Of Bike Theft and Morality

When I was twelve or thirteen my father bought me what I consider my first "serious" bicycle: a kid-sized Specialized Rock Hopper in a ghastly shade of green with some trim that came from exactly the wrong side of the color wheel to compliment the primary coat. I loved the hell out of it regardless and, frankly, I needed it, because I was a new 6th grader at the middle school three miles across town and my parents couldn't drive me every morning to class.

That bike was the catalyst of three firsts in my life: my first independent mode of transportation; my first trip to the hospital after I clipped a pole near the house; and my first bout with bike theft.

For cyclists, bike theft is as inevitable as death and taxes and, when it happens, feels like a little bit of both. Bike theft is the tax we must pay to ride and when it occurs a little piece of you -- the piece you gave to that ride -- dies inside.

This is not to say that I've had my bike stolen recently, thank goodness, because if I did I am so effing broke that there's not a chance I could replace it for months. Not a victim, for now, but victimization is all around me and sometimes I feel like the wolves are just beyond the tree line waiting for me to screw up.

My coworker's bike -- my Tuesday evening Conzelman Road riding buddy, Alex -- was stolen last month after he got drunk in the Financial District and neglected to take the proper security precautions. A bit closer to home, two months ago somebody kicked in our apartment building's main door and made off with our friend's kick scooter, but could have easily grabbed the bikes. In fact, why the hell didn't he? Unfamiliarity with the operation of the hook each bike hangs from?

Then just recently a teen in SF was arrested after police found 114 stolen bikes in his family's house's garage and storage units in Oakland. That's a hell of a bust, amounting to about a third of the bikes officially reported stolen in a year in SF (about one a day according to police, but it's not difficult to conjecture more are stolen and not reported). These thieves were prolific, but profoundly stupid. The teen (and probably his family) were stealing the bikes in SF and selling them on Craigslist and at the Laney College flea market on weekends. Eventually something was going to give and somebody was going to ID their bike, putting into effect a police sting and yadda yadda. Which is exactly what happened.

If you're an aspiring bike thief listen up, I'm going to give some sage wisdom now: if you steal a bike in the Bay Area, sell it in LA. If you steal a bike in LA, sell it in the Bay Area. If you're a Craigslist or eBay seller, don't sell in the area, do the same thing as above. Also for online sellers, don't do business with an out-of-state buyer or the penalties if caught will be greater due to interstate commerce laws. Had your fill of Criminality 101?

What I'm presently conflicted on is the morality of purchasing parts and/or whole bikes from somebody you suspect of being a bike thief. Back in May I visited a parking lot swap meet in Cuppertino and wondered the entire time how much of those piles of components and fittings were lifted. How many of the patrons were looking for their cranks, or brakes, or wheels back? In their defense, none of the vendors looked the part of the thief and I'm doing that community a grave disservice by even insinuating that there were hot parts there.

Anyway, without any statistics to back me up except a burning feeling in my gut, I'm going to say that 99% of all stolen bikes and parts are never recovered. Yeah, no figures or evidence at all, but I'd bet my bottom dollar I'm within a percent of the correct number. So, if you're willing to agree with that, with the recovery rate so abysmal how can we say it's wrong to buy something you suspect is stolen? If not you, some other opportunist will probably come along and snatch up a good deal.

Honestly, I'm torn on the matter. There's a base injustice to it, sure, but only you would know of it (unless you blabbed to a friend or something). That's a big deal, to be certain -- I already have trouble living with myself over the meager crimes I've perpetrated in my lifetime thus far. I suppose it will come down not on an academic argument, but what's in my heart if ever presented face-to-face with the situation.

Perusing the arXiv

Remember a couple months ago the announcement of OPERA's faster-than-light neutrino experiment? Boy, it seems like only yesterday; insert witty time travelling neutrino joke here. Something that's overlooked in that story is that news outlets did a run for the endzone with that headline before the paper had actually been officially published -- it was a pre-print slated for peer review, not a set-in-stone finding! Very unscientific of them, but that's the ambulance-chasing media for you. Where they found it, and where I imagine a lot more science reporters and laypeople are now paying attention to, is arXiv.org, the open access repository of pre-print (or, as they call them, "e-print") scientific papers currently operated by Cornell University.

ArXiv -- pronounced "archive" -- is a fascinating place where the contributors represent the bleeding edge of what I like to call the Awesome Sciences (physical sciences and mathematics, even though I'm just terrible at the latter). It's neat just to browse the archives, reading the titles and taking in the abstracts. Doing that feels to me like a big whiff of smelling salts that snaps my mind into remembering we live in a universe of sheer wonder, even when this world of Starbucks on every corner and football games with fifty goddamn awful commercials for American Idol try to lull us into mediocrity.

There are people out there, now -- right this very instant! -- who are peering into the secrets of the quantum foam and peeling away the 'branes of reality. What a thing of beauty.

It can even make you laugh every now and then. Boing Boing had a link today to Backreaction, the blog of two physicists who've collected their favorite silly arXiv e-print titles. It didn't take much deliberation on my part to name 22 and 23 my favorites.

