from the desk of stinkpot

such an eventful day today. funny, considering that i thought it would be rather tame. i woke up this morning still not having finished my homework for my computational biology class (7.91); i was unprepared for the amount of busywork in the assignment. in any case, i was forced to stay home (and miss a day of labwork) to finish it.

so around 8 am this morning, as i dutifully started working out the problem set, i got a call that i’ve always dreaded getting. it was christina crying; that instantly freaked me out because she had just left on her bike to go to work. turns out some bastard in a toyota corolla doored her on her way to work this morning. (for those of you who aren’t too familiar with urban biking, getting doored means getting into an accident because an idiot driver didn’t check their sideview mirror as they opened their door.) poor thing – she got a little banged up and her bike suffered a little damage. she was super lucky though … she was tossed into traffic and thankfully, the driver behind her was paying enough attention not to run her over. hear about it in her own words here.

being the boyfriend and a commuter-cyclist myself, i was super-pissed. it’s scary to consider how unprotected you are on your bike. all it takes is one attention lapse by a driver, and boom – you’re wheelchair bound. it really gets me how few motorists seem to understand this.

in any case, my anger abated within a couple of hours. it helped that google told us that christina would at least be able to claim a day’s lost wages from the driver’s insurance agency (she was too shaken to go to work today). in order for the insurers to take our claim though, we had to notify the cops of what happened – christina had the presence of mind after the accident to get the guy’s plate number. ultimately, we figured the guy was gonna get his due; cambridge levies a $500 or so fine on reckless driver-side door openings. in addition, the dude’s insurance premiums will probably go up as well (massachusetts car insurance gets a bit ugly if you’ve got a spotty driving record).

after christina and i reflected on what would happen to this guy, we actually felt really bad about all the fees he’d have to pay. nevertheless, it was hard justifying not following our course of action. this guy made a bonehead move and christina hit the pavement – she shouldn’t also be forced to sacrifice a day’s wages. at the very least, this hopefully means that one more cambridge motorist will be less reckless around cyclists

so that was plenty of excitement for one day. yet, there was still more to come later in the evening. this excitement was the good kind though. chris and i crossed the charles tonight and saw the new pornographers and belle & sebastian play. the new pornographers were awesome; strangely, it didn’t seem like too many people in the crowd were getting into it though. belle & sebastian were fun – more fun than i had antipicated, given the sleepy factor of their cds. they played a bunch of jazzy, upbeat songs that helped us forget the morning’s nastiness.

zest lah vye!

i was playing with my camera the other night and snapped this picture of pythagoras’ bust on my desk. it reminded me of a question a professor asked me once in college. it was meant to test whether i belonged in science or business.

he asked, “would you rather own the empire state building or have the pythagorean theorem named after you?” given that i’m now a grad student earning a very modest stipend, it should be clear what my immediate answer was.

(i decided to investigate my annual salary further using this list of mean annual boston wages sorted by profession. seems us grad student have less earning power than the average: telephone operator, typist, kiln tender, or recyclable material collector. and people wonder why college kids choose i-banking or consulting over science and engineering.)

it’s funny how unimportant things suddenly become pressing when you’re having trouble doing homework. for example, rather than triumph over my be.482 programming assignment, i thought it’d be much more prudent to perpetuate this blog chain letter i received some time back. so here’re my pieces of four:

four jobs i’ve had:
1. tennis pro. by far, the high point of my employment history. each summer in high school, i’d get paid $20 an hour to enjoy some fresh air and teach kids a sport that i love dearly.
2. programmer/lab rat. the polar opposite of the aforementioned job. most of these lab positions involved working in rooms that lacked windows and getting paid half what i was making on the tennis court.

that’s about it … i don’t think i’ve ever held a real job (and by real job, i mean do work that wasn’t fun).

four movies i can watch over and over:
1. eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
2. any of the lord of the rings movies
3. office space
4. any mindless action movie. i’m enthralled by movies like bloodsport, rambo first blood – part 2, and the entire die hard trilogy.

four places i’ve lived:
1. morningside, manhattan.
2. dundalk, maryland. go ahead, laugh if you’re from baltimore
3. brighton, mass.
4. sleepy hollow, new york. this place is damn scary when you’re walking by yourself at night. fog banks roll down hillsides and there’re forests and cemetaries all over the place. much creepier than morningside.

four tv shows i like:
1. the price is right. who knew that guessing whether toothpaste or baking soda is more expensive could be so exciting?
2. the simpsons (the first dozen seasons).
3. family guy.
4. south park. it’s taken me a while to understand south park, but now that i do, i find the show to be hilarious.

