Seen on a hat

...worn by an elderly fellow reading a sports newspaper, dressed for light hiking:

Joe is aiming at

being a Professonal with

active and nice savor

Technically, it's off by a syllable, but I'm going to chalk that up to the difficulties of English pronunciation and call it a haiku anyway.

O, the evanescence of things.

Went to the drugstore a while back to buy some soap. (Which reminds me: I should pick up some shampoo soon.)

I always have trouble finding stuff at drugstores. Not just because I'm in Japan. One set of plastic bottles looks identical to another set of plastic bottles, despite them being wildly different products.

This particular time, I had wandered down several likely-seeming aisles - bath products; cleaning products - with no luck. Before mild frustration turned into nuclear rage, I flagged down a passing store dude (the appropriate word does not spring to mind) who was moving some merchandise around and asked where the soap was at.

He looked down at his laden arms,

I looked down at his laden arms.

His arms were laden with many packages of packages of soap.

"Great! I'll take one of those!"

"Really?" he asked, disbelieving. I do have some theories to explain this reaction, but none of them seem adequate. Ultimately, I remain puzzled.

Anyway, I replied, "Sure, why not?" carefully extracting, Jenga-like, a plastic-wrapped three-pack of of soap. Triumphant, I proudly carried my new trophy to the cashier, paid, and departed.

I frequently gaze upon my prize lovingly - and increasingly fretfully - as my the three-pack becomes two, and then dwindles to one. Will I find it again at the store? Or do I value it more highly because of the poignance of its potential to pass from my life forever, like a drifting cherry blossom?*

My prize:

They're quite serious about their branding.

On the off chance that it was not already abundantly clear to you what the picture was supposed to represent:

Is my memory just bad, or are personal hygiene products just not branded like this in the US?

And best of all, it was totally cheap.

*Blame for anything vaguely resembling philosophical musings in this post can probably be laid at the feet of two semesters of classical Japanese literature.

Eating The East Bay

Soundtrack: eels - Saturday Morning

There was a project.

This project was to consume three delicious east bay meals: breakfast at Ole's, lunch at Chez Panisse, dinner at the Blue Nile. Inevitably, things did not go according to plan.

Instead, we ended up eating pretty much anything and everything we could cram into our greedy little gullets.

We woke early to depart for our first stop: Ole's in Alameda.

Delicious waffles topped with fresh strawberries and chopped nuts.
Eggs, hash browns, linguiça.

We had time before our next appointment, which was at Chez Panisse. Getting a reservation there on short notice was nothing short of miraculous.

Serendipitously, there was a vintage car show, ranging from the venerable Model T to the 60s.

Serious doubts were expressed about the concept of a $100 prix fixe meal, but we enjoyed the Chez Panisse café. D had rigatoni, R had calamari and mussels, and I had lamb. All of which were great, but I think what really set Chez P apart was the fantastic sauces. Don't eat your bread right away when it comes - wait for your food, then soak up some sauce.

What phallic tower?

Then we strolled around Berkeley, tossing a frisbee around in old haunts: Memorial Glade, Willard Park, People's Park. The exercise made us feel justified in picking up a picnic snack of salami, cheese, and hot pumpkin soup in the middle of the afternoon.

Once it got dark, we headed back up Northside to pick up some delicious pizzas for the next day's pizza party. Which was a good time. Friends old and new shared in the yum, and they were introduced to the joy of ultimate frisbee.

Roasted potato and onion with Gruyere and
mozzarella cheese topped with fresh mixed herbs
and garlic olive oil.

When I look at Pizza Hut's 'Idaho Special' in Japan I shudder in horror, but if Cheeseboard decides it wants to put potatoes on its pizza today, well, In Cheeseboard We Trust. And since it is Cheeseboard, they gave us bonus slices to go with our half- baked pizzas. Maybe we could have just tucked those fresh, steaming, tantalizingly odoriferous slices into the boxes to eat the next day. And maybe pigs can really have torrid affairs with frogs - while flying.

