wonderland. Dammit. It's so obvious....

I will not cease to fight against this oppressor until I have vanquished him in an all-out guitar duel, a la Ralph Macchio vs. Steve Vai at the end of Crossroads.

Eat that, local blog competition.

Bourdain in Beirut

I saw something pretty remarkable last night: Anthony Bourdain's show on his experiences in Beirut, during the war of last July.

Brett and I have been on a bit of a Bourdain kick recently; we caught a couple of his shows, and then she had the chance to interview him for the Bohemian. She also started reading his book. Friends will also remember that it was his restaurant in New York that ended my several years of vegetarianism, and it was on his advice that I bought a Global knife. We went to his reading in Sonoma, and I must say I was impressed. He seems to be a very personal and "real" guy who just happened to get lucky and famous, and now he's living his dream. Also, he really knocked 'em dead at that event.

I had also heard, of course, that he was one of the American evacuees of the Beirut bombing.

Yes, it is extremely weird to view war through the lens of foodie culture. And yet in this case it was highly appropriate, I think. Beirut by all accounts had come a long, long way, and was just on the verge of becoming a real tourist destination for westerners. It was also, as Bourdain said during his reading, just what the neo-cons are supposed to want the middle east to become. It was a booming, pro-business, multi-ethnic, tolerant, and westernized place. Althought I had never really imagined travelling there before, seeing what it was like really made me wish that I could go. (Especially since I am extremely deprived of middle-eastern food in Napa; there's a persian restaurateur, but he basically serves California-type food.)

Bourdain started shooting the day of the Hezbollah raid which captured two Israeli soldiers; that act, which resulted in the death of seven other soldiers, initiated the bombing which basically destroyed the city; it easily killed hundreds.

Bourdain and his crew were whisked away by an american security consultant, and watched most of the war from a hotel above Beirut, to the north of the bombed area. From there, it seemed oddly clear: the unassailable machines of war scattering death throughout the city. I guess I'm an unrepentant pacifist, but I just don't get it -- the urge to escalate, to completely destroy the enemy, seems so obviously wrong. It seems so clear that it will end up causing more total pain and death, that I find it difficult to understand why rational people choose it.

Now, yes, there are more obvious examples: the enemy footsoldiers approaching your borders, murdering your families. I would take up arms. I understand the desire to stop terrorism; it's just that it's clear that conventional military force is pretty much useless against it. In fact, as in the case of Hezbollah after this war, it usually feeds the terrorists. The use of massive force cedes the moral high ground to the terrorists, at least in the eyes of those in the theatre -- who are the very people who will be recruited into the ranks of those terrorists.

We need to find a better way; we need to create a lasting peace in Israel. Yes, the tactics of Hezbollah are abhorrent; they celebrate violence in a way that is extremely damaging. And yet they are responsible for much less death and destruction than our side, the peaceful, tolerant westerners.

So that's all. It seems like a perfect metaphor, though -- one moment, we are eating kibbeh, enjoying the fruits of tolerance, going about our existence as though there were no problems in the world, and suddenly, the forces of violence and destruction wipe it all away. I feel as though, despite all of our attempts to deal with terrorism, we are still ignoring it in the ways that matter.

Git 'er done

I swear I'm going to fix this truck, just as soon as I get this hose off the radiator with a pipe wrench. Maybe I should have drained the coolant first, or at least let 'er cool down...

Check out the reshaped 'burn. Very key.

Mullet Over

I don't know if you've had this experience, but when harvest season starts off with your boss giving you a mullet cut in front of all your coworkers, well, enough said, really. I mean, you've got a mullet, so that's pretty much all there is to talk about.

A word on the mullet: now that I've gone right through to the other side of mulletdom, obviously I have a new perspective on things. First off, it's true what they say: it's all business in front, and you've still got the party in the back. It's really the best of both worlds. I mean, your hair is out of your eyes, so you can go ahead and do your framing, laying concrete, siding, digging ditches, or, as in my case, winery lab work. And yet, you're still obviously out to have a good time. Yeah, you're a party guy.

Also it should be noted that, should you choose to get a mullet, your friends pretty much will talk about it constantly for the entire time that you've got the hairdo. Your coworkers will get over it in about two or three days, but if you, say, unexpectedly go to a party with your new mullet, you're pretty much the center of attention. If you were to, for instance, walk down the street in the Haight and meet some friends, they pretty much won't get over it, and people will start talking to you spontaneously in bars and such. And want to take pictures with you.

