Then the “blizzard conditions” arrived, on top of the snow that had fallen so recently, on top of what we’d already shoveled into rather large piles, and things threatened to become interesting again.

Drifts. Now that’s something I miss here in DC. It’s happened a couple of times since I’ve been here, and it’s happening now. The snow is still arriving pretty much horizontally, although the end of the precipitation is supposedly in sight. The winds, however, will continue, if we are to believe the weather mavens (and they’ve been pretty accurate this year).

I know, it’s trite to talk about the weather so much. So here’s a picture of a bird hiding under our back deck during the onslaught today:

For all I know, the sparrows are still hunkering down in the bush by the front porch (two of them flew out Monday while I was talking across it with a neighbor, me down on the ground, he on his porch—he didn’t even notice).

Almost time to start shoveling again …
__________
*I refuse to call it Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Blizzacane, or whatever everybody’s calling it. Good grief, as if.

(Note the three o’clock shadows—already a month from the solstice, but the sun is still lying low.)

Two weeks ago today, the Potomac was frozen over, and I saw this scene from Key Bridge as I biked to work:

A diver had knocked a hole in the ice with an ax and had lowered himself into the water. On the dock of the nearby boathouse, a bunch of guys prepared to join him, one of them maneuvering a strange contraption:

I thought maybe they were fishing for a dead body,* or looking for explosives, or something else appropriately dramatic.

But eventually their casual, almost lackadaisical behavior convinced me it was a training exercise, so I repacked the camera, put my gloves back on, and continued on my merry way to an absolutely thrilling Monday at work.
__________
*One summer day several years ago, again on my way to work, I had indeed seen a dead man splayed out on the boathouse dock, surrounded by police and rescue personnel. It was the morning after a nighttime cloudburst, and it’s my guess he was a homeless guy who had been washed out of a culvert about a half-mile upriver. If you rent a canoe and paddle up that way, you’ll see the warning sign where the stormwater periodically rushes out into the Potomac.

I’m a Clevelander, so snow always makes me happy. I wasn’t at all bothered that the Volvo was buried …

… but, damn, look at this!

Luckily that’s my backup bike (my Trek is warm and dry inside—and gloating, no doubt). But the point is this: I had to take the Metro all week! Okay, okay, it was a short week, with Christmas and all. But still—no biking makes me ornery.

Usually. But snow always pleases me somehow. And the walk to and from the Metro gave me a chance to see the snowy sights I might miss on the bike. For instance, this—the fattest snowman I’d ever seen, digesting happily near the festooned deck of the Dancing Crab:

As for this, I have no idea what it was meant to be—a decorated pile of snow, I suppose:

In taking this shot, however, I learned something about those signs made of dots that run from right to left (there’s probably a fancy name for them—the devoted reader will clue me in, I’m sure). The dots must get filled in from top to bottom as well, because the word “cigar” (or the phone number, whatever) was clearly visible when I snapped the picture, but not all the dots are lit up in the photo. Even such minuscule enlightment is enlightenment, right? My spouse (who is truly enlightened) would not agree, of course, but that’s okay. Many paths etc.

And I saw this, which has nothing to do with the snowstorm:

“Captain Arturo, fighting for nonviolence.” I’m a sucker for heavy irony, especially when it comes to aggressive or antisocial behavior.

Speaking of which, let’s commemorate the can’t-do attitude of the new upper-northwest branch office of TD Bank (“America’s Most Inconsiderate Neighbor™”). Unlike most if not all of the businesses around them, they declined to shovel the public sidewalks along the two streets abutting their marble-and-glass palace, never mind that it is a requirement imposed by force of local law, if not also and equally by the natural and healthy urge of a properly developed social consciousness.

As of Monday evening (thirty or forty hours after the snow had stopped falling, but who’s counting?), they had not cleared the sidewalks, and by Tuesday the local Yahoo listserv was buzzing with complaints—tales of women slipping and falling, bank personnel saying they have no intention of shoveling the sidewalks, etc.). Also by Tuesday, the bank had shoveled the sidewalks, but it was too late—the bile was out of the bladder.

The chronology is funny, if you find really stupid, inconsiderate things funny: at 5:45 am on Sunday, heavy equipment arrived to clear TD Bank’s parking lot and drive-through lanes—the kind of heavy equipment that beeps whenever it backs up. The nearest residence is right across the alley from the bank, and it’s residences all the way up the street. But apparently the job wasn’t really done, because at around 11:00 pm on Monday, the heavy equipment shows up again, this time with a big dump truck. They’re going to haul away all that snow, you see. For whatever reason. And this is when the guy shows up with a shovel to do the sidewalks. Funny, eh?

In response to a query about how long they intended to work, the man in charge said, “As long as it takes.” Did that mean “through the night”? Yes, it did mean that. Who told them to start work at 11:00 pm? We were hoping for a name, but the answer was: “The property owner.” The property owner—isn’t that the bank? No, it’s not the bank. And indeed, the property owner is not TD Bank. We forgot. They’re leasing the site from … from some … well, rumor has it, a couple of greedy sisters up in Rockville sequestered behind some LLC. Well, sisters anyway—the greedy part is obviously editorializing, based on how they ran off a popular movie theater (The Outer Circle) and a restaurant (Round Table, which had cleaned up its act and had turned into a very neighborly establishment indeed) because they weren’t bringing in enough dough, and who, because they wanted to lease the land rather than sell it, constricted the pool of tenants to the likes of a 24-hour CVS (which was already situated a few blocks south on Wisconsin Ave.) or a bank (of which there were already five in a four-block stretch, from Fessenden to Jenifer). According to this nocturnal snow-removing demon, it was the old ladies in Rockville (or their rep) who arranged for the work that disturbed the sleep of the bank’s neighbors for a second night straight—not the bank. (He, of course, didn’t say “the old ladies in Rockville.” We’re putting two and two together, that’s all.)