It is possible that cheese and bread and garlic and potatoes may have spoiled our appetite a tad. This brought us up to a grand total of four meals, and we still had to meet my friend T for dinner.

We had time before dinner, so we drove through the Solano tunnel. I thought it would be nice to get a night view of the bay, so we picked a road which happened to literally be straight up the hill, because switchbacks are for weaklings. After nearly killing Dunk's car, we made it up to the top, to a place where there was no view whatsoever.

There was a decent view and venison (did not eat - sad) on the way down, at least.

Finally, dinner. Dinner was to be Ethiopian food, but the Blue Nile has apparently closed. I think they had been around for a long time, too. Fortunately, there was another Ethiopian restaurant - Finfine - right across the street. It was in a small alcove where we usually went for Korean barbecue and fantasized about going to fondue (though we always ended up getting distracted by KBBQ).

Ten years later, perhaps our willpower was greater, because we resisted the magnetic pull of our old favorite and had a light meal at the Ethiopian place. Salmon and lamb. The proprietor was kind of annoyed because we ordered two portions for four people, but after all we had eaten so far, we were well satisfied.

Impressed by the triumph of willpower and wisdom for meal number five? Don't be. In explaining to T (a recent arrival to Berkistan) the local hot spots, Fenton's Creamery was mentioned.

Then there was nothing for it but to go to Fenton's.

At Fenton's, you might imagine that we would continue the trend of small portions and sharing.

You would be grossly wrong.

There were two of these.

On Saturday, the Eighth of October, 2011, the three of us ate breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack, a pre-dinner slice of pizza, dinner, and then the alpha and the omega of desserts.

Good thing we got a lot of exercise that day and the next.

On the Evisceration and Subsequent Consumption of Cephalopods

So one day in the supermarket they had whole squid for sale, super cheap. And I had a hankering for some pasta con calamari.

So I took them home. They were so cute! How could I possibly resist?

I named the one on the left 'Lunch,' and the one on the right 'Tomorrow's Lunch.'

When I started washing one, some goop started coming out. I figured there would only be a little goop, so I kept trying to rinse it out. Several minutes of goopy futility later, it occurred to me that there was probably stuff inside my future calamari rings.

Even though I'm reasonably familiar with the processes of removing the inside bits of fish and chicken, it took a while to realize that squid is not all calamari rings and waggling tentacles. But what was in there? And how would I get it out?

Fortunately for the advancement of human knowledge, we have the Internet. So I thought I'd share with you - quite graphically - what I've learned.

What you do is this: you grasp the head, and you grasp the body. Then, gently but firmly, you twist and pull.

Got that? Twist and pull.

Which leaves you with your future calamari rings...

...and everything else.

In an ideal world, the connection between the viscera and the head is stronger than the connection between bits and body. This actually worked just fine for the first one, despite the fact that I had caused the goopy thing (liver equivalent?) to spring a leak in trying to wash out the squid. But for the second one, I had to tease it out, working my fingers in and gently separating it from the body. I probably could have just torn it out, since I wasn't planning on using that bit, but it would have been a good deal messier.

Next comes the removal of the head and beak, by hacking, and then by prodding and tugging, respectively.

Then slicing, then flash frying, then yum!

But all this reminded me of Ikacenter, a fantastic restaurant in Shinjuku that I went to last year.

It's a seafood restaurant, with a particular emphasis on squid. 'Ika' means squid, so that came as no surprise.

When you walk in, there are squids in huge tanks that run for about half the length of the restaurant. They jet around placidly, vividly reminding me of the Bloopers in Super Mario. Now, I don't think you can pick which one you want, but at any rate they scoop one out for you and hack off the tentacles, serving them still wriggling in a small bowl. Grab it (some skill with chopsticks is necessary) and dip it in ponzu sauce with grated ginger. Wriggleicious!
Despite my initial surprise, vigorous chewing subdued the thrashing in my mouth.

