Alaska! North Carolina!

Holy. Shit. Been a long, wonderful, exhausting few weeks. (Month?)

Here is some fun vegan food porn. Feeding some awesome folks. Out of the back of the car. In NC.

Posting from ANC. Damn. I miss Alaska. Like, a whole lot. 

Mat Su glacier

From the top of the Lion's Head formation. It's a good day in Alaska.

Damn, I miss this place.

Vegan traveling breakfast!

Decided I'm tired of airport food, so i knocked up a quick fried rice with tempeh, artichoke hearts, sun dried tomatoes, jalapenos, and a ton of fresh grated ginger.

Back to the airport for me now!

St. Petersburg hotel room vegan food porn!

I knew i was gonna be tired after driving 9ish hours, so i got an exorbitantly priced ($8.55) hot food bar dinner at Whole Paycheck, and a delicious beet to go along with it.

Ohhhhh, Florida.

Volume

Yesterday I received email in 102 different threads, not counting spam. (gmail users know what I mean: I didn't click into each thread to determine how much activity was in it yesterday.) I sent 33 email messages.

Since midnight (when I was sleeping, happily) I have received email in 22 different threads.

Ugh.

So, like, I get it: you all miss me blogging. I kinda miss it too. But since most of you know me, you also know how busy I've been, and why.

I do have a shitton of photos I need to go through, which will surely yield some quality vegan food porn.

But it's pretty unlikely that it's going to happen any time in the next three weeks. It's just gonna be that kind of three weeks. Or month and a half, depending on how you cut the cake.

But I haven't forgotten you. I promise.

Clowns. Just. Clowns.

result in me drinking a beer. For another night. Clowns. Sigh. Ugh. Clowns.

I shouldn't complain, though:

my life is amazing. Like, for reals.

IAD

I fucking despise this airport. It's huge, confusing, has ridiculous intra-airport transit, is horribly located, poorly signed.

Yep, pretty much hate everything about it. Except that it has a Chipotle. About three miles from my gate.

Airport beer porn

Young's Double Chocolate Stout, a delicious airport treat at the end of a long, amazing, productive, powerful week in Ohio.

Y'all are awesome. (Really: you know who you are.)

K/L/Ubuntu

In my building, we asked our "IT vendor" to fix up our slow, creaky public internet kiosks. They told us the boxes were too old (they're from about 2002), one was running Windoze Professional 2000, and one was running Windows 97 (ack!) And both were running an unregistered free trial copy of the payware SiteKiosk (which is craptastic at best.)

So they say they "can't" fix the current boxes, and we should just throw them out. And their quote for selling us two refurbished windows boxes with SiteKiosk (no doubt again the free trial version)? $1200. Our answer, in two words: Fuck. That.

So I tell our building manager to get the boxes back. I'll try stripping them, install a very light distribution of Ubuntu, create a very limited privilege user account, throw Firefox or Chromium on, and be done with it. A supports this approach and sends a handy instructable.

Great idea, right? Except that the stupid motherfuckers THREW ONE OF THE COMPUTERS AWAY. Say WHAAAAAAT? You threw it in the garbage? Without asking us?

That's kinda like you take your car to the mechanic, and they tell you that it's not worth fixing, so they donate it to public radio for you. Or run it into a river.

So we yell a little, and they agree to provide us a refurbished box (not yet arrived.)

This morning at half of the asscrack of dawn I took the one remaining computer out (which required some power tools to liberate it) and then spent much of the morning downloading torrents of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) (very new, but I really wanted a Long Term Support version), creating a bootable USB drive with it, only to find out the computer doesn't support PAE (meaning you can't boot from an external hard drive with it.) So I go back and torrent Lubuntu 12.04, remake the bootable USB drive, and try that. No kinda dice whatsoever: just a massive pain in the ass. It takes FOREVER to install, won't properly set the time zone (which even though you used to be able to tell it manually what time zone you're in, it now insists on hanging while waiting indefinitely for a network time server for), won't complete the console configuration properly. And then even though it pretends that the install mostly finished, it just totally freezes, and freezes completely upon startup.