I'm a fairly silly fellow.

Bend Like a Reed

Tomorrow I channel my inner Jacob Riis and see how the other half lives: tomorrow I try yoga.

It's a really, really good thing I have little sense of shame or propriety in public, because somebody with either of those would surely think different of trekking up to El Cerrito to contort my body in unnatural ways, in front of the Beautiful People that frequent upscale yoga joints around these parts. I won't be alone, thankfully, as Akane and a troupe of future people-that-know-a-dark-secret-to-blackmail-me-with are coming along for what will no doubt be an experience for the books.

My opposition to yoga is longstanding and well-known. Frankly, I am still not convinced that what essentially amounts to advanced stretching can have the health benefits that its supporters claim. I'm going to expand my horizons. I'm going because there will be an extraordinary amount of women in tights in one room. I'm going because I could use the touted stress relief.

Oh, and I'm going because the gang's hitting up a brewery afterwards and I'll take any excuse to guzzle some beers.

Did I mention it's Bikram, the infamous "hot room" yoga?

Stay tuned for embarrassing photos and commentary.

Attack of the Red Pearls

If foreign cuisine were partitioned archaeological dig sites, you may be surprised--despite having lived there for three years--that there are many, many layers in many, many grids of Japanese food that I haven't drilled down to yet. And I'm not talking the semi-exotic stuff like hachi-senbei (crackers with bees baked inside) or suppon (a range of dishes made from the Pelodiscus sinensis turtle), which a lot of Japanese haven't eaten either. No, there are plenty of "common" flavors I simply never got around to trying or only sampled in passing and promptly forgot about. Ikura is one of them.

You can find them in virtually any Japanese restaurant: the pearl-sized mostly translucent red eggs of salmon. From what I've heard they're a nice bonus for salmon fishermen who make their catch in the fall as the fairly large egg sacks that contain hundreds, if not thousands of individual eggs, fetch something like fifty dollars per pound. It's fascinating to me the price gap between all the different types of fish roe, really. Black and Caspian Sea sturgeon roe (caviar) can fetch a hundred times this price, for example. I'm guessing there's a market-driven purpose for this, but would't be surprised if those little obsidian-colored balls are the proverbial diamond of the sea.

Still, good ikura can be mighty pricey, but in this case Akane and I lucked out big time. Her friend, Gosei, got his hands on some of the raw egg sacks from his wife's friend who finds the stuff just completely unpalatable (a not uncommon opinion of ikura), and after curing the eggs with the perfect amount of salt and secret Japanese hobo spices we got the call to come over and dig in. I've never had these kinds of heaping amounts of salmon roe before.

Whether I like them or not I can't quite say yet. I'm getting used to the flavor, that's for sure, but what I'm now trying to push past is the crunchy popping sensation that accompanies each rhythmic chewing action. It's like a slightly salty, wet, warm firecracker going off in your mouth. Am I the only human that finds that sensation disconcerting?

All in all, I'm pleased with my gastronomic choices today--kabocha pancakes by morning, heaping mounds of salmon roe and sashimi by night. That and thanks to our after dinner entertainment I found out that the country that uses the most toilet paper is Russia, the country that consumes the most instant noodles is Korea and the country with the highest alcohol consumption per capita is Estonia (if the variety show's statistics were correct, those Estonians must be drunk eighteen hours a day!). Facts are fun!

Whatever Gets Me Moving

Akane and I just finished watching Limitless on Netflix and I wasn't at all disappointed in the premise or execution. Really, it was a pleasant, if not confusing, surprise to find it on the streaming service -- hadn't the film come out just this year, maybe early summer? It's a distraction to check now, but I'm wondering if Limitless didn't do all that well at the box office. Sci-fi all too often doesn't, even when it stars Hollywood's Hot Young Thang, Mr. Bradley Cooper.

To tell the truth, Cooper's growing on me as a screen presence. He's versatile, playing comedy, dumb-as-bricks action and even some drama roles respectably well. And shit, can he nail the hyper-intellectual drugged-up jet set New York douchebag in Limitless like nobody else my mind can imagine. The guy speaks fluent French, too -- perhaps the source of his chops in this role. (I kid, I kid. Experience has taught me not to believe the prevailing public opinions about the French character.)

What I really enjoyed about the film (other than when Abbie Cornish used a little girl as an improvised melee weapon of last resort -- beautiful) was how it ended. That just can't be said about enough genre movies in my opinion. It had just the right amount of resolution to wrap things up for Cooper and Cornish's characters, yet doesn't leave so much dangling that there could have been a depressingly mediocre sequel. Thank goodness for minor miracles.

What's more, it left just the right amount of What Nows and What Ifs about the future of the movie's universe to set my mind racing and spark discussion between me and Akane. What is the fate of NZT, the drug that enhances Cooper's cognition? What will its effects be on society if/when it finally leaks? Will it widen or narrow the divide between the Haves/Have-Nots? Will it hasten a Singularity event?

I suppose the possibilities are...limitless.

