"What if life were more like a video game?"

Jury Duty!

I got called up for jury duty this week, and unlike ever before, I was actually selected to sit on a trial. I am not allowed to talk about the case at all until it's over, however, but hopefully that will be soon. I will say that it's been weird being cut off from the world. We're not sequestered, but nonetheless I'm away from phones and e-mails and colleagues for most of the day.

A recent Washington Post Article about Segways, a $5,000 high-tech two-wheeled electric transporter, offered the following astute observation:

"My theory for why it hasn't caught on is that you look like a dork when you're on one of those things . . . even if you're in a police uniform," said Paul Saffo, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford University and Silicon Valley forecaster.

This led me to wonder why cell phones, by contrast, did catch on, since it is an indisputable fact that people talking on cell phones in public also look like dorks. The only explanation I can find is that unlike Segways, cell phones actually have some practical use.

Sometimes technology is not our friend. Last night I had a nice cup of Yogi Tea, and then I went to bed early because I had to be alert for a presentation I was to give today. I had trouble falling asleep, because I was thinking over what I was going to say. But finally, I did fall asleep. Until 4 am, when I was awoken by a "beep."

Anyone who owns a cell phone knows that noise -- the sound of a cell phone with a dying battery. I reached over to my night stand, fumbling in the dark, and found the phone (after knocking my alarm clock on the floor). I shut it off and tried to go back to sleep.

Then -- "beep!" My other cell phone! This was bad, because it was somewhere else in the room. I tossed and turned, wondering if I could just sleep through it. And then again after a long interval... "beep!" I kneew I had to get up.

The problem is, these things are hard to find because the beeps are so far apart. So I fumbled through a mound of stuff. I knocked my bicycle lock onto the floor, which fell with a loud thump. My downstairs neighbor must love me. "Beep!" Finally after going through several places, I found it, and by now I was fully awake. I turned it off, but I was also so frustrated at having my sleep ruined that I threw it at the floor -- and I hit my foot. Violence never solves anything, and sometimes it doesn't even make you feel better! Finally, with an aching foot, I went back to bed and managed to fall asleep.

Getting up in the morning was not easy. But thankfully, the presentation went well.

A few things

The Jet Age @ Black Cat 9/18/06
Originally uploaded by alex.DC.

I saw the Jet Age at the Black Cat earlier this week. I don't feel like trying to write like a rock critic right now, so I'll just say they're good. Go see them next time.

A Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin Donuts has opened directly across the street from me. Now, that might sound exciting, but if you think about it, neither of these things are something that anybody needs in their life on a regular basis. Especially right across the street. It's certainly slightly less needed than the herbal store that it replaced; and vastly less needed than the pet store that the herb store replaced.

What I really need is a place to get a slice of pizza on short notice!

New roommate

Rosemary
Originally uploaded by alex.DC.

So I brought home a new roommate, that will be low-maintenance... and edible. That's right, a creeping rosemary bush. It smells great. Can't wait to use a sprig of it in cooking!

Last night at the Georgetown Foundry Cinemas, I saw "Little Miss Sunshine," an excellent movie about a dysfunctional family and their journey to California to enter their daughter into a unforgettably creepy child beauty pageant. Funny and painful all at the same time. Go see it!

Before going in, we decided that rather than eat crummy cinema food, we'd smuggle in hummus and homemade pita from nearby Moby Dick. So good!

DC politics and other randomness

I'm going to have to admit that since Marion Barry ceased to be a potential mayoral candidate years ago, the excitement has gone out of DC politics for me, to the extent that this time around I knew almost nothing about the two main candidates, Linda Cropp and Adrian Fenty. I say "almost" because I did have a run-in with Linda Cropp's henchmen years ago which predisposed me not to like her (perhaps a tale for another blog). And I did have those 20 or so computer-generated messages on my answering machine from the Fenty campaign, which predisposed me to not like him. But mostly I just sat this one out.

My interest was piqued slightly more post-election, however, after reading this quote in the Washington City Paper from one of George Pelecanos' fictional characters as he describes Fenty in his new novel The Night Gardener:

“Now you had politicians, like that ambitious light-skinned dude, councilman for that area up top of Georgia, trying to make laws about loitering and stopping cats from buying single cans of beer.…The light-skinned dude, he didn’t really care about folks hanging out, and he didn’t care if a man wanted to enjoy himself one beer on a summer night. But he was running for mayor, so there it was.”

So if that's on target, and it seems like it is, then DC's steady march towards sterility is unfortunately likely to continue. By the way, The Night Gardener is supposed to be pretty good. An excerpt of Chapter One is printed here.

As long as I'm dishing out recommendations, the Post wrote up a new photography exhibit at the National Gallery today called the Streets of New York, and I intend to see it at the soonest opportunity.

Anywho... I availed myself of a haircut up in Adams-Morgan this morning, and then popped down to Tryst for lunch. As usual it was packed, but a single seat was open at the bar, and I grabbed it. For lunch I had the Oscar, a delicious prosciutto-cheese-and-veggies sandwich that at one time I used to walk clear across town for. As good as I remembered. And that is all.

Dogbite

Larnaca, Cyprus
Originally uploaded by alex.DC.

I just saw something kinda heartbreaking. A woman had tied up her dog, a sweet-faced Laborador who along with her is a regular sight around the neighborhood, while she bought a coffee. When she came back, she reached over the fence to pet him, and without warning he snapped at her and bit her hand. She started crying, not so much because it hurt, although it obviously did, but because she couldn't believe her dog would do that to her. The dog looked upset too, with his tail between his legs -- it was clear that for a brief moment, he hadn't recognized her, and once he realized what had happened, he felt terrible too.

Heh...

funny.

A rainy day in DC

I just returned from a long, and largely unexpected, summer trip. As a reminder of how unexpected it was, when I looked in my fridge for the first time in six weeks, I saw shrivelled-up veggies that I had bought at the Dupont Farmers' Market back in late July. I felt a bit melancholy on seeing this, not only because I never got to eat them, but because they seemed to symbolize the fact that summer is now over. I'm not sure if the farmer's market is still going on, but it seems likely that soon such fresh treats from the soils of Virginia will be replaced by the usual pale and tasteless fare that Safeway offers.

At the tail end of my journey, as is often my custom, I stopped off in London, and this time stayed a couple of nights in Bayswater, which is a new part of town for me. But the streets of nearby Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove all seem familiar nonetheless, if only because it is the same terrain traveled by Keith Talent, Nicola Six, and Samson Young in Martin Amis' unforgettable book, London Fields.

One night, walking down Kentish Town Road in the dark, I spotted a sign that called to me like a beacon: "Bintang," which means "Star" in Indonesian, and which in Indonesia is a brand name for a local beer and welcoming sign of oases all over the archipelago. So, of course I had to go in.

It turned out that they didn't serve Bintang beer, or any beer for that matter -- it was a BYOB establishment without a liquor license. But in a lovely garden out back I ate a most delicious spicy chicken dish that was part Indonesian, part Malay, and (I suspect) a little bit Indian -- it reminded me of chicken tikka makhanwala. It was London after all.

Besides looking forward to a good meal, I was also looking forward to getting to throw a few words of Bahasa Indonesia around -- despite never becoming anywhere near fluent, I miss speaking it. It was not to be, however -- again, this being London, one of the world's great melting pots, the waitress was (I'm guessing) Russian and the maitre d was Eritrean.

I later Googled the place and discovered it's received a good review from Time Out London. And it's definitely a place I'll be going back to again.