This weekend

When the cat's away...
Originally uploaded by alex.DC.

This was a good weekend. I spent some time organizing my apartment. I got a new TV table from Scan. At the Java House on Saturday morning, J and I had a debate about when Hawaii became a state, and as usual there was an eavesdropper who confirmed that it was 1948. Saturday evening I hung out with N6 at Bliss after having a great Salvadoran dinner and a yummy margarita with J uptown in Columbia Heights. Rode my bike around town on Saturday afternoon. And my knee is getting better.

I also cooked up a batch of black bean stew... I forgot to buy tomato juice so I substituted in V8 Juice instead. Worked just fine.

Had lunch with my parents on Sunday, and on Sunday night I watched Casablanca, which has been sitting on my movie list for a month. Inexplicably I've never seen this classic and I thought it was time to set that straight. It was weird though, because so many of the lines from the movie are famous, that parts of it seemed like I actually had seen it before.

Travel stuff

Here are a few things I've come across in my recent travels that I can recommend:

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman -- I picked this up in the airport in Hong Kong because I'd enjoyed a previous book by Gaiman, Good Omens, and after I picked it up I couldn't put it down again. It's a book about a meek, downbeaten guy named Fat Charlie who comes around to discovering that his recently departed dad was actually a god, and gradually he begins to realize he's got it in him, too.

King Suckerman by George Pelecanos -- another great Pelecanos crime and suspense novel set in DC. This one is reminiscent of Pulp Fiction, if only because of the high level of violence that unpredictably erupts . Pelecanos takes us back to the 70s in DC, when Dupont Circle was thronged with head shops, Springsteen played the Childe Harold, bikers sold coke out in the suburbs of Maryland, and people still went to drive-in movies.

Undone by Michael Kimbell -- I bought this from an old lady pushing a book cart along the road in Indonesia. Great thriller set in Maine about a guy who plots with his wife and an undertaker to have himself buried alive as part of an insurance scam, and what happens to the people around him when everything goes wrong.

Crash (movie) -- very intense film about crime and race relations in Los Angeles, and what happens when disparate lives including a DA, a locksmith, a seemingly racist cop, an Iranian shop-owner, an African-American TV producer, and others interact.

I just started Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith. Too early to report on it yet.

My knee

Somehow I mangled my knee recently. I'm not even sure when it happened, because I went to bed fine and the next morning I was in excruciating pain. I've been limping around ever since. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with biking -- this has happened before when I rode too strenuously, but never without warning, and it's probably my punishment for pushing too hard after not riding for over a year. It seems to be getting better slowly, but I will have to go easy on it for a while.