Oh, well. That’s all blood under the bridge by now. The rains came, the snow melted, the squirrels are frolicking, and the sidewalks along TD Bank are incredibly clear. Let’s not even think about the nine months of construction hell in 2009, and the years of hassles and ANC meetings because of the bank’s original plan to use the nearby alley as a driveway for its two drive-through windows, and so on, and on and on. The new year is almost here. Perhaps the bank learned that customer convenience doesn’t trump common decency toward its neighbors. And no doubt the plans for the big new super-Safeway down the block will be just fine and the project will be a monument to enlightened urban life.

Armenia

Back in August we heard about the incipient rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey that was to culminate in an imminent restoration of diplomatic relations. On October 10, after a last-minute dispute over wording was resolved with input (shall we say) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two countries signed a historic agreement to do just that, reopening borders that Turkey sealed in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh. Although some elements in the Armenian diaspora expressed displeasure at the terms of the agreement, other major players fell in line behind it, as the New York Times reports:

Despite noisy street protests, some influential expatriate groups in the United States—including the Western and Eastern Dioceses of the Armenian Church, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, the Knights of Vartan and the Armenian Assembly of America—announced they would back the agreement, in a joint statement that was released Oct. 1.

While I’m sympathetic to those who are unhappy, I think the opinions of Armenians in Armenia trump the feelings of those abroad, and I doubt the pressure Armenia was subjected to caused it to perform a suicidal, or even self-destructive, act. But time, as it always does, will tell.

Bees

The mysterious and devastating decline in honeybee populations in this country (and abroad) was noted here back in May 2007. The evidence is mounting that pesticides are the primary culprit. Now there’s a shocker.

Bikes

Bad news from Paris: their bike-sharing system has run into a nasty patch of human nature in the form of stolen and vandalized equipment.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

I was downtown last night and saw a half-empty SmartBike rack—the bikes that were there seemed fine, and the fact that many were missing I took as a good sign. Whether DC will eventually share the French experience remains to be seen.

Facebook

Still tired of it.

Google

I revisited my street via Google Street View and, lo and behold, I am no longer there. The building under construction on the corner is much further along in the new views—in fact, I can pretty accurately date the shots from the state of the site. So it looks like the Googlemonster is a restless beast, continually revisiting everything it encounters in addition to going new places all the time. Just like the way it crawls the web, come to think of it.

Kindle

Too many people keep borrowing it. That’s not unexpected, since it belongs to my employer, and the borrowing has to do with the stated reason for buying it: to see if we should start publishing on that platform. The upshot (for me) is that it’s a great way to read stuff that flows, where you just flow along with it. It’s not so hot for text that is technical, encyclopedic, laden with graphics or tables, or choppy—i.e., built for browsing (like a newspaper or website), not for reading straight through (like a novel). Also not great for marking up and making notes, in my opinion. It’s still pleasant to read with it, but I suspect Kindle will be seeing serious competition in the years ahead, if it isn’t already, especially from devices with touchscreens and color.

Obama

A year ago at this time we were wondering who the next president of the United States would be. Although he’s only been president since January 20, this is as good a time as any to take stock of Barack Obama. On the plus side, he made a pretty decent Supreme Court nomination and got her confirmed; he initiated bilateral talks with Iran and has ratcheted down the rhetoric; he has scrapped the antiballistic system in Eastern Europe, leading to improved relations with Russia (and maybe leverage in our dealings with Iran); and he has done some heavy lifting in pursuit of true healthcare reform, which will likely pass in some form during this current session of Congress. On the negative side, he has done little to extract the US from Iraq, and even less to shut down Guantánamo; he has continued some of the previous administration’s abuse of executive privilege and government secrecy; and he has made only a half-hearted show of exposing and dealing with White House and Justice Department culpability in justifying and providing cover for torture by the CIA and the military. Still to be scored is his approach to Afghanistan—he is currently deliberating, and the hope arises he will ditch the simpleminded bellicosity displayed in his campaign and find a saner solution to that mess.

Addendum 2009.11.02: I knew I would forget something: a small additional plus for Obama, who “took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.” What makes it small is this: “Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.” And this: “Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars.” We are no closer to discarding the notion that the US must be capable of fighting multiple strategic (i.e., nondefensive) wars simultaneously.

Addendum 2009.11.03: A significantly bigger, unvarnished plus: “Without fanfare, President Barack Obama has okayed a large cash infusion to help clean up the Great Lakes, quietly signing a bill that was years in the making and marks a rare bipartisan milestone.”