Seventeen Years Later, I Am DONE With Star Trek: TNG

I've just finished reading James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes, his first novel in the Expanse trilogy, and it's left my childhood love of Star Trek: The Next Generation in shambles.

It's a classic case of one media synergizing with the other at just the right time to give the consumer (me) a new outlook on what fiction could, or even should, be. The sea change in my mind happened suddenly and without willful input. Now, thanks to it, I may never watch another TNG episode ever again. (With the exception of Darmok and The Inner Light.)

Now, it really should be mentioned early that Leviathan and ST:TNG are in entirely different arenas of sci-fi, with the former falling into the "hard" sci-fi circle and the latter being a nearly perfect specimen of science fantasy. Leviathan takes place within the inner Solar System, mostly in the asteroid belt, and all the tech and physics are within our contemporary realm of understanding. Gravity is simulated by good, old fashioned acceleration, there is no faster-than-light travel, resources are precious -- that kind of thing.

But my issues with ST: TNG have less to do with genre and more to do with formatting and vision.

Mere hours after finishing the novel I had a spare 45-minutes and browsed through Netflix's ST:TNG offerings, deciding to screen Season 6, Episode 20, The Chase, after many years of missing it on late-night reruns. I recall the fond memories of it specifically from all those years ago. In this episode (and this is hardly a spoiler seeing as how this episode aired, dear God, eighteen years ago) Captian Picard's former archaeology mentor, Professor Galen, drops in and drops in the lap of the Enterprise crew a mystery spanning the entire Alpha Quadrant. Using DNA fragments scattered throughout biospheres across the region a computer program is extrapolated that turns out to be a holographic message. The ancient avatar's words are heavy indeed: its species was the first intelligent one in the galaxy and after finding no other life to interact with they decided to seed potentially fertile worlds with the foundations of life as a monument to their existence, so that other life could one day coexist.

This got me thinking about another episode, Relics, that guest starred James Doohan reprising his role as Scotty. In this episode the Enterprise discovers Scotty's old ship crash landed on the outer shell of a Dyson sphere.

Relics and The Chase were both part of Season 6, episodes 4 and 20, respectively. There was still another season of TNG before the ax came down on the series. Now, you'd think that discovering a stellar megastructure and the truth about the origins of life in our galaxy would each deserve their own storyarc, follow-up episode or even just a damn casual mention in the final season. Maybe it'll pop up in DS9 or Voyager? Nope. Nothing. Nada. Insert the Klingon word for "zilch."

The first discovery in and of itself -- a fucking Dyson sphere! --is enough to devote a season to, at least. These hypothetical megastructures are pretty much impossible to build due to the model of physics our universe operates on. The material constituting the shell would necessarily need to have bonds stronger than the nuclear force to withstand the Coriolis effect. Just the surface technologies gleaned from studying such a structure would give whichever government could lay claim absolute supremacy over every species in the galaxy. Period.

And this thing is sitting in Federation space.

Heck, the Federation could literally move every member species' population inside it, have tons of room left over and never have to worry about attack from outside, because breaching the shell would be impossible.

So back to Corey's Leviathan and how it knits into this rant.

Leviathan climaxes with a discovery and an event that shakes the very foundations of human civilization. In this case I won't be specific, you'll just have to read it. The next book will no doubt begin with the consequences of said climactic events and build on that -- it's just basic continuity. ST: TNG has some smattering of consequence and continuity with the Borg and Q, then later on as the Marquis are introduced, but by and large it follows the same "monster of the week" format that the original series did.

That format is what Gene Roddenberry knew and loved, and he was involved with the conception and production of the series up until his passing. I get that. Afterward, though, the creative staff had a real opportunity to do something bold with the show and for whatever reason didn't do it. Maybe it was loyalty to Roddenberry's vision, maybe they were simply comfortable. This was right around the time seaQuest DSV and Babylon 5 -- well known for its grand five-season storyarc -- were spinning up and they had to know these shows would be competing for their fanbase.

OK, I'll concede that TNG being the ST follow-up Roddenberry had been trying decades to make probably swayed their decisions with creative direction. But what I don't understand, and what's practically a crime, is the introduction of a sort of Chekhov's Gun in the aforementioned episodes that really fails to "go off" with any effect in the larger Trek-verse. Obviously the discovery of a Dyson sphere or the progenitor to all life in the Alpha Quadrant should have changed the face of the known universe. Maybe the sphere builders were the species that seeded life. Where did they go? What other relics of immense grandeur did they leave behind?

It's these questions and possibilities, plus more, that rattle around in my head when I think of any TNG episode following Relics. So I'm swearing off the show FOREVER. If I ever watch another episode of the series (with exception to the prior allowances) I will rant so hard about its depiction of society in a post-scarcity economy that my jaw will fall off and blood will flow from your ears like a red Nile.

Pray that day never comes.

Like the Flash on Angel Dust

(Title inspired by #10 on this list.)