This is generally a good time to remember that your momma told you to chew 30 times first before swallowing.

Then they served a sashimi course, laid out in the artfully arranged corpse of a red snapper. This included a couple of types of fish I had never eaten sashimi of before, and it was delicious.

Alas, the only photographic evidence is of the sashimi course.

Next came the body of the squid, laid out flat and sliced finely. The dipping sauce was the goop-generator from inside the squid, which we ground into a paste. Again, totally freaky - but yum! I don't even know what to call it. Pâté de foie squid? Pâté de squid gras? French mystifies me.

Now, I figured that was it for Blooper-San. What more could he possibly have to give?

So we moved on to the next course, which was a fish called enzara. This is a fairly uncommon fish - I've only had it the once. It was simmered in a sweet, dark sauce, and, like everything else, obscenely delicious. And I mean it when I say obscene, because this is a fish that looked like it would have been totally at home bursting out of someone's stomach in a froth of blood and guts in Alien. Bulbous, pupil-less yellow eyes and dagger-like teeth make for a critter you don't really want to meet in an dark underwater cave. The pictures I've found of it on the internet don't really do justice to the horror.

Then, unexpectedly, came the squid's coup de grâce.

The head had been cut into four pieces and grilled (or maybe baked, I don't recall). Lightly salted, crunchy. Yum.

And that, finally, was that, for Mister Squid and dinner.

I didn't do anything exotic with mine - the parts that usually get thrown out were thrown out. I don't know if I would even try it if I bought them still-blooping from the fish market. But the unexotic, standard, flash-fried calamari still was pretty darn tasty.

The above + cheddar cheese = comfort food.

Still, you should try Ikacenter sometime. I'd be happy to go again.

When in Rome, Do as the Vaticans Do: October 17, 2006

Your imagination will have to provide
the organ music and the choir chanting
to the glory of god.

Continuing the recycling of old posts from a 2006 cruise with my parents, but now with 100% more snarky comments!

Yeah, about the pictures? I lied. Didn’t have any time in the morning and forgot my camera in the rush to get to the train. I’ll take them tomorrow. In the meantime, my dad took some pictures, which I will eventually obtain.

This has become a trend. I tend to let people with more megapixels do the photography. Then I get copies of the pictures, edit them, and give them meaning, like here. So if you've promised me pictures, and haven't given them to me yet? I'm coming for you. Oh, and I hate getting pictures off Facebook. They're low quality and fb completely destroys the metadata.

It’s just a 20-minute ride in, if that, to the station right by the Vatican. There’s plenty of trains, they come reasonably often, they’re fast (top speed I saw was 140 kph, around 90 mph), and they’re well-used by commuters. Didn’t get a chance to ride the subway or muni buses, though we did take one of those bus tours, which was not only pretty damn good but also could serve as a convenient day pass (your ticket is valid for 24 hours).

90mph, eh? How about that. Hey, CalTrain? BART? Yeah, that's right you friggin' underperformers, I'm looking at you.

Piazza San Pietro

The bus tour drove by a huge amount of interesting spots, and there was narration, though I couldn’t understand or wasn’t paying much attention most of the time. It was hard to connect the spoken narration with what I was seeing, without someone pointing at what the hell they were talking about.

Oh, god, History! Why? And you were just an innocent bystander... how tragic, to die in a drive-by sightseeing!

"We repel terrorist cavalry charges with
our pikes and garish outfits!"

Before the bus tour, though, we went through the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. 

The line for the Sistine Chapel was like a treadmill. Basically, at the back of the line, some tour group assistant would recruit you to be part of a tour group with the promise that the group was way up ahead in the line.

So then you’d go way up ahead in the line, cutting ahead of hundreds and hundreds of people, and you’d join a group. Except, here’s the thing - all those other people at the back of the line, and the new people who arrive, are also being recruited.

Not big believers in blank spaces.