It just so happens you can see me in Street View, captured in the act of gardening, even though I am not a gardener. There I am in the red T-shirt, down in a monkey crouch with a spade in my hand. That lady over there is my wife (she’s the gardener), and that’s our neighbor, chatting while he watches us work the soil of the tree lawn in front of our house. I actually remember the day quite well, though I never noticed any car with a strange bit of apparatus on it rolling slowly past.

After the initial glissando of a weird feeling that ran up my spine when I saw it, I felt strangely at ease about my Street View presence. When I showed the printouts to my brother the lawyer, he was spooked, for some reason. (Maybe that’s why he lives in the exurbs.) Am I nuts? I mean, anyone walking or driving by at that moment would have seen us, and frankly, you can’t make out our faces. (Google says it pixelates car license plates and faces, but it seems the resolution of the shots we’re in didn’t require it. I know it’s us because I know us pretty well.) But still … am I crazy not to care?

I confess I like Street View. Just the other day I wandered along the street in Cleveland where I was conceived and gestated (my parents and brother moved into a new house the day I was born, so I had never laid eyes on that neighborhood). Didn’t see any people, though. In my virtual wanderings in DC and elsewhere, I like seeing the traffic and people going about their business. I don’t recognize anyone, and certainly no one recognizes me. Is it voyeuristic or creepy to go Street Viewing in Paris or Chicago, or is it simply the cheapest, most ecological way to satisfy a mild case of wanderlust?

Perhaps more importantly, does this give the lie to my previously stated concerns about government encroachments on privacy? I think not, but the devoted reader is free to think otherwise.

Addendum 2009.05.21: A friend alerted me to this page describing the Google Trike that is photographing scenic footpaths in the UK. A bicyclist like me, he says this would be a neat job after retirement, and I agree.

Addendum 2009.05.22: Here’s a nice article in the New York Times about the Google camera car and the buzz surrounding it.

It seems to me that my blogger friends are blogging less and Facebooking more. I don’t think we can attribute that all to the fact that the election season is over (although I’m sure Nate Silver has seen a precipitous drop in his visits). Maybe they’re just living life more, which is great. I know that’s what I’m doing when I’m not blogging.

Still, I couldn’t let March pass without a single post. Being a fundamentally lazy person, and finding myself in the mood to memorialize my year on Facebook as I prepare to cut back on my participation (admittedly modest, compared to some of the addicts I see out there), I figure I’d pull all my status messages from Facebook’s ravenous maw and copy them here as a pathetic but possibly admonitory example of Facebooky navel-gazing. Some of the entries still almost make sense; some elicted rejoinders that far outshone the status message itself. And the earliest ones show just how lost I was at first in the Facebook universe. Does this traipse backward in time qualify as autobiography? Hardly. But it’s something, and that’s better than nothing. Maybe.