Back to the drawing board. I go through the same miserable process with Kubuntu 12.04.

By now I've learned by lesson about 12.04, and ditch it. I try Kubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) with the same damn result.

So I go get Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal , the alternate (stripped down) version, and it installs like a charm. Well, it takes a while, but with no hiccups.

The moral of the story? Be very wary about early adoption. 

Now time to go configure the machine and make it a public kiosk, and await the arrival of our newly refurbished machine.

Museum bathrooms

Some of you (well, one of you, anyway) might remember that I once considered doing my senior thesis as a photographic study of bathroom graffiti.

I admit it: I like taking pictures in bathrooms.

Even when I'm not supposed to. (Bondi Beach, near Sydney, Australia.)


Recently however, I've gone to several museums, and respected the rules to not photograph the galleries. Nothing said about the bathrooms, though!

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville

(check out all the annoying advertising above the urinals)

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville

Pretty, high ceilings, though: the building originally opened in 1934 as Nashville's downtown post office (a post office is still housed in the ground level on the west side.) 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

(Think much, speak little, write nothing)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

If it's Tuesday, it must be Nashville

Okay, fine, so it's actually Wednesday. And it's Atlanta. And tonight is Sacramento. But these photos are from Nashville!

These are the delicious buffalo tempeh strips at The Wild Cow in Nashville. Everything on the menu is vegan unless you request dairy cheese. (No, I don't really get it, either.) The buffalo strips and "ranch" had great flavor, but definitely aren't as amazing as the all-time reigning king of vegan buffalo wings, at the old City 'O City in Denver. And of course, the company there was also fantastic. (A2, we miss you!)

Here is my reuben, which was good, but not great (the bread needed to be toasted more, and the tofu needed to be more heavily fried.) The side of BBQ seitan was very tasty (and in the right of the frame you can see the remains of the buffalo strips, which we demolished.)

This is J's seitan philly, and garlicky kale. Also tasty, but again, not amazing. We would totally go back, but would branch out some on the menu.

From Massachusetts: this is a mural I painted on a wall in my college dorm in my first semester, Fall 1993. Still there, with a few later artistic adaptations. (It used to say "...ITY)

In Revere, from a hotel room window. I noticed plenty of traffic on the road below, but zero on the overpasses. Clearly this needed to be explored.

The roadbeds themselves are abandoned. You can see them on this google map link, just north of the hotel. It looks like maybe they used to be highway on/off ramps, but it's hard to say for sure. Could also have been access roads to the abandoned Muller Airfield / Revere Airport. (Scroll down on that link, or search Revere...) It made for an interesting way of crossing that rotary to get to the bus stop on the west side without walking alongside traffic.

Did some mountain biking and urbex last night with D3 here in Atlanta, including the fascinating Hartsfield Incinerator site.

Named for the former mayor of Atlanta, William B. Hartsfield, just as the airport. In searching for it, I found this amusing bit of historical commentary in a google book: William Berry Hartsfield: Mayor of Atlanta, by Harold H. Martin (1978.)

...his profound interest in garbage paid off in honors when in May 1963 a new incinerator was named for him -- a fitting tribute, according to editor Eugene Patterson. "After all what more appropriate monument could be raised to the hottest-tempered old tyrant in the municipal annals of benevolent despotism than a roaring, 1,500-ton fountain of blue blazes," wrote Patterson. "Where is the man who has done more slow burns, roasted more enemies alive, thrown up more smoke screens or carried more coals to Newcastle than the former mayor who will be honored by a city that was shaped brick by brick in the kiln of the irascible genius? Bill Hartsfield never cooled off in twenty-three years as mayor. Now his temperature belongs to the ages." (p.171) 

This is the rusting but still climbable conveyor strutcure. 

Here is the observation post on the top of the conveyor, just above the massive hopper. 

