Firm Reminder

Don't blog about your job, or the defense strategy for your ongoing trial. You must find other things to talk about.

Somerville is not a fucking suburb.

78,000 people on four square miles is NOT suburban.

Tenth Anniversary Weekend

Ten years ago, I started my first website. I'm still working out what I want to say.

Slash, Burn.

Posts will either be more frequent or less frequent. Don't crash your car this weekend.

I can't say why...

...but 75% of the social plans I make here fall through, and 50% of the friends I had here either moved away or literally went insane.

No Maps of Urban Boston?

It's amazing that there are no maps on the web showing the ring of smaller (but very urban) cities that ring Boston--like Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Quincy, Chelsea, Revere, Brookline, etc.--in their proper context.

I'm not looking for a map of "Greater Boston," which includes all the suburbs clear to New Hampshire and Worcester, or a map of "Boston Proper," which includes only neighborhoods in the smallish municipality of Boston.

The municipality of Boston has about 600,000 people, but when you add up the populations of the ringing cities, you find that the urban agglomeration has about 1.2 million people.

However, with no centralized government, planning suffers. And there are no maps on the web that I can use to show my brother neighborhoods he might want to live in.

The New Awful

The following things are officially terrible:

• Single-speed bikes
• Black caps

If you own any of the above, you need to question your motives for purchasing them.

Musical Immersion Training

If I'm going to sit in my house and do work all summer, I'll need to steep my brain in a lot of new music. I have this weird thing where if I listen to something enough times, I can automatically play it on guitar, bass, and/or drums. (By play, I mean figure out, because I don't practice.) I've had enough blues, soul, and funk; now I want to get into other American traditions, particularly rockabilly and western swing. This is going to be a huge investment, possibly dozens of new CDs. Any suggestions of where to start?

Lexington

To stand in a new city in the middle of a summer day with absolutely nothing to do but find images...that's how I love to spend an insanely minute portion of my summers.

With a lot more experience and much better equipment, I can't wait to get back out there.

June 27, 2005.

Nameless Diner, Allentown, PA

I have no idea why we went into Allentown on our way to Memphis, but this is where we ate. Each waitress seemed to have a man's name tattooed on her neck in cursive font, and each waitress used the f-word a lot. June 26, 2005.

Roadtrip 2005 photos going up.

Click for more.

ITINERARY FOR SUMMER 07 BBQ ROAD TOUR/PHOTO SAFARI/RELIGIOUS EXPLORATION OF THE HEART OF AMERICA

Buy your tickets. We're going with or without you.

Sat Jun 23 Arrive Kansas City. Drive to Joplin. Visit pals. Lumpy's BBQ.
Sun Jun 24 Fayetteville, AK. Catch show?
Mon Jun 25-Fri Jun 29
Road tour/photosafari of AK, OK, KS. Goal is to interview one member of the Westboro Baptist Church (aka God Hates Fags), meet Pope Michael I of the true Catholic Church, and check out the Garden of Eden. Time permitting, we will also tour the supposedly theme-park-like campus of Oral Roberts University, Ned Flanders's alma mater.
Sat Jun 30 - Sun Jul 1
KC BBQ weekend. All are invited. We will tour the city's best bbq joints, most photogenic industrial districts, and take in a Royals-White Sox game

Get your requests in for photos of meth billboards, roadside golgothas, whatever it is you want. This is gonna be good.

Curvature

Even More Lowell...

The Hierarchy of Needs

I keep thinking about this thing, even though I haven't taken a psychology course in nine years.

I spoke to a few family members on Sunday, Mother's Day and all. All they talk about is money. How much this one makes, how much that one makes. So and so got bad SAT scores but makes X thousand--it's so unfair! So and so is making plenty of money!

These conversations make me want to stab my eyes out with pens.

Why? Because they don't know anything else exists. They don't know inspiration, creation, aesthetics, art in any form. I'm not talking about going to museums or painting portraits. I'm talking about reading a novel or listening to music or looking at photos on the web. They don't do it. They can't understand it and don't bother trying. Don't know why it exists. Have no ability to learn about anything but buying a house, buying a car.

If all these people care about is money, and they all have enough, whey are they so fucking miserable?

And what if you weren't happy unless you were creating stuff? What then?

More Lowell

BOS 3.0 vs. AUS 1.0

The stage is set.

Tuesday Night in Lowell.

Yes, MORE photos from this past week. I visited a friend in the bizarre city of Lowell Tuesday night and have posted a photoset of the trip on Flickr. Click the image for more.

This image shows the Lowell High School skybridge, which extends over one of the many canals whose flowing water once powered the city's industry. That's a six second exposure with an improvised tripod (bridge railing).