At any rate, here goes …

2009.03.28 WorldWideWeber took the quiz “What color is the inside of your spleen?” and the result is yellow ochre.
2009.03.18 WorldWideWeber was going to tell you his fortune, but when he opened the cookie, it was empty. (Actually, that’s an improvement over what he usually gets.)
2009.03.16 WorldWideWeber has enough to do. Y’all can stop dumping stuff in his In box. Seriously. Enough, already.
2009.03.14 WorldWideWeber is guessing that this will come after my name and will make grammatical sense. Yet another minute wasted on process rather than substance.¹
2009.03.10 WorldWideWeber almost gave some advice.
2009.03.02 WorldWideWeber :: Ceci n’est pas une status update.
2009.03.02 WorldWideWeber is shoveling the white stuff.
2009.02.25 WorldWideWeber keeps seeing a girl with four eyes and four lips.²
2009.02.25 WorldWideWeber is pounding on a new social networking system to see how it works (or doesn’t).
2009.02.24 WorldWideWeber is woiking hahd to put food on de tebble.
2009.02.23 WorldWideWeber :: the mere act of digitizing Ysaÿe did wonders for his double and triple stops.
2009.02.21 WorldWideWeber is digitizing some Ysaÿe.
2009.02.13 WorldWideWeber :: rebeWediWdlroW
2009.02.13 WorldWideWeber did nothing special for Darwin Day. What an ingrate.
2009.02.12 WorldWideWeber says, “Happy 200th, Gas! And you, too, Abe!”
2009.02.06 WorldWideWeber is belatedly preparing to be Lost.
2009.02.04 WorldWideWeber made good time.
2009.02.04 WorldWideWeber will be swooping in and out of Baltimore and Annapolis. Hi-yo, Volvo, away!
2009.02.02 WorldWideWeber wonders what kvetching was like before there was the word “kvetch.”
2009.01.29 WorldWideWeber is back in the saddle again.
2009.01.28 WorldWideWeber is tired of taking the Metro.
2009.01.27 WorldWideWeber is taking the Metro today. Looks like the snow will turn to slippery slop this afternoon.
2009.01.26 WorldWideWeber feels that it’s not a matter of not trusting Monday, it’s … something else.
2009.01.23 WorldWideWeber :: the clementine was perfectly fine.
2009.01.22 WorldWideWeber really should do something about that clementine that’s been sitting on his desk since January 5th.
2009.01.20 WorldWideWeber had a pleasant walk home from 3rd and Constitution on 20 Jan 2009, with a nice lunch along the way at Wasabi.
2009.01.20 WorldWideWeber Such a pretty ticket! Too bad it worked like crap.
2009.01.20 WorldWideWeber :: Annals of the National Security State, Part 754: Our hero learns that having a ticket to a “public” event doesn’t mean diddly.
2009.01.19 WorldWideWeber :: look for us in the purple section. (To the right, looking out from the Capitol.)
2009.01.18 WorldWideWeber is going to be Malled at some point in the next few days.
2009.01.17 WorldWideWeber …
2009.01.15 WorldWideWeber is enjoying the cold snap.
2009.01.11 WorldWideWeber is on a Fritz Lang jag.
2009.01.09 WorldWideWeber is.³
2009.01.07 WorldWideWeber is wondering why there were three Mondays this week …
2009.01.02 WorldWideWeber is trying out the idea of working in 2009. Feels like … work.
2009.01.01 WorldWideWeber says: “С новым годом, с новым счастьем!”
2008.12.31 WorldWideWeber is back in sweet home DC, watching the horizontal snow.
2008.12.26 WorldWideWeber is spending a few days in Ohio.
2008.12.25 WorldWideWeber keeps forgetting it’s Thursday.
2008.12.24 WorldWideWeber is Christmas Eving.
2008.12.24 WorldWideWeber is “working.”
2008.12.22 WorldWideWeber suddenly appreciated, while crossing Key Bridge this morning, that extreme cold is the default condition of the universe (2.725 Kelvins).
2008.12.20 WorldWideWeber is heading to Shemali’s for some grape leaves.
2008.12.19 WorldWideWeber hung around long enough to be awarded custody of a box of crackers and a mostly full bottle of Chardonnay.
2008.12.19 WorldWideWeber is not going to mince words: his company’s holiday party has been downgraded to a “reception.”
2008.12.15 WorldWideWeber finished his last crazissimo Monday of the year. The rest will be merely crazoid.
2008.12.14 WorldWideWeber is coasting.
2008.12.11 WorldWideWeber is not going to tell you what he’s doing right now.
2008.12.09 WorldWideWeber is not so keen on cold rain.
2008.12.08 WorldWideWeber is gradually regaining fine motor control in his fingers after the bike ride in.
2008.12.06 WorldWideWeber says, “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”
2008.12.03 WorldWideWeber is plugging away.
2008.12.01 WorldWideWeber noticed nothing awry in his office after four days away. Wait … that wall calendar … “November” …
2008.12.01 WorldWideWeber has nothing against shopping, except actually doing it.
2008.11.30 WorldWideWeber is still not shopping.
2008.11.28 WorldWideWeber is not shopping.
2008.11.26 WorldWideWeber is busy sending out thank-you notes. (Mentally. Like most of what he does.)
2008.11.20 WorldWideWeber is I found a new way of talking where you put “is” right after the subject, regardless.
2008.11.18 WorldWideWeber is working on the cover sheet for his TPS report.
2008.11.17 WorldWideWeber is watching the planes land out of the corner of his eye.
2008.11.13 WorldWideWeber is not staring out the window.
2008.11.12 WorldWideWeber is staring at his computer monitor.
2008.11.11 WorldWideWeber is spending the day with the birthday girl.
2008.11.10 WorldWideWeber actually watched one leaf on the dogwood decide to “let go.”
2008.11.05 WorldWideWeber is decompressing.
2008.11.05 WorldWideWeber danced in the street with his <real street name>⁴ St. neighbors. Literally. Really.
2008.11.04 WorldWideWeber says, “Si, se puede!” (Да, мы можем!)
2008.11.03 WorldWideWeber will soon be doing his part to keep DC from falling into the McCain column.
2008.11.02 WorldWideWeber thinks he may already have wasted his extra hour.
2008.10.30 WorldWideWeber still likes spaghetti best of all.
2008.10.24 WorldWideWeber loves the smell of shish taouk in the morning. Smells like … victory.⁵
2008.10.23 WorldWideWeber is in the mood for some hummus.
2008.10.21 WorldWideWeber is back on track, look out, baby!
2008.10.20 WorldWideWeber is running late today.
2008.10.16 WorldWideWeber wonders where they find “undecided voters” at this late stage. He thinks they’re being coy.
2008.10.14 WorldWideWeber has nothing to say, and just spent six words … er, eleven words … fourteen? (is “er” a word?) … oh, never mind.
2008.10.07 WorldWideWeber is tired of these debates, my friends.
2008.10.06 WorldWideWeber can’t decide which is more unsurprising: that J.McC. is sending S.P. out to do his dirty work, or that S.P. seems happy to do it.
2008.10.03 WorldWideWeber plans to exceed some low expectations today.
2008.10.01 WorldWideWeber thought he was looking forward to the VP debate, but it turns out he isn’t. SP fatigue. (BS tornado.)
2008.09.27 WorldWideWeber watched two candidates spout the banalities (and in some cases, poisons) of the US foreign policy consensus. One of them won on points (barely).
2008.09.25 WorldWideWeber signalled for a timeout, but no one stopped the clock.
2008.09.23 WorldWideWeber discovered he had another replacement shift cable all along. Duh! Now he has three.