The end result was that though you had jumped ahead, there were tons of other people jumping ahead of you. After a while, you find yourself back at the back of the line hoping another tour group will recruit you, and round and round you go.

This is, of course, highly but not totally exaggerated.

Anyway, nice city.

Pizza Party Sunday October 9th at Noon.

Hello Bay Area Friends!

Many of you are refugees from the embattled municipality of Berkistan.

Some of you are not. But even so, you may have heard murmurs of the legendary collectively-owned eatery. Maybe rumors of their exceedingly fine gourmet ingredients have reached you through the tendrils of the (organic) grapevine. Perhaps you've overheard former wild-eyed hippies holding forth on how Bezerkeley, back in their day, was a hotbed of activism, even in food, and how the co-op and Chez Panisse led the charge for orgasmically delicious food everywhere, or at least in the place that came to be known as the Gourmet Ghetto.

photo credit: keenduck on flickr

They're called the Cheeseboard Collective. You may have heard of their pizza.

Our phallic tower is bigger than yours.
That's why you don't get Cheeseboard.

That's right, folks, we're making the fraught, eldritch, as-yet-unconnected by BART journey up to Berkeley, and we're coming back down with an epic stack of succulent Cheeseboard pizzas.

We deal with the:

• Death of Independent Bookstores
• Damn Dirty Hippies
• Absence of Nuclei
• Odors of Patchouli, Pot and Poop
• College Kids, and their
• Sense of Entitlement
• Also, They're Ten Years Younger Than You
• Shit! Well, Back in MY Day...

so you don't have to!



Your intrepid Pizza Retrieval Team:

Dunk

Tony

RGL-22

You should show up at:

photo credit:
ingridtaylar on flickr

The Dunkenpad* - with the possibility of sidling over to Cupertino Memorial Park next door, weather and logistics permitting - at 12:00 PM on Sunday, October 9th. But leave your pistols at home.

Instead of your pistols, you should bring:

$5 for the pizza, unless you'd like to gorge yourself in a fit of freshman 15 nostalgia (Highly endorsed! It's Cheeseboard, so it's, like, healthy. More so than West Coast's artery-clogging cheesy stix, anyway. Mmmm.) in which case we'll accept 10 bucks. Additional contributions of beverages - alcoholic and not - as well as alternative, non-pizza food, are very welcome.

Respond Soon Very Pleasure to
Tony at aweiss42@gmail.com or Dunk at rincewind@mac.com
so we can adjust for the optimal person to pizza ratio.

*my car is still there on street view! if only. *a single, lonesome tear falls*

Disc Golf Might Not Suck After All

If you have heard me hold forth on the subject of frisbee* disc golf before, you may be aware that I do not endorse it. Quite to the contrary, in fact. Playing ultimate frisbee* is all about the frenetic motion, dashing, catching the frisbee* disc at the utmost limit of your abilities - the dive, the leap into space.

It turns out just trying to throw a frisbee* disc with precision and accuracy is also lots of fun. Who knew?

Which one of these looks just like the other?

I happened upon this stunning revelation entirely by accident. The cover of a Tupperware container needed to be in the sink, but that was all of three steps away, and damned if I would bestir myself to go all the way over there just to put something in the sink. Upon further contemplation, it occurred to me that the cover was light, round, and mostly flat.

Suspiciously like a disc.

Shocked by this unexpected discovery, I theorized that, having a disc-like shape, it might travel through the air in a disc-like fashion if I gave it an initial acceleration in the way that I might a frisbee* disc. To paraphrase: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, if I throw it like a duck, it should fly like a duck. Right?


It flew more like an egret. Maybe because I threw it like one. I would not dare to claim perfect duck-throwing skills, after all.

