Miami Beach

Kinda, well, sucks. But I have 12 hours to kill before my flight to Lima (whee!) and MIA is genuinely one of my least favorite airports on earth, so... yeah. Had a decent stout at Abbey Brewing Co., which A and W (the Artist Formerly Known As J2. Or J3. Or something) may remember from our rough sleeping romp to Florida . (happy barfday, W!)

In Peru mountain biking and wandering through August 3, so posting will be sparse. Shocking, no?

of Js and motorized ice chests

This photograph was taken by our friend J2*, who was on the phone with J when he saw it in Albuquerque:
Yes, friends and neighbors: that's a motorized ice chest. No, I don't know why he made it, how fast it goes, or where the guy puts his feet while (riding?) J2*, feel free to elaborate in the comments section if you have additional details!

*As I was starting to write this post, I found myself in the throes of a naming dilemma: I realized I have described two different people as J2 in previous blog posts. And I have already coined a J3 and a J4, so I can't just reassign further muddying the waters. As a matter of fact, I was out at a local filmmaker showing last night with J4 and someone who will now be coined J5 when J was on the abovementioned phone call with J2*. This shit is getting confusing!

The thing is, you'd have to know me reasonably well and at least know of my friends if not know them personally to be able to decipher who any given blog post references. And referencing people in the blog is mostly a shoutout to the person, not meant to identify them to the masses on the internetz. So any confusion, well... kinda doesn't really matter.

But dammit, what was it with naming kids names that start with J in the 1970s and 1980s? Actually, a little more internetting shows that J names were awfully prominent throughout most of the 20th century.

Thus, going forward, it's like this: J2(a) and J2(b), y'all are now joined in cosmic-cyberspace bondage. This is forever, since the internetz don't forget. Readers, you'll just have to sleuth it out in any given post, or email me for clarification. J2(a) and J2(b), deal with it. I actually think you'll like one another quite a bit. And I don't want to hear any fighting in the back seat if you don't, or I swear to god, you'll be walking home! (A shoutout there to mom. Or maybe it's more a shoutout to my brothers, since we actually had to walk home once.)

The Franchise, and Alaska politic

No, not like opening up a Subway, but rather the right to vote. It's something I take really seriously, and I'm sitting here exercising it (I vote absentee in Alaska.) It regularly takes me several hours to vote, since I research every single race, every ballot measure, every bond, every judge up for retention. As I acknowledged to J2 in an email, this is arguably a sillyass waste of time, but I can't feel good about voting any other way.

My current conundrum: the options for the US Senate race are just abysmal. While I appreciate the diligent work the so-called Tea Party is doing to destroy the GOP, I'm obviously not voting for a Tea Party candidate, so Joe Miller is out. I do find it amusing that Miller was disciplined in writing for ethics violations in 2008 when he was the Fairbanks North Star Borough's part-time attorney. While Miller fans might try to claim that it's a partisan hatchet job, the guy making this public, the former borough mayor, isn't a massive Lisa Murkowski fan: "Whitaker has a long and mixed history with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is running a write-in campaign after Miller beat her in the Republican primary this summer. They served in the state Legislature together but Whitaker publicly complained of nepotism when Murkowski was appointed to the U.S. Senate by her father, then-Gov. Frank Murkowski."

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, "talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator… you know, the light goes on, the light goes off, it’s not going to do anything that isn’t built into it" so Lisa Murkowski's amusing write-in campaign is out.

Who does that leave me? A whack job libertarian named Frederick "David" Hasse (the name in quotes is from the official election pamphlet from the State of Alaska, not my own embellishment.) Why is he a whackjob, you ask? Let's start with hypothetical question #3 in his official candidate statement: "Do you know [...] What the "New World Order" is about?" Somewhat inexplicable for a Libertarian is his #1 plan for the "People's Bailout": "Nationalize the Federal Reserve and place it under Congressional control." Okay, let's move on.

One of the only things I can say for Tim Carter, a retired optometrist from Florida, is that he lives in a ski condo in the shadow of a nice ski resort. He has lived in Alaska for less time (3 years) than I have, but did manage to work the words "Alaska" and "Alaskan" into his official candidate statement 14 times. (Confidential to Tim: "neverstop" is actually two words.)

Non-affiliated Ted Gianoutsos only uses "Alaska" and variants thereof seven times in his official candidate statement, which seems to be running against Frank Murkowski as much as Lisa: "father-daughter" shows up five times. Notwithstanding the opening exhortation in his candidate statement, "Elect me, and YOU win!" this guy = FAIL.