Yes, you will need to grow the 'stache as well. Of course you will. The mulstache is part of the look, you can't half-ass this like your fuckin' faux-hawk. A faux-mullet isn't going to fool anyone. That's just a bad haircut, not the rank, over-the-top class-defying mindfuck of a hairstyle that will make you the coolest kid in class for like six months, when some other guy goes for a mullet and suddenly there are two trendsetters, not just one.

So that's my call -- it's got to be done. All of a sudden, you're way more amusing and hip than you used to be with your new mullet, and you can say, when it's all said and done, I did it. I brought back the mullet almost single-handedly. I saw an opportunity and I took it. I was there before the people in Levis and iPod commercials. I was there before the kids in suburbia grew out their hair, before the hipsters in New York and LA grew rattails. I had the balls that the mullet-watchers don't. I went somewhere they were deeply afraid of. And it was good. For about two weeks.

A day in the life

Or, at least, an email in the life.

From Rich:

Well anyway, here is the latest of the best (and worst really in a way) achewood:http://achewood.com/index.php?date=08232006(it's clickable as well)

-Rich

My response:

That is so apropos, really, seeing as how I recently watched the 1971 film Le Mans starring Steve McQueen -- not rally cars of course, the Le Mans was sports cars, but there are a couple of really gnarly crashes in it.

It reminds me of the end of the Italian Mille Miglia, when the Alfonsode Portago, a Portuguese nobleman, killed eleven spectators when his Ferrari careened out of control after a tire blowout. Tons of people have died racing automobiles, although we tend to think about that as a thing of the past.

Of course we enjoy the fruits of all those high-speed pursuits when we fire up our modern automobiles with airbags, disc brakes, and multivalve engines. Worth it?

That's the end of the email. And it's the end of August -- that means it's almost time to fire up the industrial machinery and start crushing the almost 9000 tons of grapes that will come through the 'wood. I've got to finish up my pre-harvest prep. Including hiring another lab tech -- know anyone?

I bought a bunch of espresso pods for the Solis -- so far results are mixed. Pretty poor really -- I can only get a decent shot maybe half the time, which is weird because you'd think they should be more consistent if anything? I dunno. Got some decaf pods too, which is cool.

I have to finish up cleaning and go home. Such is my glamorous life in wine country.

Dude --

Check this out. That's right, another blog with the same name, from the same place, with way more posts than mine. This can lead to only one conclusion: my blog name is totally weak. Oh well. It may be too late.

So I've started a new project: I'm going to try to make a chronological chart of my material obsessions over the past few years. After all, the impetus to change career and get into the wine business started off as an obsession with food and wine beginning in 2002-2003; since then I've been obsessed (as documented by purchases) with: handmade persian rugs, coffee and espresso equipment and autombobiles. There were also occasional flare-ups of some "background" obsessions: hi-fi audio, guitars, and computer gear.

The real difficulty of this is finding a good way to graph the intensity of the obsessions in addition to when they are active. I think we may also do a chart for Brett's obsessions: moving to Europe, Swedish handicrafts, being an artist, etc. I believe that this exercise will be most informative.

Long time no nothing

Hello, gentle reader. It has been too long since my last entry in this forum. A brief synopsis of what's been going on: Brett and I visited Richard in L.A. Richard, who has a diagnosed mental disorder, was institutionalized. At around the same time, Israel invaded Lebanon, quite possibly starting a larger conflict in the Middle East. Then, Brett and I moved. Also, my boss quit and I got a small promotion at work.

So...yeah, it's been busy and rather stressful. I will expand on some of these topics later if anyone is interested. Or if not!! That's the great thing about a blog. Anyway, toodles.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

OK people -- tired of Koyannisqatsi? Add this one to your list of mind-blowers: documentarian par excellence Errol Morris' 1997 masterpiece, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

It's about four people: a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a specialist in naked mole rats, and an MIT robot scientist. It sets two of the characters against the others, in a way...on one side you have mechanation, trans-humanism, and insect social structure, and on the other you have the total control of nature and animal instinct. It's totally brilliant and makes you think more than once about, well, everything. I don't want to spoil too much, but pay attention when they start talking about feces. It'll make you squirm for sure.