To get up to it, you briefly have to crawl up the conveyor belt itself before switching out to the stairs (visible on the right.) 

 Lots of old cylinders laying around. 

Naptime! 

Under the pavement, the forest.


Which a little searching indicates might be an adaptation from a beautiful Wendell Berry poem:

IN A COUNTRY

ONCE FORESTED

By Wendell Berry

The young woodland remembers

the old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,

an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement the soil

is dreaming of grass.

Nashvile

BTW, is weird. Fun, but: weird.

Nashville

This is about as close as I'm likely to get to Nashville honky think or country. It's also the quickest photo i could snap on my phone to blog with.

I'm currently at  Big River Grille & Brewing Works  in Nashville after an unsuccessful attempt to check out a Nashville Green Bike . The cask pulled, dry hopped Sweet Magnolia Brown Ale has a great taste and body, unfortunately it's served at ambient temp, not cellar temp. But still tasty.

Had lunch at Flying Saucer, with an extremely friendly bartender, Mike, who made my vegan needs work despite several 86s on the menu, including avocado, and pita. The BBC Kentucky barrel aged stout was delicious.

Just prior, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts was well curated, but small, and somewhat underwhelming. Still well worth the cost (free.)

Various and sundry

Hot off the digital presses, since I know y'all must be missing the food porn and gardening porn something fierce.

This is this year's crop of container gardening tomatoes. (Containers, in this case, are drilled out 6.5 gallon homebrewing buckets. I sold some brewing equipment through Craigslist right when we moved to Atlanta, and the guy who came to pick the stuff up noticed I was using old brewing buckets for gardening, said something like, "Wow -- you really must have a ton of brewing equipment!")

The larger plant to the left looks healthier, but it struggling a bit. Atlanta is a tough place to grow tomatoes, and buckets are a tough place to grow tomatoes.

Now on the left is the smaller plant, a Tumbling Tiger, with a couple delicious specimens picked and sitting on top. And that's our little baby herb garden with, I think, oregano and thyme. We finally gave up on some transplated hydroponic basil which did surprisingly well for a while, but then just wasn't having it.

Here are those Tumbling Tigers in action: sliced on toast with Better Than Cream Cheese, then going clockwise: sauerkraut, fried tempeh, sauteed broccoli, and caramelized ONIONS!

My favorite apron from my time cooking aboard ship has a silkscreened patch sewn on. The text is: "under the pavement  |  the forest".

I love exploring, particularly abandoned buildings and industrial sites. I particularly love it when nature takes back over.

I'm posting this from my college alma mater which many of you know. Yesterday I moderated a roundtable discussion of alums and friends about Occupy, caught up with one of my most important faculty mentors (K), and am going to a couple more workshops today, and get to just wander around and re-explore the place.

Above is a shot from my bike and hike this morning through the "pine forest." (See any pines?) (Stir any memories?)

It's a little hard to express how amazing this place is for me, and for many people.

Here's a toad trying hard to blend in on that same little path. 

Students here make stuff. Sometimes it's hilarious.

I'm lodged in the housing group (starts with "P") I never did officially stay in, but spent plenty of time in. The first time was when I needed to flee the rages of Fuckmonger, and an upper year friend invited me over. They were going out on an exploration of the former SAC bunker built into Bare Mountain. (Neat video in that link.) It's massive: almost 26 acres, and 44,000 square feet. Now owned by Amherst College and used as the Five College Book Depository, it contains nearly 500,000 volumes, filed by size rather than by subject, on over 8 miles of shelving. Here's a wonky article all about how it was set up and is used as a library depository. Its initial purpose (1957-71) was as the eastern communications hub for the Strategic Air Command, and it played a significant role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Back in 1993, however, it was in a strange transitional state of use, and, well, some students knew how to get in. And so we did. And wandered, climbed around, sat and spun around in really uncomfortable office chairs, went through piles of old records (mostly boring stuff like time logs.) For further details on this trip, we'll we'll have to talk in person.

