Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Good Enough for Government Work
Just as a counterpoint to the grousing below, here’s a quick rundown on some of the really good stuff from this past weekend:
* Catching up with 24 and the Sopranos, and being that much closer to being out of first-run thrall for the summer!
* TWO-NAP SATURDAY. ‘Nuff sed.
* A solid jog in the park on Saturday (between naps). I don’t do it often enough and it felt better than I even expected. Excelsior!
* Bay to Breakers - getting up and out with Z and K to walk three blocks to the park and meet our dear friend Jackie (and her delicious home-baked cookies) for an hour of watching the intersection of athletic expression and freak-flag flying. My favorite costumes were Waldo and his girlfriend, who was dressed in a big red arrow and jogged by his side, shouting “Found him!” Z loved the balloons, the carnival atmosphere, and the helicopters and biplanes that buzzed overhead; he didn’t even bat an eye at all the naked people. The one thing that was weird for the weirdness that is B2B was that I didn’t see any floats - no rolling kegs on red wagons, no tiki bars dragged by teams of sweat-glazed slaves, nothing like any of that. The only piece of wheeled furniture I saw was a little cart that looked like it should have been a kegtote but actually just said “Obama 08.” Our conclusion was, if they were smart, it would have been both.
* Going out at night to snap a time-exposure photo of the giant purple head, and getting a decent shot despite some technical challenges: there’s a streetlight that flickers on and off every 90 seconds or so with unflattering light, so the process needed to be timed to that cycle; also, my blasted tripod seems to have run out of cialis and is now all floppy at it’s upper portion so I had to hold the camera in place atop it by hand for a 30 second exposure. It was also very challenging to get the focus right. Whine whine whine. I like the photo anyway. It counts as a “good weekend thing,” and here it is:
(turns out it’s a 6-month installation from the black rock collective, from the burning man festival. yeah, I can see that.)
* Redeeming my iTunes gift certificate from Kel and getting a nice new tranche of music, including some old Elvis Costello and TMBG that I have not heard since my cassette days, and some new (to me) music by The Devil Makes Three. Google it yourself, good people. Fun stuff.
* Deciding on a whim to get a traditional Korean supper at our favorite place, Han Il Quan, and then finding two (!) tourbusses full of Korean tourists parked outside waiting for seats. Damn! How will we find a delicious bowl of dol sot be bim bop under these circumstances? We had to walk almost five blocks before we got to a nice new place, Um Ma Son, for exactly that. Fairly modern in décor, but traditionally attentive and polite. It’s no Han Il Quan (that place totally rocks), but it’s a good fallback.
* Going out to Crissy Field for a toddlerstroll on Sunday afternoon and having a nice time in the warm sun, and fortuitously noticing posters for a photo exhibit at the Officers’ Club – giant “environmental portraits” by Robert Cameron, whose name I recognized from several of his “Above” books that I’ve either owned or slavered over. The exhibit was really astonishing and well worth the price, which is “free.” Come to SF and chekkit out.
* Catching the 399th and 400th episodes of the Simpsons, and – despite being disappointed in most of the recent episodes I’ve caught – really enjoying them. When they hit their stride they’re still as funny as anything on television. TCBY = “that container of botulized yogurt”? Genius!
I think that’s all I need to share about good stuff this weekend, though there was more, oh yes, much more that I just won’t be divulging, because it is the policy of this administration not to comment on an ongoing investigation. Or such. Just take it from me, it was a good time. And since I don’t have a better place to say it, I recently enjoyed a tasty box of botan candy – those delicious Japanese rice-gummies with quadruple fun: a cool box, edible rice-paper inner wrappers, tasty chewy candy, and this cheerful fellow as a prize:
double-horny dragondude! Finally, a nickname with street cred! I think he’s a temporary tattoo, and I am open to suggestions where he should be applied. I’m thinking, if I could sneak it onto some stranger on the bus, it would probably be best – but I’m still working out the logistics.
That will be all. Good day to you, sir. I SAID GOOD DAY.