four places i’ve vacationed:
1. palawan, philippines
2. st. lucia.
3. barcelona.
4. a bunch of france. christina and i spent a month in 2005 following the tour de france in an eentsy-little car.

four of my favorite dishes:
1. rice + canned meats like spam and vienna sausage. i’m a canned food junkie.
2. paella
3. mcdonalds chicken nuggets in sweet and sour sauce. sooo good.
4. sushi

four sites i visit daily:
1) digg.com
2) nytimes.com
3) boingboing.net
4) macdailynews.com. resistance is futile; zealotry is unavoidable.

four places i’d rather be right now:
1) on the beach.
2) on the tennis court.
3) on a hike.
4) away from bostonians. between their dumping of lawn furniture in winter parking spots and their maniacal red sox idolatry (even in the dead of winter, nightly news shows here have a sox update segment), i’ve just about had my fill of boston folk. not a good sign, given that i’ve only lived here for 6 months and the phd looks like it could take 5 to god-help-me-7 years to complete.

four books/series i like:
1. borges’ collected fictions. my favorite slice of “magical realism.”
2. jared diamond’s guns, germs + steel.
3. salman rushdie’s haroun + the sea of stories. so delightful.
4. merck manual. because so much can go wrong with your body.

four games i can play over and over again:
1. chess (especially bughouse with good friends)
2. poker, even though i’m terrible at it
3. word racer
4. stratego.

four bloggers i’m tagging:
1. christina cruz
2. andrew louie
3. powen shiah
4. jennie lin

i don’t know any other people silly enough to keep blogs.

here’s a fun site i came across today: gullible.info.

the people who run this page post a bunch of official sounding pronouncements every day. these things look like great daily email signatures. for instance, yesterdays’ factoids:

• In 1953, Virginia governor John S. Battle unsuccessfully attempted to change the state’s motto from “sic semper tyrannis” to “ol’ Ginny gonna get you.”

• An internal memo circulated by the Democratic Party after the 2004 election cited MoveOn.org as “directly responsible for the 2004 defeat.”

• Six percent of an average telephone call is silence.

• The Moonflower Society, an international group pushing for building a moon colony, has started lobbing the International Olympic Committee to begin plans for the “Moon Olympics.”

• In the first five years coach Mike Krzyzewski was at Duke University their team had the worst cumulative record of any team in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

after reading a bunch of these “facts”, i can’t help but admit that if i saw them in a newspaper, i’d accept most of them as true. i guess i’m just a sucker for things in statistics/conspiracy theory form.

seems like buy.com slipped up and is giving out free domain names. you might want to give this a try. just follow the link in the forum and proceed to the checkout. apparently, you’ll receive an email within a day or two from godaddy.com confirming your new domain.

can’t hurt to give it a whirl. wait … i guess it really could hurt, n’est pa? hmm, too late for me though.

google can peer into so many nooks and crannies of the internet. for instance, here’re a bunch of fun searches to try [via digg].

that article reminded me of this infamous boing boing post, which showed a lot of people how to find unsecured webcams using google.

woohoo, i’ve actually received some responses from city council members concerning the private reservation of public parking spots following a snow storm.

council member craig kelly wrote:

Lawrence-

I forwarded your email to Lisa Peterson of DPW (Lpeterson@Cambridgema.gov). In the past there’s been talk about picking ‘street furniture’ up when it’s saving spaces, but I’m not sure how aggressively it’s done.

For what it’s worth, as a guy with off-street parking and who pretty much bikes everywhere anyway, I think we ought to be picking that stuff up. I let Ms. Peterson know that as well.

A larger underlying point is how are we going to handle more and more cars trying to park on our streets as we build more and more condos without enough off-street parking. My thoughts are we want the people and the density, but we don’t want the cars. So we could allow added density to developments where the residents are not given on-street parking stickers. And we could set up an overlay district for the whole city requiring two off-street spaces for each new residential unit. We’ll see how far I can go with these ideas.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this up and stay in touch.

Craig Kelley
Cambridge City Council

council member tim toomey was more taciturn:

Lawrence,
The city does not allow parking spaces to be saved and the DPW does remove any objects placed on the street. If not, please call 617-349-4800 or let me know at 616-576-XXXX.
tim

[i looked up the first phone number: it's public works. i've omitted the last 4 digits of the second phone number because i suspect it's a private line.]

so there we go. i’ve been mollified by a pair of really non-committal e-mails. since at least my voice was heard, i can delude myself into believing that i’ve gained a modicum of traction over a phenomenon that i have no power to change. then again, i could indeed take real action and begin a campaign of dibsarchy here on berkshire st.

oh, and here’s the original letter i wrote:

Dear City Council,

I’d like to request that something be done to prevent the practice of saving parking spaces here in Cambridge after a snowstorm. I think it’s ridiculous that some residents here feel it within their right to claim a portion of the road simply because they’ve invested some hard-work in it; no amount of effort by any individual should translate into domain over a piece of public property.