This is only the second time I've been back to campus for any significant period of time, the first being June 2010. As of then, my mural was still up in the basement of the dorm I was housed in. I'm hoping to be able to go check it out today and see if it's still up.

Tomorrow: Boston for some friends, some Red Sox, some wandering.

State College, PA

Lunchtime. Otto's. Old Fugget Barleywine. Yum.

Driving back today from a long but amazing week+ in WV. More details may follow (but probably not, since I forgot to bring my digital camera.)

I listened to this song (At the Bottom of Everything, by Bright Eyes) a lot in the car:

into the caverns of tomorrow
with just our flashlights and our love
we must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

Is this your bike? Or: notes on grammar, irony, and intentional misuse

Below is a recent posting from the ever-vigilant Midtown Ponce Security Alliance (MPSA), a citizen group that employs off duty Atlanta PD cops to patrol a nearby area with a significant emphasis onbusting "gangs" of trans* prostitutes, or what MPSA ally Wayne Mock of the similarly styled off duty rentacop police force Midtown Blue likes to call "tranny hookers."

Is this your bike?

May 13, 2012 · Posted in Eye on Midtown 

APD recently arrested a homeless male who is staying at the Peachtree-Pine “shelter” for stealing money out of parking lot boxes on West Peachtree Street. They are looking for the owner/victim of the bike he was riding, a baby-blue, almost brand-new Power Climber 2X suspension by Dynacraft. The subject refused to divulge where he found the bicycle. According to the police report, the “shelter” folks told police that he is new to Midtown community. If you are missing a bike please contact Investigator Cantin directly at JCantin@atlantaga.gov.

Power Climber? Dynacraft? Whoa! Sweet ride that someone is no doubt burning to get back, right? Well, in case the desperate crime victim needs their memory jogged, this might be their bike if they recently paid $88.00 for it at Wal Mart.

What really rubs raw about this article is not their lack of understanding that they really mean "dual suspension" rather than "2X suspension", but rather their bizarre and inappropriate use of scare quotes (a.k.a. air quotes) around "shelter." No matter one's position on the Peachtree and Pine shelter run by the Metro Atlanta Taskforce for the Homeless, it's most definitely a shelter. Check out this article and the reader comments to get a small flavor of the debate over this shelter. If you click through on that article, try to ignore the blatantly unobjective [micro] journalism in a series described thusly: "Welcome to another edition of "Visions for Vacancies," where we visit a local vacant commercial building and ask you what you'd like to see go in that space.…"

Confidential to Midtown Patch: the Peachtree and Pine shelter isn't vacant, and the parking lot across the street from it isn't part of the shelter, and those who hang out in the parking lot (which really isn't as terrifying as they make it sound: I ride by it semi-regularly) explicitly aren't allowed to access the shelter's services.

Confidential to MPSA: the word shelter isn't ironic. Perhaps you were going for a "writer's concise (but possibly misleading) paraphrasing, characterization, or intentional misrepresentation of statements, concepts, or terms used by a third party."

For the grammar nerds out there, if wikipedia isn't a sufficiently reliable source, see also the MLA Style Manual (3rd. Ed., 2008) at section 3.48(a), or The Chicago Manual of Style (15th Ed., 2003) at section 7.58. I assume the CMS 16th Edition (2010) section is numbered similarly, but I don't have it to check. Anyone out there in internetlandia have the 16th edition and want to post a comment confirming or denying this?

US Virgin Islands! (and stuff)

In the USVI with J, her sister, and sister's fiance. We spent the last three days hiking and snorkeling, so a rainy day is a welcome rest day. It also gives me a little time to catch up on blogging!

These three shots are from some of the worst mountain biking or trail riding I've ever done. I was exploring the powerline cut behind the former Bellwood Quarry site in west Atlanta. Don't ask me why.

It was: terrible. Like, no joke. I fell constantly, my legs were torn to shit by brambles, there were hidden holes throughout the knee to waist high brambles. It sucked. These shots are actually all from laying down on the ground after falling.