RB's proposed map for KC BBQ

I've looked at Dan's maps and propose this alternative to the shorter run, adding Fayetteville:

http://tinyurl.com/28tjld

This guy doesn't want you to check out my photos of...

...the New Lebanon, NY flea market. He didn't want his picture taken with all the fireworks he was selling. Oh well. He also asked if he could take a picture of my dick (?), which scared most of his customers away.

The New Lebanon, NY Flea Market: yet another Flickr photoset.

Alexa's Global Top 500

Amazon's Alexa ranks the top 500 sites on the internet (by traffic) every day. Check it out.

Of note: Even though no one remembers it, Friendster is in the top 25--usually at 25. Flickr hangs out around 42 or 43.

FUCK WINDOWS!

Why has my laptop been crashing for the last 25 minutes?

Because Windows is pulling its routine "Automatic Update" bullshit. That's when Microsoft servers take over your computer, downloading tons of patches and shit. Then, you get the Automatic Update screen: Restart Now or Restart Later. If you're out of the room, on the phone, in a meeting, etc., your computer restarts in 5 minutes and you lose all of your work.

This is progress?

New England thing

Somehow it went from being dark out at 3:30pm to being totally light out at 5:30am. Trying to adjust sleep accordingly.

The Ferry

In preparation for summer, I bring you this first of many images of previous road trips. Here we see the bridge of the BC Ferry QUEEN OF SAANICH on the Tsawwassen-Nanaimo run, June 30, 2006.

Photo sharing websites = big business.

Today, News Corp.'s MySpace bought Photobucket for $250m. And Yahoo! has shuttered Yahoo! Photo in favor of its far superior Flickr subsidiary.

From the archives...

Found this blurred capture from one of my last rides on a Redbird--the type of NYC Subway car I spent hours on every day as a high school student. It's from my first digicam, a 3mp Kodak.

BTW, I caved and bought a SIXTH digital camera on sale at Staples yesterday. Details to follow.

DONUT DIP

Home of fantastic, glazed sour cream donuts. West Springfield, MA.

The bar at Teo's, Pittsfield, MA

Lunch at Teo's, Pittsfield, MA

One with everything, one with cheese and ketchup, and a Pepsi. Less than $4.

Charlie on the MBTA?

What happened to this great blog about Boston public transport? All I get is this strange "permission denied" screen that says I haven't been invited. WTF?

WOMAN STARING INTO GRAND CANYON

AEROFLOT B767-300ER L. TOLSTOJ

LAX.

LAX

It is disturbing

to come here first thing Monday morning, guilty about all the things I haven't been able to write and all the photos I haven't been able to post, and see the post below.

Aborted Thoughts

I found the following text in an Outlook post-it note from the third hour of a Tuesday morning flight across the country. It is a perfect example of what I shall call attempted thought.

AIRPLANE THOUGHTS

US Airways yesterday, Delta today, American tomorrow, JetBlue Thursday.

I was annoyed that there was no free paper today because I'm not in a hotel or on the shuttle. The paper fills me with ideas. Yesterday, the WSJ filled me with a great futuristic short story setting (a first) involving sports, stocks, audible watermarks on digital video, a College Point bar full of city workers, and, possibly, alien attack. It would be hilarious, but I won't write it.

As I was packing my massive corporate tool bag last night, I found a crumpled USA Today with an ad celebrating the paper's 25th anniversary. A grid of 25 captioned photographs covered the page; these corresponded to the 25 most significant changes in Our Society in as many years.

Somewhere in the middle of the list was "Sexualization," the header adorned with a photo of Timberlake preparing to bear Jackson's star-studded teat.

[a one-sided discourse on whether anything had actually been sexualized or layers of societal cloaking around evolution had been quicky and dramatically unwrapped was to follow]

Airplanes are peace and solitutde. An empty, bankruptcy-enducing 737-800 above cornfields is a great place to work and think and develop. Most disagree.

In two months, we will drive around those cornfields for a week and take thousands of photographs, some of them awesome. I need to order a tripod now.

Willets Point

Via metsblog, of all places, comes news that the Bloomburg administration has announced its mammoth plan for the eradication/gentrification of scrapyards in Corona/Flushing, Queens.

Remember, in ten years, when all the public-private development in Flushing is done, it will be the city's fourth (maybe fifth) downtown. Awesome.

Then and Now

As my fourth (sequential, non-contiguous) blog nears its third anniversary, I have to reflect on why it's still here. I offer you no rationale. I have no plan. This is the written record of what I thought and when, or what I tried to think.

For the Record

Brother visit concluded this morning. Austin exploration gaining momentum, music still to be deeply explored (and played). Will participate in KCBBQ this June. Contrary to something I scrawled years ago, geography is not obsolete.