Skating with Low Pants

Today K and I were hanging out at Columbus Circle watching some high school kids hanging out skating around the statue of Columbus. Kids were primarily black and white, or African- American and European-American, if you will. What I noticed was the union of two cultural phenomena. Skating came from, I am guessing, suburban white kids. And the low pants fashion, I think, came from urban black culture. And at Columbus Circle, and elsewhere, the two phenomena have mixed. There is hope for the world.

How many racist white men now wear their pants low because that is the fashion?

Meter Maids

Is that the correct term? Or should it be meter persons? Ticket distribution engineers? Anyways, saw one of them the other day, Tuesday I think, giving a ticket to a parked car in my neighborhood. In my neighborhood street sweeping occurs with annoying frequency- every 2md amd 4th Monday and Tuesday, alternating sides. If you happen to forget and park on the wrong side, you get a ticket between the hours of 9am – 12pm. So the other day I saw a T.D.E. at work giving a car a ticket. The timing was perfect, as right at that moment the streetsweeper was sweeping by and had to make an even bigger circle around the parked car and the T.D.E.’s car, bigger than if the T.D.E. had not been there. Thus the T.D.E. had caused the street sweeper to miss an even greater portion of the street. Which is exactly what the street sweeper is trying to prevent.

When you see that due to the street sweeper you got a ticket, you become the street’s weeper.

Just this morning I saw another T.D.E. in front of the local liquor store. On the back window of his vehicle was a sign that read something to the effect – “It is illegal to physically assault Transit Safety Officers under Oakland Penal Code blah blah blah…”

Has society deteriorated to such a level that such a sign is necessary? Are meter maids regularly assaulted? Do you think that someone who is beating up a meter maid with see that sign and stop?

word verification word: zpnhap
Something that happens quite quickly.

Done

Finished transferring all my posts from my Yahoo! blog to this one. Took a while. Guess I have written a few posts in the past 1.5 years. Good bye Yahoo and your lack of functions. Now I just gotta move my website also. Someday. Time now to pack and return the Spring/Fall key. Going to NYC for some rehearsals, food, museums, people watching…

Now that this blog is set up, I’ll probably lose all desire to write.

edbty is the word for word verification.

The Wheel of Time has ended

Robert Jordan died.

Which really sucks. Not only for his family. But also for the fans of his “Wheel of Time” series. Good stuff it was. Well the first 8 books or so. The later ones got kinda bogged down in minutia, not much happened in them. I kept reading them because I so enjoyed the earlier ones and was hoping the series would end. Another reason the later books weren’t as good, maybe, is because a good amount of time would pass between each successive book I would read and so forget who are the different characters were.

Jordan had been working on the 12th book in the series. Who knows how it ends? Maybe the series is not supposed to end, as time does not end…

hmmm…

embarking on this. Not sure if I already signed up as wasswasswass and forgot the password.

I think Muni is

retarded. Well, for that matter, BART, too. Today, or I guess technically, yesterday I walked to the Embarcadero stop to board Muni to ride the N-Judah to the Church/Duboce stop. To board Muni, I need to pay $1.50. Fine, but not enough quarters. The change machine for Muni was out of coins. So I go to a BART ticket machine that changes $20 bills to 4 $5s or $10 bills to 2 $5s. Fine, but there still is no way to get quarters because to get quarters from the BART machines you have to use $1 bills. So I ended up buying a postcard from the information kiosk just so that I could get a $1 bill to get quarters from the BART machine to board Muni.

Talk about lack of synergy – transfers from BART to Muni are not free. In terms of usage they are basically the same transit system, yet different tickets and costs. Why not streamline the whole system for the Bay Area? Allow people who are BARTing into SF to use the same cards on Muni. Why are there no monthly passes available? I am sure that they could make some money from monthly passes. I bet enough people would buy them and not use them enough/lose them.

The transit system here in Cali is terrible. Wonder why that is? Ford? GM? Chevy?

tired…Zodiac was too long and not as interesting as had hoped

Jumping

So I am tooling around YouTube and came across this style of dancing called “Jumping”. Far as I can tell, it looks like skankin’ to techno. Seems to be mostly done in the Netherlands or Belgium. But then again looks like an evolution of that one move Kid & PLay would do, whacking their ankles together. Guess it is called jumpstyle. Interesting how these things evolve. Duojump, what most people would call a unison duet. Interesting how specialized dance can become. Jumpstyle to me looks like a version of line dancing, just to different music and more time spent in the air. Wonder how those kids knees are going to hold out. Interesting, too, how most of the people in the videos on YouTube are male. Seems like everyone wants to dance. But why does art dance ( for lack of a better term) have such a stigma for men attached to it? I would postulate that dance for many people means graceful, light, and pretty, not hopping and stomping. Well, there was Stomp and that was hugely popular, and stepping certainly is not light and pretty but pretty damn cool. Well, this is turning out to be a half formed idea at 12:45 am. But art dance I think suffers from having an unbalance in the ratio of females to males. “Oh, their dancing like guys.” I remeber hearing that in college. So then is everything else, “the correct way”, dancing like women? Or should men just be marginalized in appropriate male dance forms – jumpstyle and steppin’? Or should men not be afraid to be beautiful, graceful, and pretty. Ha! Too many classes, trying to dance like women. Hmmm…

Condiments

If your were going to be stuck on a desert island, what condiment would you take with you?

I’d take ketchup.

Fruit, Fat, and Protein

photo
We had some friends, J + S, over this evening. Drinking wine, talk about art, eating cheese. Good times, but now that I write that it sounds like a Starbucks commercial or something. At least there was no soundtrack from Starbucks playing. If you are buying your CDs from Starbucks, something is wrong with your life. Talked a lot about an article in In Dance the monthly newsletter from Dancers’ Group– How Freedom is Killing My Creativity. More about that later, hoping to get off my duff and write a response to that article.

But to return to the title of this posting – Fruit, Fat and Protein. Or Sugar, Fat, and Protein, the three simplest building blocks of food. There is so much more to food as we, as an obese malnurished species, are learning. (Read Omnivore’s Dilemma for more about that and NPK and micronutrients). The culinary highlight of the evening was figs, prosciutto, and chevre. Cut the figs in half, broil them. Top with chevre and prosciutto. Also did the same with dates, medjool dates of course. Noor dates are no good. The bellam pepato cheese(I think that was the name) was pretty good, too.

*do not look at post modernism through a modern/classical lens. Well, if you do, be aware of the lens. See attached photo