Nevertheless, fly it did, though ultimately it landed in the dish-drying rack rather than the sink. Enthused by this discovery, I retrieved the projectile and attempted again. Due to the air currents, (I theorized) it tilted contrary to the initial curve that I gave it. I persevered, however, and after perhaps 10 tries, I was finally satisfied with my throw. Some of those throws had actually ended up in the sink, but only because it had bounced off of something else. I wanted it to go in perfectly.

portrait of the blogger as a young duck-thrower

Elated by this simple diversion, it suddenly occurred to me that this was actually frisbee* disc golf writ small. Throw the disc, pick the disc up, throw it again. But I hate disc golf! How could I possibly be enjoying myself?

This has led to a profound re-examination of my life and opinions and prejudices and, like, all sorts of stuff. I would like to actually go to a course (is that the right term?) and try it out.

Fortunately, there is one nearby, so who knows? It might even actually happen.

And if it it turns out I do like it, what's next? Running? Curling? Synchronized swimming? Actual golf?


I am frightened of what I might become. Hold me.

*god damn it, Wham-O.

The Waffle House Rules

Caution: not actual WaHo waffles. However,
canned fruit, whipped cream, hash browns
and eggs give a good approximation.

When other eateries are closed for reasons as feeble as 'no electricity' or 'structural damage,' Waffle House keeps on truckin'. All they need is gas. Gas! Gas is all they need.

How to Measure a Storm's Fury One Breakfast at a Time Disaster Pros Look to 'Waffle House Index'; State of the Menu Gives Clue to Damage

Although pecan waffles require electricity, or at least a generator. Damn.



Once upon a time...

I was on my way back down from Orlando with D and we decided to stop at a WaHo for breakfast, or lunch, or whatever the appropriate meal was for that time of the day.

Unfortunately, there was a car in the Waffle House.

Literally. Because it's Florida, an elderly couple got mixed up between drive and reverse, gunned the engine, and put the car in the WaHo. I hereby grant permission to use that phrase as euphemism for sex.

Alas, we did not arrive in time to see it happen. But we arrived in time to see the panicked emergency evacuation, which consisted of people calmly eating their breakfast (lunch? whatever.) and new arrivals lining up to wait for tables. So we followed the emergency evacuation procedures and got in line.

Yes, that wall section is several feet inside the store.
No, WaHo does not usually have that sort of open-air feel.
Yes, the dude at the counter is happily finishing his meal.

It gave people something interesting to talk about while eating (or waiting), at any rate.

Eventually firemen and cops arrived. They were flabbergasted at the ill-considered and rash emergency protocols.

"Y'all in line need ta git. The folks eating their breakfast... er, lunch... their meal, git when ya finish eaten."

D and I were crushed. What were we gonna do without our pecan waffles?

Envious of the privileged who remained, placidly chewing their cud, we allowed ourselves to be herded away by the stern and burly firemen.

So we got back on the highway.

Then we got back off two minutes later, at the very next exit, and went to the WaHo there.

And then we ate happily ever after.
The end!

Fregene: October 16, 2006

Part two of the exciting walk on the wild side - a stroll through my mind for two weeks that I spent on a boat in the Mediterranean. Actually, it's part three, but part two was so devastatingly boring that I've done you a favor by skipping it. To give you an idea, it was about waiting at the airport to be picked up. See? We're all better off.

It’s the name of the city I’m in. It’s, maybe, a half hour out of Rome? Not even that.

It’s a little town, by the beach. There’s several bed & breakfasts around, and the advertising on the street for local restaurants suggests that tourism is reasonably significant.

I probably don't need to say this, but the food was good. It's Italy, right? If I could only pick one country's cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it'd be a toss-up between Italy and Japan.

Now, though, it’s pretty quiet. The weather’s pretty decent, though - I was able to get away with just wearing a t-shirt during the day.

I’m in Europe. People are speaking Italian on the street. It still hasn’t sunk in yet, though. Unfortunately, my Italian is nonexistent - I can understand it pretty well, but when I try to form sentences in my head they’re some bastard mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and even Japanese. I don’t even bother trying to speak it.