These shots are actually all from laying down on the ground after falling. This must have been a relatively early fall, since my legs are only very slightly bloody, and my shorts aren't torn yet.

The angle of the shot isn't an artifact of the digital camera: I was laying down where I fell, backwards in the weeds at about a 20 degree angle.

Another shot laying down backwards after falling.

Hey, since we're here, how about a little FOOD PORN? You wouldn't believe how many search engine hits I get from that term. Or maybe you would. They mostly probably weren't looking for pictures of tempeh and flash fried brussels sprouts.

St. John has a lot of ruins left over from the days of sugar plantations, started by the Dutch in the mid to late 18th century with slave labor. According to one source, there were as many as 109 sugar and cotton plantations, covering most of the island. Fortunately most of the island is part of the Virgin Islands National Park so the sites are protected. This site is great, and only accessible by hiking in.

These are the boiling vats which once produced rum. Yum!

Here is our comprehensively stocked freezer, which shows we're drinking plenty of the modern day product. Liquor is ridiculously cheap due to some weirdness with duty fees. A liter of basic Cruzan rum, made on neighboring St. Croix, costs as little as $4. Yep, you heard that correctly. Fortunately there is also a very generous import allowance of up to five liters of hard liquor per adult, and a bonus sixth if one of them is USVI produced.

This view shows part of the giant steam-powered sugarcane crushing machinery, which the book "St. John Off The Beaten Track" tells of a child getting crushed in:

On March 7, 1908 fifteen year old Maunie Dalmida was crushed in the gear assembly next to the rollers. The following account is taken from... "Boy That Got Caught in the Cogs": The undersigned was sent at Par Force to get information regard to a boy that got caught in the cogs of the mill... With his back toward Dalmida, J Samuel hord the cracking, he then look bahind him saw Dalmida caught in the cogs. Mr. Marsh... was outside of the boiling house, he run and stop the ingin. He was already broken in too. The right hand was also smash, the belly was smash, his bowels was torn asunder...

It's interesting (and heartening) to see the jungle reclaiming many of the ruins. These are the oddly named Par Force ruins. While par for the course, they are not forceful. These are a little over a mile from the Reef Bay ruins above, which are all part of the Reef Bay Sugar Factory Historic District. The Library of Congress has some neat B&W photos of the site before the NPS restored it in the 1960s. Here, for example, are the same boiling vats I pictured above.

C'mon now: you didn't think I'd do this long a blog post with this many randomass pictures without including some ONIONS, did you? Really?

Especially for R and A, here is a video clip of one of the many "Soldier Crabs" that inhabit the entire island, and according to one guidebook make an annual trek in August to the beaches to lay eggs (and presumably find new shells.) We were initially quite surprised to find them, since the first I saw were at least 3/4 of a mile away as the crow flies, with a 440 elevation gain: about a dozen were marching along in a line alongside the America Hill ruins. Yesterday at the Reef Bay Sugar Factory ruins, we saw them as big as an average adult's fist.

Edit: I'm not sure if that video clip is working for y'all out there in Internetlandia, since it's not working for me, so here is a screenshot of the solider crab in question:

Also at the America Hill ruins, since mom loves these shots of me behind signs indicating that it's dangerous and I shouldn't be there.

Okay, I'm going to post this sucker, and maybe, if you all play nicely, you'll get more later.

I know, I know.

It's been a while. But look, it's not you: it's me.

I'm a lead logistics organizer for a 400-500 person bike ride. Tomorrow. And then on Sunday J and I fly to the USVI. Whee!

I couldn't resist this (presumably unintentionally funny) screen shot from Patch, our little "hyperlocal" news source.

No, that's not the "crime beat" box, that's just some headlines you can click on. Yes, APD are clowns, all the way up the chain of command: that's a quote from (edit: former) Major Chris Leighty, Zone 5 Commander (where I live.)