How about the Democratic candidate, a marginally qualified small town mayor? (Will Alaskans never learn our lesson on that?) Scott McAdams is the somewhat bumbling mayor of Sitka, which at population ~8,986, is the fourth most populated city in Alaska. (Yes, really.) To once again call up the memory of Utah Phillips, "Working for the Democratic Party now that’s kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic..." Indeed. McAdams wants to destroy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is aggressively pro-war and pro-Afghanistan war, and generally, I just disagree with almost every one of his positions. I mean, this is really the Democratic candidate? It seems that one of the only things he and I agree on is abortion, though his own statement on ""Individual Liberty" is the political equivalent of mumbling with your mouth full of peanut butter and Wonder Bread, which forced me to google him specifically for a position on abortion. He does manage variants of Alaska and Alaskan a whopping 15 times, but he has lived in the Last Frontier for 19 years, so he's a little more justified than Carter in his pandering.

So I'm left with: nobody. I can't decide who to write-in, and I simply cannot, as a matter of personal morality, vote for someone I genuinely don't want to in office. And I don't want Scott McAdams in office. I guess I'm going to leave it blank. To continue with my theme of paraphrasing musicians, here's a little Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

Not similarly problematic is the governor's race: I'm actually fine with voting for Ethan Berkowitz, who I have met and spoken with in person at some length. Unfortunately, I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis of Ivan Moore, a local politcal pollster:

"Ethan’s a very smart and capable guy, but [voters] don’t know the man. He’s a personally private person and very few people really know what he’s about, what makes him tick, and what he’s done in his life. The reason they don’t know it is because Ethan hasn’t told us. For years now, he’s shied away from that critical aspect of political life, the telling of his story, and the creation and maintenance of a personal bond with voters. Instead, we get the quips and the gimmicks, and his opponents defining him instead."

I know the man a little (though not nearly as well as a friend of mine does), but Moore is, tragically, correct: he largely lets his opponents define him. This is especially sad when the opponent is a boob, as Don Young is and was in 2008, or a machine tool and corporate lobbyist whore, as Sean Parnell is. (Let's be real: Parnell is really only gubnuh because a certain Tina Fey lookalike is chronically unable to not quit her jobs.)

On a related note, here is some awesome reading on Alaska's somewhat strange gubernatorial succession procedures. I'm particularly fond of the following quotes:
"The Palin administration is a clown car."
"...there have been [Alaska] Cabinet officers in the past who should not be running a hot dog stand, much less standing in line to take the helm of the U.S.S. Alaska."
"Besides, face it, there are only so many Wasilla High School graduates to go around."

Sometimes, I just adore the Daiy News. Few other papers have the cajones to publish snark on the level of Paul Jenkins, who regularly refers to Palin in ways like "our former half governor" and "Demi-Gov".

Ahhhh, Alaska. Sometimes I miss you. Okay, back to the electoral salt mines.

A big bike tour! And food porn!

C'mon, what more do you need?

Planning for a big bike tour now. Roughly: Myrtle Beach, SC to Amherst, MA, then train to Rochester, NY, then bike to Detroit. Unknown from Detroit. Big times. Hopefully I'll figure out how to post photos when doing mobile blogging.

But just in case, so my loyal readership isn't starved for food porn for a month or more, here's last night's dinner I made. J2 came over and we played trivial pursuit. We were going to go out to bar trivia, but only one non-smoking place in the area had trivia, and it was in East Decatur.

Ridiculously, dinner didn't include any onions. Bummer. It was a basic stir-fry, with brown rice:

Frying tofu.

Fried tofu.

Broccoli!

Giving the broccoli stem a little extra frying time before adding the crowns.

Stem and crown: reunited, and it feels so good!

Zucchini!

Zucchini, cooking!

Poblano peppers!

Poblano peppers! Frying! (Garlic was added later.)

And like I usually do when we have guests over, I kept most of the components separate so the guest(s) can add whatever they want, and skip what they don't. Except onions. Onions are mandatory.

FAJITA FAJITA!

I wasn't teasing, I really do have plenty of food porn to post. Here are fajitas I made when J2 came over a few days before my bike trip:

The produce before cooking, and:

after cooking, with the tempeh thrown in. Tempeh, you say?

Oh yeah, tempeh! Cubed and uncooked, and then:

fried with olive oil and salt.

Some reasonably good looking organic bell peppers.

And a side profile. You can see a seam on the green pepper, the kind of thing that "perfect" conventional peppers wouldn't make it to supermarket display with. You would probably have to dumpster them, if they made it as far as the store.

Cut and cleaned, and ready to FRY!

And the peppers, with a little olive oil and fry lovin'.

More before and after magic, with organic zucchini:

FRIED! Woo woo woo!

Green onions, and

broccoli.