The next time I was in Italy, I found Italian to be really easy. Getting languages mixed up is still a problem, though: last year I had an Argentine visitor. I spoke with her in Spanish just fine - up until, as part of the conversation, I pointed to a map and said "Shibuya." The next sentence came out in Japanese. I paused, and tried to start again. Still Japanese. I apologized, shut the hell up, and had to take a few deep breaths before I could get back to Spanish. 

Hopefully I get more comfortable with it over the next week, so I can get around in Venice and maybe Torino after the cruise. Greek is a lost cause. French, well, I should be able to get by with some combination of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I won’t be there for long anyway.

Ended up not going to Torino. I had met a super hot girl who was from there. I barely knew her, but hey, a boy can dream right?

I’m writing this from the front patio of this 2-bedroom house that we’re staying in for 2 nights. It’s hideously nice. The garden is small, but it’s full of all kinds of plants and fruit trees. Grapevines are growing above my head. I’ll take pictures in the morning, I suppose.

I'm going to post this for now, and update it with pictures later. I'm doing some major reorganization of my photos now that I've got better hardware, so finding appropriate pictures will be easier. But I want to get a post up. But I've been spending time tagging rather than selecting pictures. Meh. 

The Critorist Tests Out iWeb: October 3, 2006

The first (and worst) in a series of unpublished blog entries dredged up from 2006.

This is all very nice and pretty. But how the hell do I, you know, stick code in here? I suppose I’d have to open it up in a program actually designed for code, but from what I saw of Dreamweaver, you could switch back and forth between design and code easily enough.

I should probably revisit iWeb sometime after iCloud comes out. If there's an iPad version.

Bananas have a great UI. It's like it was...
designed.

I suppose it’s worth commenting on working on the Mac in general. Obviously, it’s going to take some getting used to. The five (count ‘em, five) different, what the hell do you call ‘em, modifying keys - like Ctrl - are, well, confusing. All a matter of practice, I suppose. And if I can do much more with the keyboard, I can work faster. My main concern is whether the scheme makes sense - do I need to learn a whole new set of command keys for every damned application? That’d be a huge problem.

In retrospect, Windows had 4 - ctrl, alt, shift, windows. I can hardly remember what it was like to be an iVirgin.

Haven’t messed with iTunes yet. Briefly looked at iPhoto, if only to import my photos - now I need to figure out how to use it to organize things well. On my PC, it was pretty well organized into folders, but on a mac, the emphasis is on metadata - tags attached directly to the file. I was using the folders as a way to achieve the same result.

I still feel like my workflow with iPhoto could be much better.

Photo Booth is amusing. Frankly, it’s a toy, but it’s still pretty cool.

All I’ve really used this computer for so far, when you get right down to it, is browsing the web and IM. My excuse is that I’ve only had it a week and consequently not spent much time really digging in.

But I got the Japanese input set up. Works pretty similarly to Windows. でも、マックに全部がユニコード使える。 Doesn’t seem to be a key combo to switch back and forth quickly, tho, which pisses me off.

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

I haven't bothered pointing out the glaring inaccuracies. Revisiting my first impressions of Mac OS is pretty embarrassing.

Hopefully five years from now I'll have progressed as much as I have from 2006.

Blog archaeology.

Before the dawn of time

Around October of 2006 I obtained my very first Mac.

Well, my only Mac. I'm still using it. It's rapidly approaching the point where I will need a new one, but that's another story.

Precambrian and Cambrian posts

With that new computer, I resolved to explore the myriad new apps that I was confronted with. I thought it would be pretty nifty to experiment with iWeb and write a blog. I didn't want any part of MobileMe, though, which complicated things. So I just wrote things up and didn't bother to publish them.

Shortly thereafter, I went on a cruise with my parents. There wasn't much to do on the ship except read and write. I wrote a travel blog, and put it online, writing posts in iWeb and Pages and then copying and pasting into a crummy web interface. The workflow was terrible, but still, nothing better to do. Which helps explain why I stopped writing shortly after the cruise ended. (Read: I once again had inexpensive internet access.)