Lately I've become a bit lax about how I spend my Thursday and Friday early morning working meet-ups in Piedmont. At first I did blog posts here. That's all good and fine, I suppose. Then I tried studying Japanese, but the cafe setting, and particularly their schizophrenic tastes in music, isn't terribly conducive to information retention. Then I just had to devour Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a genuinely delightful sci-fi novel(-ette?) that latched on like a brain slug.

Perhaps a better way to spend the time, though, would be to jolt my brain into being more proactively creative. How to go about doing that is the trick. Embarking on a grand, long-term project isn't much my style, but flash fiction--creating a story of perhaps just a few hundred words in length--is certainly up my alley.

With any luck I can publish the stories in a seedy anthology magazine, start a cult religion based on them and become the next L. Ron Hubbard!

Oaklandは午前の七時

For early risers it's probably difficult not to think you live in some kind of Truman Show-esque staged reality. I say that as somebody who carefully observes a busy thoroughfare from a cafe window two times a week--perhaps not rich enough sample, but worth something. From this vantage point at 6:45AM the world bounded by my field of view is all but tranquil. The occasional morning jogger passes by, a police officer slowly buys and sips his coffee without any sense of urgency whatsoever and the only cars to pass by are brown econoboxes.

Then at 7AM everything changes in the blink of an eye. Layers stack on layers and the world gets real in a hurry. And brighter. Dog walkers join the joggers, who themselves have multiplied and started equipping themselves with gadgetry. Men in fedoras and woolen vests appear and peel back the pages of a newspaper. Slack-jawed, back-pack-toting students filter in for their cuppa. The vehicles change into sportscars, into European luxury sedans, into motorcycles. The bus that never passed by before passes by.

These are the happenings of any morning in Anytown, USA, I know. The way they all activate at once, though, as if somebody has double-clicked a script to run at 7AM PDT on the operating system of the universe, that's what I find so incredible.

Remember Sim City 2 where you could zoom in close on the street and at some point you'd get close enough to street level and the citizens would populate slowly or quickly depending on the speed of your system? Who can say what the clock speed is of the universe's CPU, but it seems at least as fast as a Pentium 3 if you ask me.

The Butterfly Effect, Not Starring Ashton Kutcher

脳ぶっかけです～。（「ぶっかけ」というのはいつもそんな意味がないよ。）

All too often are we the victims of freak cause and effect rather than the beneficiaries. A butterfly flaps its wings in Madagascar causing a cascade reaction that ends in Frank Chu doing a haymaker on Gavin Newsome. San Francisco’s pretty-boy former mayor is pulled off by bodyguards, but pumps his fist at Chu to signify a forthcoming terrible revenge, perturbing the air currents just enough to result in tornados in Kazakhstan, killing fifteen and an innocent goat.

Somehow that changed for me recently, at least temporarily.

My recent chain of cause and effect goes something like this: A Friday night bar hop goes explosively wrong and results in (perhaps self-imposed) social isolation that, coupled with the geographic isolation of living in North Oakland, pushes me to get out and explore again. Less than a week later a massive earthquake rocks the Tohoku Region of Northeastern Japan and aid agencies, among others, scramble to respond. Benefits are had, money is donated, and three Japanese women in Albany organize an impromptu bazaar in a vacant storefront on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley.

One week later, after Sunday brunch at The Drunken Boat just a few doors down, I wander into the bazaar and out of the driving rain. Among the Neil Diamond records, Doraemon postcards and homemade lemon cupcakes I spot an old VIZ coworker I hadn’t seen in over six years. When she first landed at the company in 2001 I had an embarrassingly massive crush on her—almost as massive as my complete dorkiness that prevented any kind of relationship past being simply friends. We chat, reminisce about old times and agree to meet up for dinner in the near future. That happens once. Then it happens again.

Then I have a girlfriend in this ghost from my past, and she makes me feel happy for the first time in a good long while.

As I read over the above set of circumstances again it’s impossible to ignore where it could have turned out different. Zig where I should have zagged, Aunt Mary’s or Sconehenge for the meal instead of The Drunken Boat. What if I’d gone in before eating and she wasn’t there, or decided to heed the expired parking meter and drive off instead of chancing a ticket and entering the bazaar? It boggles the mind, really.

Thanks, Fate, you’ve been kind recently to this individual. Don’t do something to lose my trust in you, OK?

The Ass Crack of Dawn

Confessions are hard, but I'm just delirious enough to squeeze this one out: I like getting up early. Not early like setting the alarm for 7AM. More like 5AM. I am a sick fuck, it's true.

I came to this realization last year, when Whiskey was still in Sausalito and I would rise at 5:30AM to make the final BART train to San Francisco an hour later that technically allowed bicycles. I've since learned that the conductors don't give two shits that bikes get on after 6:30--perhaps they too see the inherent injustice of singling out this group of green commuters for discrimination. Anyway, it's a magical thing to ride one's (awesome) bike through a mostly deserted Crissy Field and across the Golden Gate Bridge while the sun crests Mt. Diablo to the East. Don't knock it till you try it.