All this makes me think about what I love about car racing, especially vintage car racing. Actually, I don't care much for modern car races, but with the old cars, I'm totally mesmerized. It's because it catches the entire evolution of automotive development: they start off with these pre-war cars with like 25 horsepower and end up with 1960s V8 monsters, and all the while they balance the power and handling...and it's all a pointless pursuit, more or less. We would have all been better served if they'd built a train system that goes everywhere. But there's something caught up in the intersection of the technical struggle and the beauty of the sheetmetal designs that, I would argue, embodies the best aspects of humans as a species. We have an enormous capacity to create diverse forms of beauty. This is obvious. What isn't so obvious is the relationship between beauty and pointlessness. I seems like it's at its peak when the entire exercise is utterly pointless, like wild animal shows: They're dumb: downright stupid, but there's a certain awe about them that's impossible to deny. But it's almost the as great when an everyday task or need is transformed by an invention: I would argue that as a society, we "Americans" are totally in awe of the automobile. Look at all the people that commut in pickups with giant v8's, or new sportscars, and tell me that this is the product of a rational mind.

Anyway that's all for now. Throw that one on the queue, and if you can stomach another documentary, put Morris' late-1970s masterpiece Gates of Heaven on there as well. Two words: pet cemeteries. Pet cemeteries that I've seen with my two eyes -- and Brett has recently written about.

Vintage Race 2006

I know that you have been waiting patiently for an update, gentle readers. And I think that I do have something that might interest you.

Our story begins last year, June 5th, 2005 -- Brett's birthday weekend, and I've already messed up by not getting her a cake. Oops, who knew it was such a big deal? My plan for recovery, you ask? Why not take her to the Jaguar Vintage Car Classic at the Infineon? I mean, what girl doesn't like that?

Oddly enough, she consented. And odder still, once we got there, she loved it.

Really! She loved it. Both of us got teary-eyed, sitting there in the sun watching an amazing array of old racing and sports cars, not in a museum, but cranking around a racetrack, screaming their hearts out. And she hasn't stopped talking about it since.

This year, we brought the camera and she, Brett Ascarelli, my fabulous in-house photographer, snapped some shots. Here are a few favorites:

These cars are so damn small!




Check out the smoking E-type -- it had to retire after about two laps. Too bad -- that was the mid-late 1960s production sports cars race, and it's fun to see the E-types in a race dominated by Shelbys and Corvettes.







Next up is the "Piranha," a crazy kit car that's based on a Corvair!!! Unsafe at any speed!










But here's my personal favorite: unbelievably, there were a couple of SAABs on the track that day, Sonnett V4's, which were actually raced! About 2,000 Sonnett V4's were produced, a fiberglass-bodied two-seat sportscar. And I totally love them. They were powered by a ford v-4 good for about 65 hp, SAE. Probably like 50 by today's measurements. But they were out there, and they're beauties.

Performance

Above is a picture of my first successful performance modification: I have added an "intake" to my old Saab. Perhaps this isn't so impressive, since really it just consisted of removing the factory air filter assembly and bolting the new, larger air filter in place.

Translation: I have found another geeky obsession to bore you with.

Well...that's all for now. I was really excited about it for a minute.

I'm a friggin' mechanic all of a sudden.

So this monday, after spending the weekend ordering stuff for the "new" car and getting its oil changed, I was greeted by an unwelcome occurance: a terrible squeal from the engine compartment, followed by a small "clunk," heralding a major change in the material status of the alternator belt, and ushering in a new era of tool-time for yours truly.

Despite the $92 pre-purchase inpection and around $500 of work done on the car since then, my reputable but perhaps overworked mechanic in Sonoma had no idea that the alternator belt was on its last legs, or even, apparently, that the car is meant to operate with two belts instead of one. Oops. This does not bode well for the aforementioned timing chain rattle.

Flash back to Monday morning, around 8:30 AM, (nearly the same time and day of the car accident that has caused the automotive content of my life to rise so drastically). Myself, calling the shop that works on Brett's car:

(Ring ring)
"'s Auto Service."
"Yeah, I've got a question for you -- how are you guys with older Saab nine hundreds?"
"Uh...we don't work on Saab 900s (you idiot)."
"Um...ok, thanks..."

Next shop no answer.