2008.09.22 WorldWideWeber discovered a shift cable hanging on by two threads … back to the bike shop he goes.
2008.09.19 WorldWideWeber hopes to gather parts this weekend for his Trek 750 that’s been on the disabled list all season.
2008.09.18 WorldWideWeber hears wedding bells.
2008.09.15 WorldWideWeber was okay with the old Facebook.
2008.09.05 WorldWideWeber Palin … the general tenor of the GOP convention … the breathtaking inanity of Giuliani … etc.
2008.09.05 WorldWideWeber is still astonished.
2008.09.04 WorldWideWeber is sleepwalking today.
2008.09.03 WorldWideWeber is going to enjoy Dulles Airport in the wee hours again …
2008.09.02 WorldWideWeber is herding cats.
2008.09.01 WorldWideWeber is doing nothing.
2008.08.29 WorldWideWeber is pretty sure he’s on McCain’s short list. What? Sarah Palin? The one person with more experience than he has! Oh, well.
2008.08.29 WorldWideWeber is pretty sure he’s on McCain’s short list.
2008.08.22 WorldWideWeber says, “Did I say Wes Clark? I meant Joe Biden.” ⁶
2008.08.20 WorldWideWeber is enjoying an extreme close-up of the grindstone.
2008.08.19 WorldWideWeber is enjoying a sudden day off.
2008.08.18 WorldWideWeber is recovering at work from a busy weekend.
2008.08.15 WorldWideWeber liked the Nats ballpark, is still replaying the bunt single for the Nats that brought in a run.
2008.08.15 WorldWideWeber liked the Nats ballpark, was glad the Nats made it a game against the Mets … until the bottom of the eighth.
2008.08.13 WorldWideWeber is looking forward to seeing the Nats on Thursday with G & A.
2008.08.12 WorldWideWeber got some big news on Sunday.
2008.08.06 WorldWideWeber experienced the glories of Dulles airport at 2:30 am.
2008.07.30 WorldWideWeber is looking forward to seeing the chiquita and her novio.
2008.07.25 WorldWideWeber is back from the Outer Banks early because of team loyalty.
2008.07.25 WorldWideWeber is back from the Outer Banks early because of softball obligations (i.e., too many of the youngsters are injured, out of town, out of the country …)
2008.07.18 WorldWideWeber is outta here.
2008.07.17 WorldWideWeber is on the verge of vacation.
2008.07.09 WorldWideWeber thinks the Fourth Amendment was nice while it lasted.
2008.07.07 WorldWideWeber was welcomed back to the work routine by a soft rear tire on his bike. Crap!
2008.07.03 WorldWideWeber has slogged his way into a three-day weekend.
2008.07.01 WorldWideWeber is slogging away.
2008.06.30 WorldWideWeber cancelled a meeting—woohoo!
2008.06.27 WorldWideWeber is watching another thunderstorm approach or go by or something.
2008.06.27 WorldWideWeber is finished writing and deleting status updates.
2008.06.16 WorldWideWeber needs deadlines. Sad, but true.
2008.06.08 WorldWideWeber will try to be more transparent in the future.
2008.06.04 WorldWideWeber wants everybody to shut up about Eve. Just shut up about Eve, that’s all he wants.
2008.06.03 WorldWideWeber feels bad for the mackerel.
2008.06.02 WorldWideWeber notes that it’s Monday. ‘Nuff said.
2008.05.26 WorldWideWeber has become a garden-variety photographer.
2008.05.23 WorldWideWeber And yes, she apologized and “clarified” what she said, but geez.
2008.05.23 WorldWideWeber Hillary is certainly making it hard to say anything positive about her. It would be one thing to say RFK won California in June (which he did, although California is not a June bright spot for her); but the implications of her saying he was assassinated in June are clear and unnerving, whether they were intentional or not. She either needs a good week’s sleep, or she’s losing her bearings completely.
2008.05.23 WorldWideWeber has not exactly earned his three-day weekend.
2008.05.23 WorldWideWeber This Slate article must strike those who detest HRC as risible fantasy or pathetic delusion, but the history is interesting: http://www.slate.com/id/2191942/
2008.05.17 WorldWideWeber is sick to death of hyperbole.
2008.05.16 WorldWideWeber is squeezing four days of work into one.
2008.05.15 WorldWideWeber took three days off in mid-week and, damn, it feels good.
2008.05.12 WorldWideWeber bugged everyone by writing in Russian. But she started it!
2008.05.12 WorldWideWeber не понимает о чем говорит своя дочка.
2008.05.09 WorldWideWeber has nothing to say at this time.
2008.05.02 WorldWideWeber has finally experienced Eddie Izzard in real time.
2008.04.27 WorldWideWeber went 3 for 6 and that will have to do.
2008.04.24 WorldWideWeber wonders why folks are so bent out of shape over the choice between O and H.
2008.04.22 WorldWideWeber has given up (for now) on configuring wireless on a Thinkpad running Fedora.
2008.04.17 WorldWideWeber is installing and configuring his sixth flavor of Linux in a week’s time.
2008.04.10 WorldWideWeber saw a whole bunch of netroots, and a few netberries.
2008.04.09 WorldWideWeber is off to see what a netroot actually looks like.
2008.03.31 WorldWideWeber is still doing his taxes. What gives with that?
2008.03.24 WorldWideWeber is contemplating oxymorons.
2008.03.21 WorldWideWeber wonders why people advertise their microcephaly with Bush 2004 bumper stickers.
2008.03.17 WorldWideWeber always wondered what it felt like when the stock market crashed.
2008.03.13 WorldWideWeber harbors unspoken thoughts.
2008.03.10 WorldWideWeber is glad Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia worked out their differences in a gentlemanly way.
2008.03.08 WorldWideWeber is wondering where that hour went.
2008.02.29 WorldWideWeber welcomes the lion of March.
2008.02.27 WorldWideWeber is running out of February.
2008.02.22 WorldWideWeber ‘s middle name is Ohm.
2008.02.20 WorldWideWeber is resisting an invitation to play chess.
2008.02.19 WorldWideWeber understands the importance of games.
2008.02.19 WorldWideWeber isn’t sure why he’s here.
2008.02.18 WorldWideWeber replaced the chainring on his 80s-era Giant.
2008.02.16 WorldWideWeber plans to replace the chainring on his Giant this weekend.
2008.02.14 WorldWideWeber has been prompted to avail himself of the delete option.
2008.02.13 WorldWideWeber wishes you could edit a wall message after it gets posted
2008.02.09 WorldWideWeber Sort of like the nineties, but having to do with years beginning with zero (“aught” or “naught”). Some people say “the naughty aughties.” I think that’s a bit much. But hey, that was on our wall2wall, so you’re⁷ p.s. doesn’t make sense to everyone else. (See? I’m catchin’ on here, baby!)
2008.02.09 WorldWideWeber Didn’t mean to cramp your style. But frankly, I’m a little lost here. Guess I need to start exploring.
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¹Testing Facebook after yet another redesign. The status box now says “What’s on your mind?” Okay.
²One of the idiotic IQ quiz teasers in the right column on Facebook.
³Facebook used to have the text box prefilled with “is”.
⁴If you’re a Facebook friend of mine, you know it.
⁵I had joined thousands of other Facebookers in making my middle name Hussein in the run-up to the election.
⁶You don’t get graphical smileys in Facebook, of course. Nor italics, bold …
⁷Among the innumerable pleasure of Facebook: unfixable typos. The solution: delete the status message and retype it.