However, now that those days are behind me, I find I still like waking before the dawn and getting a move on. It's like stealing time back from the Universe--the early birds emerge from their apartments as the first inkling of light creeps in from the Prime Meridian, slip a razor blade between the dimensions of day and night and enter null space. In there anything's possible.

So, yeah, today I woke up at 5AM and will continue to wake at this hour every Thursday and possibly Friday for the next few months. Why? Craigslist is why.

Recently I've been a tad isolated and remembered that Craigslist has a location-specific events page, which I used to check fairly regularly. Typically it's a dry well, but every now and then there's something good. While perusing the listings over the course of two weeks one popped up over and over: a UC Berkeley grad student looking for a writing buddy to help kick their ass into gear to finish a thesis. Compelling, because I, too, want someone to kick my ass into gear and get writing/studying/thinking again. An ideal opportunity at first glance until one reads the fine print: the grad student is only available in the early morning. No wonder this ad's been up there for weeks.

So I took the initiative and responded, committing myself every Thursday, and possibly Friday, to coffee and writing at Gaylord's in Piedmont. My study buddy is Katie Somethingorother, a biologist studying antelope morphology in Africa.

Sitting here typing with her thesis in my peripheral vision I can't help but feel a tad melancholy about not pursuing a degree in one of the sciences. Of course, were that the case I wouldn't ever have met Chizuru, Rie, Mayumi, or any of the many of the other residents of Oita that have so shaped my recent life. And frankly that's an insult to their existence, so no more of that thinking.

On that note, I'm planning on opportunistically hopping a plane back to Oita in the next few months now that airfare is so low. Missed the registration for the Tour de Kunisaki race this year, though. Too bad. Oh well, there's plenty yet to get up to in Kyushu!

Tremble At the Culture-Corrupting Powers of Garrison Keillor!

The right wing has a long and illustrious history of batshit loony concepts of just what they think will reduce deficits and help balance national and state budgets, but the recent vote by the House to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio is certainly the richest (pun intended) to come around lately. I had to really strain my eyes to find the CPB entry on the annual Death and Taxes infographic that illustrates where our tax money is spent. Slightly more money is spent on it as the Peace Corp--and that's not a hell of a lot in the grand scheme. Far, far less than one percent of the national budget.

A show of hands from anyone who listens to public radio: how many of us enjoy the two weeks every quarter when the hosts and announcers from our local NPR affiliate beg and plead for listener support? I, for one, feel sad almost every time Ira Glass guilt-trips some poor listener, or Jerry Neuman and Sandy Althouse dangle some trinket in front of their listening audience to entice them into donating. Serious journalists, it seems to me, should focus on their craft rather than on how they're going to get the cash to keep the lights on and the transmitter beaming over the airwaves.

Yeah, expect that extended by a week or more. Fucking joy!

The issue of CPB funding was a topic of discussion on last Friday's episode of Forum and the hosts invited both a rep from NPR and a blowhard from the libertarian Cato Institute to come on and discuss the issue. It was astounding, really. The Cato jackass made it sound as if the only thing holding back NPR from being the loudspeaker of the American Communist Party was that they were accepting federal dollars, and without that control rod the whole thing will meltdown into a glowing pile of sentient, unstoppable leftist goo. (That analogy brought to you by the still-ongoing Fukushima Daiichi situation.) He even insinuated that those left-of-center would like it--they'd have their respective version of Fox News. You have got to be kidding me...

Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said of his decision to vote for the withdrawl of federal funding, "Why should we allow taxpayer dollars to advocate one ideology?" By their statements and position on this issue I can surmise that neither Cantor or the Cato guy seem to listen much to their local NPR affiliate. I can be relatively sure of this because I listen to KQED daily, the NPR outlet in San Francisco, one of the most leftist places in the nation, and can say for a fact after having gone through their daily programming schedule that the one unifying quality virtually all their shows have isn't anything like leftist ideology or activism, it's plain, simple objectivity and intellectual enrichment.

Let's go down that list together for the date of March 31, 2011:

7AM, Morning Edition--News magazine program that covers broad topics of both national and international importance. Lightweight start-of-the-day stuff that still manages to be informative. Hosts do not offer up opinions on topics.

8:33AM, The Do List--Weekend events happening around the Bay Area. Host does not offer up opinions on topics. Oh, other than telling us the time and locations for all our Communist rallies.

9AM, Forum--Interview program that hosts authors, artists, politicians, musicians, etc. While hosts can debate factual data with certain guests, never do they push one political ideology or another. Listeners are invited to call in and ask guests questions or offer up commentary. Oftentimes these callers are opinionated, but that can hardly be held against the program.

11AM, Talk of the Nation--Much like Morning Edition, a news magazine program that covers topics of national and international importance. They host guests pertinent to whatever the topics are and invite listeners to call in. Like Forum, these guests can be opinionated, but that, baby, is freedom of speech.

1PM, Fresh Air--Purely interviews of authors, artists, politicians, musicians, etc. without listener call-ins. While Terry Gross can make her opinions known through the types of questions she asks never does she actively implore or lead her listeners to ascribe to one viewpoint or another. Frankly, I consider Terry to be little more intelligent than a tangelo and anybody who picks up on and follows her political wavelength deserve only bad things in life.