I would like to suggest actively encouraging city sanitation and transportation workers to remove objects saving parking spaces. By doing so, it will become clear that Cambridge does not condone the vandalism of vehicles that do not “respect dibs.” Removing these objects will also benefit local local businesses – residents are less likely to run even short errands if they know that each time they leave their neighborhoods, they risk a potential confrontation upon returning and trying to find a new parking space. Finally, clearing the street of the folding chairs and other bric-a-brac I’ve seen strewn across the road today will help reduce our streets’ resemblance to a garbage dump.

Respectfully,
Lawrence David

114 1/2 Berkshire St.

it’s funny: christina and i were both thinking yesterday that we’d finally gotten used to boston. perhaps it’s the fact that the red sox are deep in hibernation, but nonetheless, we thought that spending the next several years here might not be so trying after all.

but then, following yesterday’s blizzard, we saw the folding chairs. it appears that many bostonians feel that having dug out their cars following a snow storm, the parking spot they’ve just cleared rightfully becomes theirs for at least the next several days. when said owner drives away, he or she usually deposits some piece of tasteless wooden furniture, like a dining room chair or a footstool, as a warning to would-be-parkers. woe to anyone foolish enough to remove these urban signs of “dibs” – your car is likely to get punished.

this whole practice is just baffling and really really frustrating. i grew up in and around new york city – a place where parking was even harder to come by than boston. nevertheless, i’ve never seen anyone resort to anything as infantile as blocking a shoveled-out parking spot with a refrigerator (one of christina’s co-workers saw one her the way to work this morning.) the idea that your personal hard-work somehow earns you a special reprieve from laws on public property is just wrong and infuriating.  the street isn’t a playground – you can’t call dibs.

yet, as silly as this practice appeared, it had some very real consequences for us: we were  prevented  from doing some much-needed grocery shopping today, as by early this evening, every available parking spot had some piece of bric-a-crap in them. since i absolutely refused to lower myself to putting a piece of trash in my parking spot, we couldn’t leave – there’d be no parking when we got back.

[again - it makes absolutely no sense.  if everyone who had a spot leaves furniture there when they drive away, parking becomes even harder to come by.  it's like everyone choosing to cheat in the prisoner's dilemma.  which, now that i think about it that way, does make sense to me.]

whew, felt good to have vented there. earlier, i was upset enough to write a letter to the cambridge city council (and in doing so, became one of those “letter-writers.” must be the cambridge water getting to me.)

damn bostonians. i always thought that your misguided passion for things like red footwear belied the fact that deep down, you were in fact reasonable people. but now, these folding chairs have proven to me that christina and i need to escape as soon as possible.

inspired by the winter games in turino, christina and i ventured out into the blizzard today. i brought along my camera. here’re some photos i snapped:

the lot of them, most of which didn’t turn out so well (since it was so dark), live here.

having successfully tended to our plants for the past couple of weeks, christina and i have decided to get some more interactive pets. of course, a dog or a cat would be ideal, but would also violate the terms of our lease. i’ve had some bad rodent experiences too; the last one i had (childhood) escaped one night and gnawed through some water tubing in our kitchen, flooding our entire house and forcing my family to move into a hotel for a week. the insurance agent didn’t even bother investigating too closely – it was obvious that no one could invent a claim that ridiculous.

the remaining set of putative pets consisted of fish and a child. hah.

so off we went to “petsmart” today. we had already picked up a snazzy fishbowl from the christmas tree store (who knew they were still open in february?) sadly, we were forced to pass on the fish, since our apartment gets colder than the minimum temperature at which most fish live. determined to bring some kind of pet home, i decided to at least get some snails. christina and i actually spent one summer as snail farmers in baltimore, successfully turning a pair of the critters into a 4-dozen strong colony by the summer’s end. we can handle snails.

yet, i had underestimated how diligent the petsmart employees were. when we asked a sales associate to pick out two snails for us, we were immediately grilled about our tank setup: “do you have a heater? how about a filter? how big is your tank?” dumbstruck, christina and i failed each question and were deemed unfit to raise snails by the associate. as we left the store, my guilt quickly subsided, however. “what the hell?” i thought. i wasn’t trying to adopt some orphan; i was trying to buy a $1.50 invertebrate. that woman must really care about the pets she sells.

whatever. we’ll try petco tomorrow, where i’ve noticed the store clerks have weaker attachments to the pets they sell.