Meteorite impact

Does anybody remember blogging sites from 2006? I know for sure I didn't post on livejournal, xanga, blogger, or myspace. But I can't recall the name of the site that hosted the blog. I can't find any emails or bookmarks relating to it. I've tried searching Google for unique phrases from the posts, to no avail.

I never told anyone about the blog, either, so it is irrevocably lost in the space between the Interwebs.

Digging up fossils

"How do you remember unique phrases from the posts?" you ask.

I have copies of what I believe are all the posts, in iWeb, Pages, or both. Also, I do remember that I hosted the pictures on photobucket, and there they have sat.

Now, that blog is quite distinct from this blog, because I've actually told a non-zero number of people about this one. Also, I'm still writing. Partly due to improved workflow - I still like using Blogsy to write on the go, though today I'm at the computer. But also partly because I'm getting better about these things.

To the museum

At last, we arrive at the point, or at the very least, a point.

I plan to restore the old blog posts, and add them to this blog. But it'll be a director's cut, with additional photos, video, and commentary as suits my whims.

Paintball

During my visit to the Philippines, I had the opportunity to try out paintball for the first time.

It's not how big the paintball gun is, it's how you use it.

It was fantastically cheap. It only cost 400 pesos, for renting the gear and 40 pellets. That's about $10.

The battleground was the side of a hill in a pine forest, with the addition of some wooden planks and stacks of tires to provide additional cover.

In action

It was two on two, and we were sent to the top of the hill, while our opponents started below. I figured this gave us a pretty good tactical advantage. However, instead of sticking to our fortified position, I wanted to move around and try to come up with some fancy tactics. Imagining my partner would move laterally and help me pin down one of our opponents who was advancing, I tried to flank him and immediately got myself pinned down behind a tree instead. My partner (perhaps wisely) stayed safe behind a wide fortification and didn't budge.

The rule was, you were in till you ran out of pellets, regardless of how riddled with holes you were. So once the initial shuffling around was done, it basically degenerated into a stalemate, where you would poke your head out, take a couple of shots, and then duck back away, till our ammo was gone. I could have said to hell with it and taken a few hits in exchange for finding a better position, since there was no consequence to getting hit, but the visceral fear of getting shot was strong enough that I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Ouch.

Not that I didn't get shot. My left eye and shoulder were hit, so I was definitely quite dead. The head shot was pretty sobering, and racked up the adrenaline several notches.

My partner was shot in the head - just above his face mask, which left a shockingly large red welt for a few days. One of our opponents was hit in the head and body. The other, I don't recall.

Weary wounded warriors

Next time, I want to do some target shooting first, to get a better feel for a paintball gun's range and aim.

Clearer sets of rules seem like they would be interesting. Not to mention they would help avoid the deadlock we hit and clarify victory or defeat. But having to leave the game early due to being eliminated is no fun either. Maybe some sort of rule where you had to return to a safe zone before you could rejoin the battle. Basically, respawning.

Adding more rules and adjudication would probably break up the adrenaline and tension, though.

The fascinating thing about video games is that all of that can be handled automatically, permitting smooth play despite extremely complex rule systems.

I looked to see if there were paintball video games available. (A video game simulation of a game which is a simulation of war?) The only one I found was way too realistic to be fun.

Something bright, colorful, and arcade-y, with paint splashing wildly everywhere, seems a lot more appealing to me than trying to compete directly with drab and hyper-realistic shooters, which have explosions. The lack of viscera and death should make it accessible to all ages.

Maybe an augmented reality game? M did mention technology to map the camera view to a 3-d space.

A brief update.

Went to the Philippines, returned, interviewed, moped, back to work.

Ancestor worship

Today I went to a vaguely church-ish event, which was about, from what I understood, honoring your ancestors.