2PM, The World—Heaven forbid Americans find out about international issues and hear human interest stories from around the globe. Oh no, the Geoquiz is turning our children queer!

3PM, The Jim Leher News Hour—A news institution that’s probably one of the most solid sources of televised domestic and international reporting, this show is hard journalism through and through. Anchors will invite guests from all walks and across the political spectrum to participate.

4PM, Marketplace—It’s a show about money and what’s happening in the world of. Money: there’s nothing more Republican than that. ‘Nuff said.

4:30, All Things Considered—The day’s programming wraps with All Things Considered, another domestic and international news magazine show. This program somehow especially got on the nerves of right wing listeners, though I struggle to understand how. Michele Norris asks awkward questions that, on the very outside could be considered to have a leftist bias.

Let’s be very, very clear here: NPR has no voice—not a single one—that approaches the screeching volume or vitriol of an Olbermann, Beck, Malkin, Limbaugh, etc. Nor do they have any shows that overtly skew one way or the other. Or covertly, for that matter.

So, in conclusion, fuck you House Republicans. Fuck you and the money-covered Jesus unicorn you rode in on. You’ve nothing to stand on in this debate. Nothing.

**************

Update: So, it's taken me a while to write this post. Distractions at every turn. Since I began, NPR's On the Media, at the prodding of Ira Glass, has explored the issue of liberal bias at NPR. The results compiled by a media watchdog group were fascinating. Once parsed, the data showed that not only does NPR give at least as much airtime to conservative issues as commercial news radio, in any given month their reporting is often well over half right wing issue stories. Right wing NPR listeners invited by the show to keep a log of whenever they found a story skewing left-of-center really couldn’t produce much compelling evidence to support their viewpoints. The saying “squeezing blood from a turnip” comes to mind.

As the Japanese would say, 根も葉もない.

Investment Bankers Might Not Be Human

Ladies, I suggest you vamoose from this here page for a calmer locale. I intend to speak of the secret world of manly things, a realm shrouded in shadowy secrets greater than those of the Mona Lisa's coy smirk or why urinal cakes are blue and taste so good.

Damn it, too close to my topic!

Communal restroom etiquette: comic gold to the stand up funnyman, but Serious Business to the considerate individual. Yesterday, while in the 20th floor men's room of 333 Bush, I ran into a situation that will haunt me to the end of my days.

The sound of urine hitting the porcelain wall of a urinal is a well known and comforting note (as we are all men here reading this now certainly you know that). World-class flautists have tried to capture the captivating resonance of it for decades, to no avail. Only the real deal will do.

While sitting down and dropping the kids off at this posh highrise's pool a man entered the bathroom and began his...recital, shall we say. All was going well, at first. The pitch was high and steady and the judges were already lining up to give the man a Grammy. Then, disaster.

*BLOOP*. What the fuck was that?

Imagine the sound of a rock with the approximate mass of a child's fist being dropped into a small pool of liquid and that was the sound I heard. I froze. Who wouldn't? Probably a lot of us freeze anyway when we're on the crapper and somebody enters the restroom. Playing possum doesn't take away any of the perceived shame from this natural act, but we'd like to delude ourselves into thinking it does.

Anyway, seriously, what was that sound? Did this man just painlessly pass a gall boulder? And then there's the etiquette matter: do you summon up the courage and ask "hey, is your urethra OK after that, man?" or do you just keep on trucking yourself, in private?

I'll send this scenario in to Miss Manners and get her opinion.

--Matt

A Manga to Make Carl Sagan Weep

I read somewhere a while back that Tite Kubo, author of the obscenely popular manga series Bleach, made a statement to the effect that he's only halfway through penning that title. It's almost difficult to fathom another TEN YEARS of Bleach. Mind you, that series is basically about teen ghosts that fight each other with spirit swords, so I'm intensely curious--though not enough to actually buy any--about how much plot juice one can wring out of such a banal premise. Madness.

Well, from a critic/sensible reader's perspective it's loony. From that of the accountant it makes perfect sense. In fact, from that angle it's tough to begrudge it since a cash cow like this enables publishers to take risks with other, perhaps more artsy, niche titles.

Back in my Viz days that company occasionally took a gutsy risk thanks to such lucrative series. Carl Horn's great work on Eagle, about a Japanese-American who makes a bid for the White House (this is waaaaay before anybody'd even heard of Obama) was one of them. They promoted the fuck out of it--I know because I helped write and distribute lots of its marketing materials--and it sold like dog poop in a box even though it received critical acclaim.

Before that, though, my favorite risky title had to be Hoshino Yukinobu's 2001 Nights, a hard sci-fi collection of time-skipping vignettes that philosophically approaches the subject of mankind's future endeavors in space. Every year or two I come back to it, read it over, and remember the way it was. You know, back in those good ol' days that don't actually exist except through the rosy glasses in our heads.