Next shop:
"Selbach European."
"Uh, yeah, do you guys do Saabs?"
"What's the problem?"
blah blah...
Them: "Yeah...well, we could take a look at that. Thing is, we're just really busy right now. I mean, wow, we are plowed under..."
"O.K. well, thanks, maybe if I can't get anyone else to do it, I'll call you back."

Moments later I order a set of replacement belts from a Saab website, resolving to do it myself. Today, Friday at 6:30 pm, they are on the car and took me to work today. However, that was not before a mishap with the order (two power steering belts, one alternator) that delayed all of this by two days.

Not to mention all the grease and dirt on my hands, and teaching myself with the help of a book how to do it. That said, it really wasn't too bad, despite the Saab "backwards engine" setup, where all the belts are right near the firewall. All the bolts turned easily, and I didn't even cut myself; as long as I get home tonight, I'd say it was pretty much a success. Now, here's the big question: will I now be emboldened to tackle further projects with this (my only) car? I've heard that it may be possible to deal with the timing chain rattle by replacing a guide accessible under the valve and timing cover; this may have the fringe benefit of clearing up a major source of possible vacuum leaks, the valve cover gasket. And of course, here's the big question: could I deal with the project to convert the car to a light pressure turbo? Most of the parts come from the turbo engine and are a direct fit, although it involves replacing a whole lot of them. It would mean a probable 10-15 hp gain, and a gain in fuel efficiency as well (so far the 2.1 naturally aspirated engine is getting worse mileage than the old car with its far more powerful 2.0 turbo.) But would the gain in efficiency offsetthe price of super?

I have spent a whole hell of a lot of time thinking about this stuff since my old reliable auto was destroyed. And money. Back in the day in NYC I spent about $60 to $70 a month on transportation, a little more if I took the bus out of town or took a cab somewhere. Furthermore, it was all electric and I could read while I went to work. Sure, I've caught the car bug, and I love the joy of the open road and all that, but I could sure do without the extreme cost ($3.25 for 87?) and the life-threatening auto accidents.

But this just looks right...

Well I must admit I miss the rush of taking Pete's Audi for a spin with the top down, but we all know that when you get down to it I'm a SAAB guy. I found this baby on the side of Highway 12 in Sonoma; my co-worker spotted it. It's a 1991 SAAB 900S with 164,000 miles on it, in remarkably good condition. I had it checked out by Universal Auto in Sonoma who gave it a more or less clean bill of health, and did a bit of work on it. Well, it has a coolant leak -- I think that it's a just cracked expansion tank -- we'll see tomorrow. 1991 introduced the 2.1 liter naturally-aspirated four in the "S" cars, which has the reputation of being the most problematic of the classic 900 engines, but I think it should take me a few more miles. I'd like to swap in a rebuilt turbo engine someday; it would probably cost me a few grand, but it would still be much cheaper than a whole new car.

There is one big problem though -- the heated seats don't seem to be working. The guy who sold it to me swore that they worked, and maybe they did before it sat through this rainy winter. Maybe a mouse took a liking to some wiring? Maybe somebody stood on a seat and broke the wire in it when they were cleaning it up? Anyway, I'm going to find out.

And I really hope that nobody runs into me -- although it seems they're trying. Going around the bend between Ravenswood and Viansa today, there was a tractor coming the other way on the highway with its blinkers on, and a long line of cars waiting patiently behind it. All except one -- a brand new silver Corvette, screaming towards me in my line AROUND THE FUCKING BEND. I hit the brakes (he didn't) and we came within probably 3 feet of highway head-on collision. I mouthed "motherfucker" and drove on -- but I swear to you if we'd collided, I was about this close to pulling his battered, midlife-crisis body out of that fiberglass piece of shit and beating out of him whatever life was left. The other accident was, at least, just that, a simple accident caused mostly by road conditions; this was a really, really stupid decision that could have easily cost that asshole his miserable life -- and mine, which I was planning to do some things with. Right on the other side of the bend, a few hundred feet away, is a straightaway with a dotted center line for passing, but no, he just couldn't wait.

I hope that he realizes what a lucky guy he is tonight; if I had been driving Brett's car (which has shitty brakes compared to the old SAAB) or if I just hadn't been paying attention, he would've ended up with that big ol' engine on his lap.

From across the void...