Up until late Monday, Laura and I planned to head down to the Mall at a not-too-unreasonable hour and see what we could see of the swearing-in. We are, after all, just ordinary folk. But a former neighbor (and extraordinary guy) stopped by Monday evening, offering two tickets to the standing-room area of the Capitol lawn. The tickets had a nice purple border, corresponding to the area designated for our humble presence.

But like a one-way sign that is no guarantee you won’t be run over by a car going the wrong way, this pretty ticket—signed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC)—didn’t mean we’d actually get to stand in the purple area and watch Barack Obama be sworn in from a few hundred meters away. Due to a complete breakdown of crowd control and security management, we were among the tens of thousands of ticket holders who never made it through the purple, blue, and silver gates.

The details of this mess are now being sorted out in the proper places (e.g., within minutes a Facebook group was created, “Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom”) and in the mainstream as well. So I’ll spare the details. Just Google it. I’m tired of the whole thing. As I said in a comment I dropped somewhere, I don’t feel sorry for myself. Despite the subfreezing temperatures and idiocy of standing around for three hours (some stood around for twice that and didn’t get in), I’m glad we went down there. We met some great people from all over: Michigan, Florida, New York City (Queens); even a guy from my wife’s hometown in Wisconsin—a quiet gentleman in an impressive black fur coat, who works for Racine’s most renowned and community-conscious employer, Johnson Wax. Those are the folks we felt bad for, people who were our guests in the District of Columbia and who were treated so shabbily. Unfortunately it’s a moot point whether those in charge will learn a lesson from this fiasco: the inauguration of Barack Obama was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and they blew it: the JCCIC, Capitol police, and Secret Service (which unpredictably closed off streets that were supposed to be clear, creating a fluid maze and ensuring that lines would turn into mobs—although, as I said elsewhere, these were the most docile, genial mobs I have ever been part of).

At a little after noon, after hearing the distant cheer of an unseen crowd and the echoing booms of a 21-gun salute, we left the area near 1st and C Streets NW, but not before Laura banged on the temporary fence and got one of the cops to come over. (It must be said, they did a most excellent job of ignoring us for three hours.) While she tried to get an explanation from the guy, I leaned against a tree with my eyes closed. When I opened them, one of our new friends from Michigan was taking my picture. I smiled wanly, and she said, “To help remember the day.” Earlier she had gently scolded me when I called out through the fence: “Thanks for nothing!” She said they were just doing their jobs. I said, if that’s true, their jobs were pretty pointless. I said I was letting them know I’m disappointed since I’ll never be face to face with whoever designed their “plan” and set it in motion (or did neither). She said, rightly: “That’s not what this day is about. Let’s be grateful and enjoy that.” How could I disagree with this lovely African American woman who had traveled so much further than I and whose feelings about the new president most likely run deeper?

Laura and I started walking toward a Metro station, encountering hundreds of vendors hawking tacky memorabilia and noticing the trash collecting like snowdrifts against curbs and buildings. We started down into the Gallery Place station, took one look at the crowd at the turnstiles, and turned around. We walked up to Faragut Square and had lunch at a place Laura has wanted me to try for some time, Wasabi. As the name implies, it’s Japanese, but with a twist: little plates of food move along a conveyor from the kitchen to the other end of the restaurant and back. There are booths along one side and bar seating on the other. The plates are color-coded* by price and labeled; if you see something you like, you just take it off the conveyor. When you’ve eaten your fill, they tally up the plates. Delicious and fun.