It truly is a masterpiece of sci-fi manga, despite my obvious leanings. Like a skilled surgeon Hoshino takes so many of the familiar conventions of the genre, dissects them and presents them back to the audience with that thing the Japanese so love to cite--heart. Take the KARK 9000 storyline, in which a remote probe with a sentient AI at its core is sent shooting off on a nuclear rocket at twelve percent light speed towards Barnard's Star looking for alien life. Hoshino takes the story of a fancy computer and its human programmer and, in two parts, transmutes it into a genuinely piercing tragedy that pulls readers in with tremendous emotional gravity.

The grand question Hoshino presents to readers throughout hundreds of pages of meticulously illustrated panels is this: Will humanity every truly be ready to not just gaze into infinity, but step into it willfully? Serious food for thought as we retire space shuttles, slash NASA funding and move further and further away from the glory days of triumphant moon landings.

--Matt

Deathrace 2011

So we're ten years (give or take some months) past the dystopic future depicted in Deathrace 2000 and I for one am furious there isn't more--or any--bloody high octane death sports out there. Meanwhile, the Phillies just spent something like $140 million on a single player. That's money that can be better spent on spinning wheel spikes, oil slick shooters and fuzzy dice.

And you know, that plus the shitty weather recently has got me thinking of getting back onto four wheels.

There, I've said it and already I feel dirty.

Christ, I've owned a lot of vehicles over the years: a 1983 Audi C3/5000; that wonderfully named 1989 Mitsubishi Starion; my first bike, a 1991 Kawasaki EX 500; the salvaged 1996 CBR F3; and finally my Mille "Highway Star."

Will two-wheel transport continue to dominate my life? Yes, certainly, but even I need to admit that it's not always practical. Take the coming week, when it's supposed to rain continuously for days and I need to be at a client in Novato. It's not suicide to ride in the rain but even I, a stalwart, stubborn motorcyclist, can't deny the risks are higher. Not to mention it's just so much more uncomfortable. I'll need to take an extra pair of socks and shoes, find a place to dry out the suit, come up with a whole bunch more gripes. Way too much work.

The plan is really to drive it as little as possible, only in inclement weather, on cold nights and trips with friends out of the area. So, as you can see, I've already justified it like an addict rationalizes that next hit of the crack pipe. Just a matter of saving up a bit more money and choosing the right car. Used, of course. By the numbers, when one factors in all the energy costs of resource extraction, transport, refinement and vehicle assembly it's more environmentally friendly to purchase a used car than a brand new hybrid or diesel. At least for a while.

Or until I can convert it to run on blood.

--Matt

I'm Seceding From the Union. Who's With Me?

You know, I could go on all day and night about the good and bad aspects of my former English teacher position, but definitely one of the best aspects was the mobility. Every day a different school--hell, sometimes two!--which ensured that nobody ever got too big a dose of gaijin Matt and his foreign devil ways, and vice versa. Well, here I am in this IT gig doing the King of the Road thing once again. No desk, no roots, no problem.

One of the places the job has taken me is an Oakland labor law firm in a high rise at the corner of 12th and Broadway whose western windows stare straight into the never-blinking face of the Tribune Tower's illuminated clock. It's a lovely view to say the least and the lawyers there are good, kind people. However, from those heights looking down, I couldn't help but recall how Oakland's unemployment rate is hovering between seventeen-and-a-half and eighteen percent. That's approximately seven point higher than the regional average. A staggering level for a major American city that's not, say, Detroit.

How does it get like this, and what can be done to cut those percentages? Of course, Oakland has historically had its share of problems since at least the '50s thanks to White Flight and then the rising wave of crack addiction starting in the '70s. But the issue is bigger than one East Bay city, it's national, perhaps even international. In a speech at Boston University in late October--which I've read about three times just to solidly take it all in--former presidential press secretary and PBS newsman Bill Moyers made a good case for identifying a major contributor to the poverty and misery facing so many Americans these days as "wage repression."

I'd never heard of wage repression before but it's pretty intuitive once Moyers cites a prime example of it:

I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it’s the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.

That’s wage repression.

He goes on to explain how the top one percent who hold half the country's wealth, plus the companies they work for, pretty much only spend their money on luxury items and then squirrel away the rest or buy back stock to prop up market values. Little to none of their money makes its way to the local, regional or national communities. The trickle down economics that the Republicans tout? A myth.

And America just put them back in the driver's seat of government. Their message essentially seems to be "do what we say or we'll wrap this sucker around a tree." As a friend said yesterday, that branch seems to be run by twelve-year-olds at the moment. Twelve-year-olds with access to booze and DC hookers.

Workin' for the Weekend

I doubt anybody follows this anymore. Haven't posted in months after all, but what the hey--it beats written journaling, which I made a halfhearted stab at last month. Perhaps I'll still document some of my more personal thoughts in there. Perhaps.

A lot has gone down in the past few months. From losing a job or three to getting a salaried one to moving home to maybe moving back out to helping some friends through tough times to...other things. The position, a staff IT helpdesk grunt for my friend Kelli's husband's consulting firm, is more or less working out. That's nice and somewhat reassuring. Still, other parts of my life feel muddled, confusing and downright painful. What I'd give for the answers to some burning questions...