The other day, as I was driving home, I heard a recording of a call to 911 from a victim of the 9/11 attack. It really brought me back.

I've told this story a few times but somehow I keep feeling the need to retell it; somehow I don't think I've quite done it justice yet.

In terms of weather, September 11th was about as good a day as it gets in New York. The sky was preternaturally blue, and totally clear in every direction. I lived at that time in "South Williamsburg" Brooklyn, two stops outside Manhattan, right underneath the elevated tracks for the J-M-Z. I'd recently bought a digital camera, and for some reason I had thought of bringing it to work with me that day; in the end, I didn't.

I read novels or the New Yorker on the way to work; I took the J train back into Manhattan briefly, and then caught the F back to DUMBO, (Down Underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, the stupidest acronym in New York) in Brooklyn. As the train made its way slowly over the Williamsburg Bridge, a woman exclaimed that "that building is on fire." Nobody paid any attention, really. People say lots of things, and the view of the towers is often obscured as you go over that bridge. I looked up long enough to see what she was talking about, and think to myself, isn't that the World Trade Center?

I also remember thinking to myself that the black, gaping hole looked a lot like something I'd seen in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Specifically, I think, the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

My commute took me back underground; the question, "Hey, did you see the fire in the WTC?" went on deck for small talk at work. By the time I reached the York St F stop, the second tower had been hit. A column of smoke trailed over DUMBO. A woman said to me as I walked, "Two planes hit those two buildings," and I answered, "No, it was only one!" I imagined a single-propeller plane, far off course, losing control; I also remembered the famous statement about the WTC: that it had been engineered to withstand a plane crash.

There was a clear line of sight from my workplace to the towers; it was just over the east river from them, and there is a famous park there which has views between the two bridges. I saw the two towers smoking from just in front of the entrance, and then went up to the sixth floor. There, I found confusion. No one's cellular phone worked; we had no radio or television (not that it would have helped us, since the antennas were on the towers) and most websites were down. The New York Times frontpage would sporadically load; the best connections seemed to be with IRC servers, far away. The conversation was about the attacks; that was where I heard about the attack on the Pentagon. Also I heard there were five more jets in the air, and that fighters had been launched to intercept them, and many other crazy things. I heard about leaflets dropped from the planes, as well.

Some of my coworkers went up the the roof to get a better view. There was a janitor up there who wouldn't let us on the roof (building policy) but we looked out through the door, which framed the towers against a background of pure blue. We could see things falling from the towers: people jumping. A coworker of mine, Shu Li, brought his camera and recorded it.

Back in the office, more confusion. I remember seeing people leaving Manhattan, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, from another office suite. We desperately searched for information, and tried to contact our families (who often knew more than we did about what was going on) and it was from one of them that we heard the first tower had fallen. After that the office gathered down on the street to stare at the other tower; it fell as well, with a sound like bricks being thrown into an empy dumpster, and just as loud, even on the other side of the river.

I walked home through Brooklyn that day; a little south of where I lived, the Hasids were giving out water to those who were walking home. At home, my roommates were on the roof. They'd received calls from family telling them what happened while they were asleep -- no jobs. That night, we went out to a Mexican restaurant on Bedford Avenue that was operated "cash only" as a sign proclaimed on the front door. I remember saying that if I were President Bush, I would immediately invade Iraq, regardless of actual causality. Turns out he was thinking the same thing.

For me, and I think for many people who experienced it, even through television, the whole even has been relegated to a strange, surreal part of the mind: the "antipodes," as Aldous Huxley called it. A place that we don't visit very often, because there's no real way to understand it. The recording of that phone call brought me back there, to the time when we were all struggling to understand what was going on and how to react, when a 911 call, even a fire in the World Trade Center, might be business as usual on some level. Stay put and we'll come get you. The implication in the fireman's voice is "we've all got problems," a very New York attitude, I think, and on some level reassuring: they know how to handle this, calm down.

If only it were. It seems to me that what has followed has been worse than what happened. It was a terrible thing, it changed all of our lives, and it changed them for the worse. It has provided an excuse for war that has killed many more than died that day, and a basis for the terrible fear which pervades our society. Yes, some people are exploiting that fear, but that cannot last forever, and I hope that we can see through it soon. Horrible things can happen to anyone at any time, a point which we seem determined to prove. But the way forward is along the path of justice and wisdom, a path from which we have strayed. It seems that many statements beginning with "September 11th changed the way we look at..." often point away from lessons we have spent many years and lives learning.