When we finished, we kept walking north on 18th, which was basically taken over by pedestrians north of K Street. It’s always a liberating feeling when the people take over the streets, so my spirits soared a bit a this point. We ended up walking all the way home, sparing Metro two additional riders on their record-breaking day. (We had taken the Metro from Tenleytown to Judiciary Square in the morning—a crowded but boardable train appeared within two minutes. They actually were running on the rush-hour schedule, as advertised.) We watched some of the TV coverage and called it a day.

And that’s the way it was, January 20th, 2009.
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*Color-coded! The irony just now hit me.

I saw a teaser today at the New York Times saying that David Brooks is “satisfied” so far with Obama and that Gail Collins is “worried” (didn’t bother to read the article). I’m a bit of both, which says a lot about both Obama and myself; but it’s the possibility of agreeing with the self-satisfied, strange-thinking Brooks that really has me worried.

A lot of people are having fun making their own pseudo-Shepard Fairey posters at Paste Magazine. I hope Barack likes mine.

I’m looking forward to seeing how crazy it gets down on the Mall on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll get a nice photo of me next to Obama (i.e., a Jumbotron Obama). Last week I saw a truck hauling about twenty pedicabs into town, and WABA is sponsoring bike valet parking at two locations. Other than that, I have no idea how people are going to get around. We may end up walking to the Mall from Tenleytown (and back) if Metro is swamped.

Then again, maybe temperatures in the low thirties Fahrenheit will keep the crowds down—maybe only a couple million. We shall see.

And so, to kill some time between now and Tuesday, and to get a post in for the month of October, I’ll cobble together a personal, far from comprehensive, somewhat belated roundup of Russian news.

In late July one of my brothers gave me a T-shirt, for no reason other than the fact it had Russian writing on it and he figured I might like it. I do like it, but as luck would have it, I couldn’t wear it for a while.

It says, “Kiss me, I’m Russian!” (In the States, anyway, you come across such stuff all the time—“Kiss me, I’m Italian,” “Kiss me, I’m Lithuanian,” etc., etc.) Just the thing to wear during my bicycle commute, since my other T-shirts are getting ratty. Unfortunately, in August the Russians invaded Georgia, and my commute takes me past the Russian embassy, where the Georgians picketed for several weeks: “Russian tanks … out of Georgia” was the chant I heard the most as I pedaled by. I resisted the urge to congratulate them on having a president who is just about as reckless as ours. Speaking of whom, how could a person not laugh when George W. Bush, with no trace of irony (of course), criticized Russia’s “bullying and intimidation.” He said “Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.”

The Russia bashing started in earnest, as prescribed by our fetid foreign policy conventional wisdom—even Barack Obama felt the need to join in, unfortunately. One could find scattered attempts in the US press to put the conflict in context, but the tenor of the coverage was Cold War redux. Here are a few pieces I found evenhanded or sympathetic (gasp!) to the Russian point of view:

• Mikhail Gorbachev: Russia Never Wanted a War
• Fred Kaplan on the “feckless response” of the US to the Russian invasion of Georgia
• Glenn Greenwald on being smeared for not toeing the line on the Russia–Georgia conflict
• The Nation: The Cold War That Wasn’t

Earlier in the month, a giant of Russian letters passed away. I would be remiss if I didn’t note, however briefly, the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

As I was coming of age in the 1970s and became infatuated with Russian literature and, soon after, the Russian language, the figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sure to appeal to an American teenager, especially during a time of protest against the Vietnam War, racial inequality, and a tight-ass culture. Here was a guy who was butting heads with the Soviet state. Brezhnev was sort of like their Nixon. The reasoning was pretty clear, if juvenile. A trace of my Solzhenitsyn craze can be found in the St. Joseph High School yearbook for 1972: at the back, a donation in the name of Oleg Kostoglotov, the main character in Cancer Ward. (I leave it to the devoted reader to say whether the 54-year-old is any less pretentious than the 18-year-old.)

After the Soviet Union dissolved, Aleksandr Isayevich turned his withering gaze on the West, with its liberal mores and diverse ways of living. It became clear that Solzhenitsyn was in fact a Russian nationalist and theocrat of the Dostoevsky mold—and a monarchist to boot. Whatever relevance he had to Russian public life seemed to fade with each passing year, even after he moved back home, eventually taking up residence in a dacha outside Moscow (between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko).

Whether or not he ever regains the stature he enjoyed for several decades, he had a big impact on me. And I often think of his breakthrough work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—not the descriptions of the grim conditions of the labor camp, or the political discussions among the zeks. It’s the fact that Ivan Denisovich wakes up feverish and achy but decides to work rather than spend the day in bed in the infirmary. And that night he concludes he made the right decision—he feels better, he ate better (he wouldn’t have gotten his full ration in the infirmary), and he accomplished something. It felt good to work, even on behalf of the Gulag and the Soviet state. The opening page and the closing page—for whatever reason, they stuck.