Maybe it's best to forget it and move on, but the matter's not in my hands anymore.

One thing that is certain though is this familiar feeling of work. Ah, how I've missed you! The dizzying highs of getting shit done, satisfaction of a good day's labor and the longing for it all to be over and the weekend to arrive sooner rather than later. On a scale of latrine scrubber to professional international Indian food taster I'd place IT well above average, definitely better than teaching English in a tiny Japanese mountain town (not that I don't have any love for Kusu and my friends there) but still below the Whiskey Media gig. Hey, we takes what we can gets, you know.

In any event, I'm learning new things everyday and enjoying some of the small luxuries and finer things a life of poverty and penny-pinching denied me. In fact, went by Remedy earlier on and had a cup of ridiculously fine coffee. The place's client base is so hipster and Apple-centric I expected all the young flannel-clad ones to break into song and dance if an MGMT track came on. Well, guess what all you hipsters not reading this: I was a regular at Remedy when it was just the owner, Todd, on a 2'x5' cart out front in the freezing weather until noon-ish. I was going there before it was cool to go there!

Oh, shit. That was something a hipster might say.

Goodbye cruel world!

John Cleese Has America's Ticket

The below video is titled "John Cleese Rants - Soccer vs. Football," and it's anything but an unintelligible hate-screed one might expect from anything with the word "rant" in it. Of course it's funny--Cleese always is--but it's also enlightening. The unpopularity of football (soccer) in America has always vexed me because it's such a treat for the eyes when two teams of skill go at it. As Cleese explains, though, this is merely another case of corporate media dictating what is and isn't to be popular as football's virtually uninterrupted action is not conducive to advertisers, thus cutting into the network's revenue stream.

America: it's all about the Benjamins.

--Matt

Tearful Native Americans Not Enough To Convince Some, I Guess

While crossing San Pablo Ave. on Adeline southbound I saw a man toss his spent can of beer to the sidewalk.

People still do that?

Well, he was really more of a boy, probably somewhere in his teens. That will give you the idea of the caliber of human being here. I'm stupefied that this remains an issue in the 21st century as I thought it had been eliminated like polio--a relic of the past that our parents talk about in hushed tones. There're garbage cans on practically every corner in the city, and if not a municipal one then some shop's can or a resident's plastic bin. How hard is it to hold the can until then?

Witnessing this most preventable of hits to urban beautification irks me deeply for two reasons. First, Japan has almost zero public waste bins, so the public must hold their trash until they get home, to work or find a convenience store with a waste can out front. I "suffered" through this for three years and you know what? It's really not that big of a burden! Next, and perhaps most important, I'm really starting to like life in Oakland and it pains me to even think that I may need to move out of the city soon due to my current unemployment. But with residents not even willing to crush and stow a can in their pocket does this city have a brighter future? Thanks to, ahem, contacts in city government I've recently become privy to a good deal of the inner workings of Oakland's civic leadership and it's a bleak picture indeed. Residents and local officials have to pull together pretty soon to save Oakland from the blight it was not even fifteen years ago.

First order of business: stop littering on my damn city.

Hank Scorpio For World Leader

Completely out of left field, for sure, but while I've been writing up articles about MIB III plot details and Bruce Willis cologne somehow the subject of the greatest forgotten Simpsons side character popped up. How could I have forgotten about Hank Scorpio, Homer's one-time boss and evil mastermind? Too bad he only appeared once, but best not to spoil the genius of his character on too many guest spots. Here's his theme song:

--Matt

Meanwhile, Several Months Later...

Late to the party, certainly, I picked up a copy of McSweeney's superb San Francisco Panorama in late May and have been slowly making my way through the fat chunk of newsprint and higher quality stock paper that compose the thing. It's all fairly old news, so I'm taking my time. If you're not familiar with Panorama, it came out in December of '09 and stands as McSweeney's, well, some would say swan song to the print newspaper, but I'd like to consider it a blueprint for the future of the medium. It contains several segments including news, sports, entertainment/book review and an interesting news-magazine supplement.

By far my favorite section is the magazine. I've been enlightened on the subjects of what transpires when two gay San Franciscans visit a NASCAR race in Michigan, why film distribution is broken in the U.S. (very handy while writing for Screened.com), how a green (as in experience) lawyer broke through the red tape to deliver a family from home foreclosure and how a black woman from Oakland experienced the cold southern climes of Antarctica.

It's that latter most article that's been continually blowing my mind these days as I read and then re-read the thing over and over again. It's the style the draws me in, as well as the story. Author Mary Williams writes from a third-person perspective and placing you in her place. There are plenty of "Your new boss..." and "You will..." moments where she pulls the reader into her place where I feel like she's just writing about me; I was the one suffering through frostbite and food-zealous dive-bombing skuas on the ice sheets of Antarctica. If she's still in Oakland I'd really like to meet her, shake her hand and buy her a hot cup of...whatever.

--Matt