And why should we all be there at 7:30?

Sometimes in life, things just don't make sense. One thing leads to another, unforseen complications arise, causality is indirect or simply lacking.

Around a week ago, I found myself at a party, eating sushi off of an ecdysiast's torso. I won't lie to you: in a way, it's a titillating idea. There are a couple of drawbacks, however. The fish, usually served cool, quickly rises to body temperature, the body in question belonging to a mostly naked woman that you, the eater of said sushi, really doesn't know very well at all.

I don't know quite what else to say. Don't try this at home? I mean, no one got hurt...

It should be mentioned that Brett Ascarelli (my domestic partner) took this picture, and also the picture in the "After the Flood" post, and should be credited, as she recently reminded me.

BLAHGTASTIC!!!!!

So, I showed my coworkers the posting with the side view of my car in it, and they all got excited that I had a blog! WOW!!!

The upside of this is I have new readers. The downside is that they'll make fun of me for writing stuff like, I dunno, alternate storylines for the Star Wars prequels, rants about audio or computer stuff, or just about any other topic would actually treat in this forum. The solution: make this blog so dull that no one in their right mind would actually read it.

It's almost as if I'd planned this from the start...

iPod "HiFi"

Disclaimer: I have not heard the product.

Rant: What the hell has happened to home stereo.

In the 1970s, there was a war: this one wasn't related to oil, or terrorism or even communism. It was about winning the home stereo market, and it was fought in Japan, California and elsewhere. Marantz, Technics, Sansui, Onkyo, and many other manufacturers were building stereo "hifi" systems that pushed the envelope in terms specifications and features. You remember what they looked like: silver and shiny, with weighted controls and glowing lights in the darkness. Your dad probably had one until he threw it out in the early '90s or late '80s and bought a some black box that purported to have better specifications. That one probably broke about 5-7 years later, and he got another one. This one doesn't even have a phono preamp, and all the vinyl records your parents once had are not getting moldy in the basement. Then, one day, they just said "what the hell" and bought a Bose wave radio at the mall.

The iPod HiFi is for you, the hip kids.

Here are my objections:
1) Placement. The Apple website shows the HiFi next to your sweet flat-panel TV. I guess the imaging is so good that you can put it anywhere and still perceive stereo.

2) Frequency response. the plus-minus 3 decibel area is 53-16,ooo. I am more or less OK with 53 as the low end -- 40hz is generally considered the cutoff for perception, and a lot of the stuff down there is perceived as "thump." But 16k is just too low for truly detailed high end. There is nothing in the audio world that would describe itself as even close to "audiophile" that has a high end of less than 20k. High-end tweeters are much higher than that.

3) What the hell kind of amplifier is in there? What's the thd? Is it a 50w amplifier with a distortion of 0.01% or is it a crappy 8w piece of shit like what's in every boombox? Hmm, I wonder why there aren't any specs on the website.

4) No nobs or controls on the unit. Oops...where's the remote? Honey? Have you seen the iPod HiFi remote? HAVE YOU???? DAMMIT HONEY I NEED THAT REMOTE CONTROL, I CAN'T CHANGE THE VOLUME!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHERE IS IT!!!

Now, that said, if the thing sounds "good," I think that's great. Sounding "good" is certainly subjective, and if it does image halfway decently, and represent dynamics and timing well, I think it could be a steal at $349. I just don't understand why there aren't any tweeters on it.

Mind you, I just bi-wired my Linn Katans (~$900 or so, without stands, claimed performance 75-20k hz) to my Nikko NR-719 amp ($84 on ebay, with luck showed up working) which is a 35w amp from the late '70s that claims 35w into 4 ohms with 0.05% thd. What's more important is that the phono stage sounds basically like you're in the same room with the musicians. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't mind putting a little effort into having stuff sound good -- while iPods and the like are cool, and make it easy to listen to your favorite music, I'd rather work a little, pay some attention, and then have something pay off by sounding great. Plus I'd rather listen to reissues of Son House on Yazoo or Art Blakey lps than mp3s from the iTunes store. Jazz just sounds better on vinyl.

Man, it's been a fricking blogfest today. I guess I really don't want to do my taxes.