Made for some damn tasty fajitas, lemme tell you what. So much so that when J got home from work last night, she wanted fajitas, too! So, with (no) apologies to a nasty pizza chain which shall remain unnamed for the play on words, I made fajitas fajitas!

Of course, any proper meal that any reasonable person would eat starts with ONIONS!

We were hungry, so I was working quickly and don't have many prep pictures this time. Suffice it to say that they look a lot like the prep pictures above. Here is the veggie mixture cooking.

And fully cooked.

And fully cooked.

And I had a hankering for more fried food, so I did a slightly lower-oil version of battering and deep fat frying. Here are some onions, about to get bathed in batter, and:

FRIED! I mean, for real: how can you not want to eat these?

Here are some similarly frying green peppers. J made a wasabi veganaise for a dipping sauce. Yum yum yum!

Shorts and thriftiness

I'm a big fan of thrift stores. Atlanta has been a pretty big disappointment in this category, at least intown. Fortunately, I used to regularly peruse the thrift stores in Anchorage, and pretty much couldn't pass up a pair of cargo shorts that fit, which is good, since it's definitely shorts weather in Atlanta.

I broke out my cargo shorts collection from the closet this morning:


It's a little difficult to see, but I treat my clothing pretty hard. Bicycling is particularly hard on shorts and pants, especially in the crotch. Here's a visual aid:

Conveniently color coded, the yellow circles are tears and holes. You'll note a particular prevalence in the area where, well, contact with a bike seat is made.

The red circles are what results when you're replacing your food waste disposal,
and realize when you're halfway through that the pipe leading from the disposal (visible righthand side, ~1/3 from top) is kinda gross, so you decide to spray bleach water into it.

Hot tip: this isn't blood stains on a carpet resulting from removing bike pedals (shout out to J2!), and
quick treatment with hot water or other cleaner doesn't actually make a bit of difference.

One more hot tip while we're at it: turns out that cheap screwdrivers aren't designed to be used as prybars when replacing food waste disposals.

READERSHIP POLL: Which, if any, of the above shorts should be (A) turned into rags, or (B) replace the even more ragged cargo shorts in the painting clothing collection?

Time to go for a bike ride in the one pair in the photo without obvious damage.

A Nervous. Fucking. Breakdown.

Is what I'm about to have. In the condo next door to the north, for the second day in a row, they are replacing flooring and otherwise making such an astonishing amount of noise that it's like having a dance party inside a 747 engine. On our floor to ceiling windows to the south and east, the window washers dangling from ropes are slamming around. (They also make a surprisingly massive amount of noise.) They are allegedly cleaning the windows.

I'm going to go read new urbanism at a coffeehouse. In the not-very-amusing irony department, I'm going to have to ride my bike to get to one, since there really isn't a good one within a five minute walking distance (consistent with NU principles.)

Before I go, here are a few pictures from the 65 mile (~metric century) ride I did with a friend on Sunday, mentioned in the previous post. We'll call this friend J2, to distinguish him from J. As mentioned, the first two thirds of the ride were fantastic: rolling hills, and quiet back roads in central Georgia.


Here is the obligatory bucolic country road, with white picket fence, and cyclists approaching the second rest stop image:



Here is the obligatory condom-icecube-in-the-portapotty urinal picture. Yes, really. (This is at that same rest stop):

It was a lovely rest stop, complete with a friendly volunteer mechanic who fixed J2's rubbing front derailleur. In other news, J2 had never heard of the idea of a condom icecube?!? Consider this a request for a Highly Scientific poll of my readership: please leave a comment if you knew this fantastic utilization for condoms.


Remember, dear reader, how I said that the first two thirds of the ride was fantastic? Well, after the last rest stop it rapidly got marginally less fantastic, as the last twenty miles was in apocalyptic-quality rain, thunder, and lightning. Here is the obligatory standing-water-in-my-shoes at the end of the ride picture:


We had great conversation the whole time, including shouting to be heard over the thunder and rain about whose bike was more likely to be struck by the lightning that was blasting at nearly the exact same time as the thunder boomed: my friend's steel frame urban commuter style bike with slightly wider tires, or my aluminum frame road bike with super skinny tires. My friend maintained that his bike and person was less likely to be struck down due to the wider tires (because the lightning would have to go farther to get to ground.) I maintained that my aluminum frame was less attractive, period, and still believe the lightning wouldn't be doing the endgame analysis when it decided who to strike down for their wicked ways.

Of course, in the wicked ways analysis, I definitely lose. (Incidentally, when I described this to J later, she agreed that the steel frame was far more susceptible to lightning strikage. And she's Really Really Smart about such things.) Sorry, J2.