The Santa Cruz Metro's routes will soon be available on Google Transit, allowing users to type in a starting point and destination, and letting Google work out all the details....
A group of artists called Art for Art donated nearly $6,000 to the rapidly emerging Tannery Project on River Street, using funds raised at the group’s June show in the...
The Pajaro Valley Performing Arts Association is inviting nonprofit organizations who were unable to raise money from fireworks sales this past Independence Day to share in its take from a...
Here's a four-minute short film about a little-known farming practice that makes the world what it is today. Can you imagine if this crop disappeared, what our day-to-day life would be like? Better? Worse?
The Thinking Machine, version four, is a chess-playing javascript that shows you all the moves the computer is considering, often several steps ahead, with colored lines that represent each player and the perceived outcome of each line of play (darker is better for black, the computer, and lighter is better for white, the human). It's not Big Blue -- the programming is such that experts will easily whallop the machine and beginners will be smacked down hard -- but it's an interesting look into the thought process involved in becoming adequate at chess. Plus, it's darn pretty, with all those radiating waves of influence coming off each piece, the simplified use of shapes to denote the pieces, and the light saber color scheme.
Here's a fantastic animated short film in which national culinary specialties re-enact every major war since World War II. It can be confusing at times to figure out what's happening, but part of the fun is when it dawns on you which country is being represented by which pile of food. Plus, the burgers that shoot their own fixings at stuff are just rad.
I'm smitten with these wineglasses from Hamilton Design that represent each of the seven deadly sins. What would you drink from them? Here are my choices:
Wrath
Ah, the grapes of wrath. With that hard spear on its edge, the glass could only be filled by Devil's Corner pinot noir from Tasmania.
Greed
The multiple horny pockets of the greed glass just beg for the fake 1787 Chateau Lafitte (purportedly from Thomas Jefferson's wine collection) that went for $156,000.
The holes in the side of the glass made me laugh out loud. And isn't there a winery in Napa called Envy? Why yes, there is!
Sloth
My favorite sin ... probably shouldn't go too far out of my way to fill this glass (which requires a second person to do the pouring) with Sleepy Creek Vineyards' (in Illinois??) Little Woody ... oops, too late, sold out. Oh well. Maybe some other time. Can I nap now?
It's over. The final week was a stumble across the finish line, as I mooched as many meals as possible, failed to shave my face, neglected to comb my disturbingly mullet-like hair, and in general did my best impression of a bum in order to atone for the overspending on vacation.
June 1, needless to say, was a celebration of sorts, though I still spent most of the day in a frugal state of mind. I filled my car up with gas (to its immense relief ... the engine knocking was getting quite petulant) and drove down to Fort Ord to spend a day seeing a friend off before he ships with the Marine Corps to Iraq. As part of the celebration, he managed to commandeer a box of Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), which we all devoured with a mixture of curiosity and and fear. Really, they weren't too bad. I had a flat silver package of penne with sausage and tomato sauce, and it tasted like decent airplane food, albeit more salty. The milkshakes also brought all the boys to the yard, and the cookies were dusty but recognizably cookie-like, once you discarded the little stay-fresh packet from both the wrapper and your mind. The most interesting part was learning how to make a bomb with a water bottle and the meal heater. From the demonstration, I doubt these MRE bombs will deter any insurgents or even speak much of the American military might, but they do make a fun 13-year-old boy kind of toy.
Surprisingly, given the amount of calories and sodium in the MRE (yes, even the gummint has to list FDA stats on its food packages), I was still hungry, probably from the wasp stings on my arm, so the party decamped to Maui Tacos in the beautiful outskirts of picturesque Salinas where I engaged in my first guilt-free, whole-hog, don't-think-twice dining out purchase.
I busted. Went over. Broke the bank. Blew the wad. I went away for the weekend and spent $177.89. But it was worth it.
