Black Sox no longer
Last night I had the crazy notion that, with a world champion team to call their own, White Sox fans would lose the massive chip on their shoulders about the Cubs. You’d not know it these days, but Cubs fans greatly outnumber Sox fans in the city and throughout the country (thanks to years of national coverage by WGN). Wrigley Field is a tourist destination by itself and while the new new Comiskey — pardon me, The Cell — is a great park, it still doesn’t hold a candle to Cubs field and Wrigleyville. This has nothing to do with the quality of the respective sports teams, of course. It is all about the perceived sense of importance to the city. (And perhaps lingering guilt over the team’s scandalous collusion with gamblers in 1919?)
Will the inferiority complex dissipate now that the Sox are the champs?
Headmuffs
I have too many types of headphones I think.
- Earbuds for iPod listening during the commute. (Apple iPod Earbud Headphones, not the ones that come with the iPod — decent sound, not great)
- Sweat-proof, collapsible headphones for running (Sony MDR-A35G S2 Sports Headphones — love these, sweat is not an issue and I am one sweaty bastard)
- Crappy earbuds for inserting under hat when running outside in winter (whatever)
- Noise-cancelling for long plane flights and at work (Sennheiser PXC 250 — LOVE these, highly recommended)
- Big padded ones for make-believe DJ’ing (Sennheiser HD 202 — nothin’ special)
When I travel I actually have three of these in my backpack. That’s ridiculous. What is my problem?
Reluctant cheerleader
The World Series has me in a real dilemma.
Fact #1: I greatly dislike the White Sox. Or rather, I’m no fan of their fans who, you can be sure, would not be cheering on the Cubs if by some cosmic anomaly they made it to the World Series.
Fact #2: I love Chicago and I love that any of our sports teams is so dominant.
Fact #3: I am married to a woman with a great deal of family in Houston (more since Katrina) and so
must deal with a large pro-Houston lobby.
I suppose it is better than a Sox-Cardinals series. That would have been too much for any Cubs fan.
Grandpa’s gonna spin in his grave, but … Go Chicago!
The steam will rise again
Perhaps catering to its larger blue collar readership, the Sun-Times scooped the Trib in covering a story of great importance to the public bathers of the city. The good news is that the Division Street Baths are closed for remodelling and will reopen next year most likely, just in time for its 100th birthday. Thank goodness, but why on earth would they do this over the winter when we need it most?
Kudos to Greer for tracking this down. And, May, if you’re not demoted at the Tribune for dropping this particular lead I may ask my vast readership to start a blogging campaign highlighting your journalist negligence.
Viva fat sweaty men flagellating themselves with oak switches!
See also: Sensory deprivation
One show, daily
I attended a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart today in NYC. Great fun. Actually way more fun than I thought it would be. I guess I just figured it would be a little sterile in a studio setting, but it was actually funnier. For instance, I always assumed that the correpondent reports that are filed from “Baghdad” and “Washington D.C.” — obviously in front of a green screen — were at least done backstage or something. In fact, the correspondents are mere feet from Stewart on stage and watching his off-camera reaction to their reports is hilarious. Sometimes it felt like he didn’t know what they were going to say, though of course it is scripted and flowing past on the telepromters. The staff cracks up constantly too — and why not? Just great to see how much everyone enjoys the show. There’s a bit of a pre-show standup routine by a staffer that was really quite funny and then Stewart comes out to answer some audience questions. One guy asked Stewart how he felt about the fans who purchased the old show set on eBay and are touring around the country. He said he had not heard about it — which I find very hard to believe. (Thanks for the tickets, Matty!)
Please standby
Seems the blog’s database is corrupt — which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.
So buckle up. It’ll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.
Gridwork
Circa 2:30pm, Oct. 18. Crossing Chicago River eastward on Lake Street.
Out of steam
Something’s up at the Division Street Baths, last of the venerable public steam and sauna houses in the city and one of my favorite wintertime retreats. The door is shuttered, the phone number is disconnected, and there’s no notice of any kind about why it is closed. The baths have such a loyal following and checkered past that the complete silence seems very odd.
My pal Greer who is both a bath devotee and a novice gumshoe emailed Jesse Jackson, Jr. — like his dad, a long-time fan of the baths — who replied that he had no idea what had happened but that he was not pleased about it. Greer then called Alderman Flores whose office replied that the bath house building is undergoing complete renovation and should reopen in the spring.
But why no notice on the building? Why is the phone number disconnected? Something is not right here. Health code violation? Mafia?
Me and my three readers disagree
Jakob Nielsen, geek advisor to the corporate masses who think they grok usability, has a column on the usability of weblogs this week. Over the last year or so I’ve watched Nielsen’s always-tenuous grasp of the relationship of style to user experience slowly give way to a highly corporatized version of what constitutes good web design. In the current column he advises all kinds of wacky stuff but the one piece that clinches his inability to grasp what is truly happening in the blogosphere (yes, Jakob, I know you hate that word) is that he actually advises personal bloggers to stay on-topic or else risk appealing to the “low-value demographic” who actually read for diversity rather than singularity of topic. On-topic for a personal blog? Isn’t that the opposite of writing about and for yourself?
If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.
Oh, really? A separate blog each time I plan on changing topics?
Good god this man does not get it.
When the original just won’t do
So what happens when you find out that an album you downloaded illegally because you were so anxious to have it that you broke a longstanding pledge not to deal with sketchy P2P networks and with every intent of actually buying the album when it was released — hang on, let me catch my breath — OK, so what happens when you do buy the album legally and you find out that five of the tracks on the album are fake, or maybe not fake but certainly not from this album if they are in fact by the same artist at all and that you in fact like those tracks better than the legitimate tracks (of the same name!) on the officially released album? What happens then, I ask!? You’re in a real pickle, I’ll tell you.
You know by now that I really love the new Boards of Canada album. 10 of the 15 tracks I had downloaded are identical, so it is safe to say that 66% of it my initial reaction is unqualified. But the other five tracks — they are so typically Boards of Canada and fit in so well musically that I am almost incapable of admitting what is obvious. Someone — maybe BoC themselves — released a bogus copy of the album on filesharing networks. Yet, two-thirds of the tracks were legit. And the non-legit ones might as well have been from the same band they are so musically identical.
There’s raging debate over whether these tracks are from another band or from early BoC — and in fact there appear to be different bogus albums out there — but the point is that I fell in love with an album that was musically holistic, but which I now know to be not what the artists’ intended. But, truly, the “fake” tracks make a better album.
This is like falling in love with the cover of a song before ever knowing the original and not liking the original when you finally hear it.
Bad John, bad. Filesharing bad!
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