Time to lighten up a bit. Only recently I discovered you can select a “country content preference” in YouTube, and naturally I selected Russia. Almost immediately I found a video that played off the famous “Where the Hell is Matt?” video, only in this case Matvei does his “dance” in all the stations of the Moscow Metro.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was glad to have the opportunity to “revisit” the three or four I saw in person, and to get acquainted with the rest. The Russian guy starts off doing the exact same goofy dance that Matt does, but in what I would say is typical Russian fashion, he varies it occasionally—out of boredom, or to stave off anticipated boredom in the viewer, or both. In some ways it’s a more artistic product, but it is long; and, as different as the Metro stations are, they aren’t as varied as the locales in Matt’s video. But I like it, and tip my hat to him.

Translation of the introduction:

It took 27 hours to film this video. It took 7 hours to edit it. We visited all the stations marked on the map of the Moscow Metro. At each one, the same dance was performed.* About 300 people witnessed the dance in person.

At the end:

Thank you, Homepage.ru, for the jersey and the fares.

In the YouTube “more info” area for this video, it says further:

Для полных идиотов, без обоих полушарий головного мозга – это видео – стеб над оригинальным роликом танцующего Мэтта. Если вы этого не поняли и пишите, про какой-то плагиат – ВЫ ИДИОТ. [For complete idiots, lacking both hemispheres of the brain: this video is a send-up of the original film of the dancing Matt. If you don't get it and write that this is some sort of plagiarism—YOU'RE AN IDIOT.]

Among many nice touches: at the Lubyanka station, he dances in front of the police booth.

And now that I’ve discovered Homepage.ru, I’ve learned that they have discovered Halloween.

Addendum 2008.11.08: The New York Times has published an excellent piece, “Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question,” based on accounts by international monitors—members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (OSCE is a multilateral organization with 56 member states that has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s, according to the Times.) See also this piece about the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev (“perhaps the world’s most famous Ossetian”) and the heat he took for defending Russia at the time.
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*Not quite true, as noted above.

The city of Washington, DC, finally launched its long-heralded bike-sharing program. It proved to be a smash hit, and plans are afoot to expand it. Within days, an attempt was made to steal one of the bikes from its very public parking place. You didn’t expect that, did you? The bike was fatally damaged, but unstolen. So there, you bad person!

From sunny Racine, Wisconsin, our favorite resort town on the slate-gray shores of Lake Michigan, comes news of a new outlet for the competitive urges of devotés (and devotées—let’s not be sexist) of the derailleur: the Tour de Racine. This is long overdue. Racine is, after all, a French name. Whether it respectfully evokes the renowned writer of that name, or is an arch reference to the river that runs through it (viz., the Root River), or both, I do not know for sure. Perhaps the devoted reader does.* Who won, you ask? Some guy from Winnipeg. Winnipeg! The one in Manitoba, presumably. Did he travel all that way just for the Tour? (Tour? Actually, a dizzying number of laps around a 0.78-mile stretch of downtown Racine.) Or did he just happen to be in town? Do I care enough to research it? No.

Speaking of Canada, good news from Toronto: the bicycle thief is caught. Not just any bicycle thief (like the sad sacks in De Sica’s movie). No, this guy stole around 2,800 bikes. He was a Bicycle Thief. And not just. This guy, Igor Krenk, “was something of an informal social worker, … giving work to street people and outpatients from a nearby mental health institution. Of course, the police say some of that work involved stealing bicycles.” The funny thing is, for a long time Torontoans strongly suspected what was going on—some of the victims of bike thievery would actually buy their bikes back from him. (Did I mention he ran a bike shop?) The cops needed to catch him red-handed, apparently, so they set up a sting. And lookee here: he’s Slovenian! What an intrepid race! What an impressive bike-stealing record! Here’s a more personal take on the whole biking vibe up in Toronto, and I provide this link only to show what a handsome Slovenian dude Igor Krenk is when he’s cleaned up a little.

On a personal note, I finally did what was necessary to bring my Trek 750 out of mothballs (or, more precisely, the road dust and cobwebs of garage level three at my location d’emploi): new cassette, new crankset, new chain, new rear wheel, new brake pads, and, in an unexpected development, a new shifter cable. It’s good to be back on the good old Trek, and it always feels good to have done the work yourself. As usual, I picked up a new tool or two along the way. And I’ve become a chain fanatic, or chain evangelist, or whatever. Chain obsessed. That new chain-wear tool will see a lot of use. Sick of buying drivetrain components.

I read that some employers are taking baby steps toward incentives for bicycle commuters. That’s all—not much to this yet. I know I ain’t getting anything from anyone for biking to work.

Finally, and sadly, a bicyclist was killed this summer in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington. A trash truck traveling westbound on R Street turned right onto 20th and nailed a young woman who was biking to work at the Middle East Institute. The DC police have yet to release a final report. The Washington Area Bicyclist Association placed a ghost bike at the site of the accident and is staying on top of it. She may have made a fatal mistake, or it may have been the driver, or both. But it goes without saying we need to make the streets safer for bikes.
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*Wikipedia says the latter (sans the “arch” part), but begs the question: What was the Root River named after? Is that what “chippecotton” means? Or “kipikawi”? Or “ot-chee-beek”? Or was there some white man named Root who named it? More questions than answers, as usual. [back]