Rhode Island is a bizarre place. I couldn't claim to understand it fully after only a weekend in Prahvidence, and particularly not when that weekend was the graduation for Brown University, and thus most of the people I saw were out-of-staters, and wealthy, and in a good mood, but there's a lingering sense of "what's the use" in the air, and it shows most symptomatically in the streets: lane lines appear and disappear at whim, leaving confused drivers to their own merging devices; green turn arrows are not employed consistently, leaving many people pulling into an intersection to turn left and staring blankly at the people who have a red light coming the opposite way; roads are too narrow for parallel parking and two-way traffic, as is common in older cities, but all the streets are still two-way, and drivers are curiously indisposed to scooting over, giving any cross-town trip the feel of an International Tournament of Chicken; major parking lots and garages ask you to estimate the time you'll be there and pay up front, which seems like the honor system at first glance, but (given that they enforce overages) really ends up being an unnecessarily complicated system of guessing and double checking; the main bridge, which is part of Interstate 195, apparently has some structural problems, but instead of closing it to fix the issue with federal dollars, the state has simply banned vehicles over a certain weight from using it, including all trucks and -- your tax dollars at work -- buses (although they are working on it ... slowly ); and simply getting on the freeway involves the use of so many backstreets and alleyways that my trusted local guides were unable to cleanly complete the task without scads of philosophizing about the nature of dead ends and a little bit of plain old Irish luck.
But I have to navigate visitors through the Morrissey / Water / Soquel interchange, so who am I to judge? And besides, Boston's worse.
My streak of spending money exclusively on food came to an ignominious end when I landed at Logan and purchased a $5 Charlie ticket for the MTA in order to get $4 worth of bus trips to and from the train station. The vending machines didn't take anything less than a $5 (and certainly weren't going to swallow a pair of $2 bills), but the fares are all $2 each way. Also, if you want a ticket, you must use the vending machine, in the airport. Think of it as a hidden, $1, I'm-not-sticking-around-in-Boston-for-the-weekend tax.
Raise your hand if you've heard the lament that today's kids don't have any mass culture touchstones. You know, "People don't all grow up with the same TV shows and same hit songs anymore. Everything is so fragmented."
Weezer's new video for "Pork & Beans" (which may or may not get airplay on MTV, one of those channels that mass culture no longer watches for shared musical touchstones) obliterates that notion by combining a roster of YouTube superstars that's instantly recongizable for anyone who spends a few hours every day with the 21st century's version of a remote control (or radio dial, to go back another generation or two).
Tomorrow morning I leave for Rhode Island, where I will spend Memorial Day Weekend with my best friends. This has been weighing on me all month, because it seriously screws with the experiment. Dare I live on $2 a day while on vacation? No: one of my friends recently lost her job, and it feels chintzy enough to be mooching couch space. Okay, if I'm spending extra, how much?
Most of my friends have said it's a vacation, I should just take a break, but that seems too easy. There has to be some sort of ceiling, and it can't be too arbitrary ... something within keeping of the experiment's spirit.
If you're going to whitewash a graffiti wall, why not turn it into a long stop-motion animation that meditates on the notion of corporeality and the way people interact with their environment?
The artist Blu does just that with this intense and amazing graffiti project in Brazil, combining George Plimpton with the urban setting in a way that's simply astounding at first, but as the technique becomes "normal" looking and you accept his metamorphosing creature as alive, the sequence tells a tale of the suits we wear, the skin we put on, and the pressure we feel from the things that we build around us.
Even though I pre-paid most of my monthly bills, there are some unavoidable ones that arrive in the first week of the month and are due before the end, so I spent my Saturday morning the way I usually do: balancing the old checkbook. I also dug out several credit card offers from the past month since I'm hyperventilating about that debt.
I'm an enthusiastic participant in the credit merry-go-round, and credit card companies love me for it. I have a decent credit score (I haven't looked it up since my last rent application, but I know it's high enough that there's no trouble getting car loans or apartments), and I obviously love to load up healthy balances for the companies to suckle at for years and years. For this reason, I'm the number one target of 0% interest offers.
These aren't good deals. Or, they are, in the same way that the old Columbia Music Warehouse Club was a good deal when they offered you 12 CDs for a penny, figuring you'd get lazy or stupid and forget to send back the free Hootie & the Blowfish "club choice" CD and be obligated to shell out $24.95 for it the next billing cycle. If you could stay on top of the "no obligation" discs mailed every month, then you could indeed garner a few dozen CDs for your collection at a few dollars apiece. But most people couldn't, and that's what they counted on. It's also what credit card companies hope for. Here are the three offers I'm mulling over anyway, because once you join the club, you have to keep rotating balances through the offers or the musical chairs music stops and you wind up trapped on a high-interest card:
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