I have great respect and fondness for my ancestors. Specifically, those from two generations back, all of who are gone, regardless of how much time I spent with them (but not enough, never enough, I know now, even as I repeat the same mistakes with those still here). Those who were born, lived, and died in a different world, a world which I shared briefly with them and already has the warm, misty feeling of "the good old days."

I only met one of my great-grandparents, and my only memories of her are memories of photographs, not of an actual person.

If you asked me, "What did she look like?"

"An old woman in a chair," is all I can tell you.

Of these people, three generations and more removed, I know only the barest of details, names and a two-sentence sketch of their lives.

I do not know them. They are ghosts. They were beloved by people I love. And yet to me, they do not exist.

What is there to venerate of these anonymous ghosts, these decaying black-and-white images of the past?

I can only bring myself to respect the ones I knew, the ones who I have, belatedly, reached some understanding of, if not from my personal experience, but from recognizing the ripples still spreading throughout the lives of those who remain.

Though I do not share the religion of either side of the family, a dream I had a couple of months ago really shook me.

I was at a table with my family and a close friend, R.

R mentioned that he had lit a menorah (the Hanukkah candelabra-like thing) at home, and I ridiculed him for it, since, well, he's not Jewish. And nor am I, and I have no recollection of my father participating in any sort of ritual of his own volition.

Caught up in ridiculing R, I finally realized that the table was lit by a plethora of tea candles, and my father was lighting one from the centerpiece, which was a menorah. (To get an idea of just how Jewish I am, in the dream it was the last day of Hanukkah, but instead of lighting a candle each day, they were snuffing out a candle each day. Oops.)

I gradually became aware of the others seated at the table. My father's parents, one of his aunts, and a good friend and neighbor of my grandparents. Not an exhaustive list, but a fair quantity of those from my father's family who I had grudgingly spent a lot of time with in my childhood. My cynical laughter snuffed out.

Berry murderous.

In the sudden silence, I began to cry. I picked up my own candle and shakily lit it, sobbing, and repeating the word, "sorry," whenever I could catch a breath. They never said a word, only looked at me all the while.

And then I woke up, feeling bereft and unsure of what I was apologizing for. I'm certain it wasn't for the Hanukkah gaffe, none of them were particularly attached to ceremony, that I recall. I think I was trying to apologize for only knowing them as a child, not as a person.

I'm afraid that if I have children, they'll relate to their grandparents in the same way.

Why learn Japanese?

Because when the police pick you up for intervening in a fight between your friend and some random asshole (hereafter known as "asshole"), being able to articulate...

"Asshole kept attacking us respectable folks even though I apologized (without knowing, admittedly, what the hell we were supposed to be apologizing for) and told him we were leaving," while presenting Exhibits

1. bloody mouth 
2. torn shirt 
3. broken glasses 

and sounding like a reasonable human being while asshole is screaming "fuck you, pigs!"

...is priceless.

Also: asshole hit like a pussy.

Road Trip: The World

"You're making that face again," R said.

The first time I made that face was when I heard that R, J, and E were going to be road tripping in a Japanese car - one made in Japan, with the driver's side on the right.

I was making it now because I had just understood that the starting point of their drive was Vladivostok, on Russia's eastern coast.

"Because the Trans-Siberian Railway is for pussies?" I asked.

He nodded. "We don't need that kind of luxury. We'll be camping, mostly, across Siberia and the tundra and everywhere else."

Later, I asked about the southern hemisphere. "I thought driving around the world was good enough," he declared defensively. Apparently, I wasn't the first one to ask. I hastily explained that no criticism was implied. If they were driving across Siberia, who knows? Maybe they were driving across the Sahara and through the Amazon, too.

To sum up the trip in three sentences:

Go to Japan and buy a cheap used car. Drive it across the Eurasian continent. Then drive it across North America.

Or in one sentence:

Drive across the northern hemisphere with the steering wheel on the right side.

I was making a face because I thought they were fucking insane.

I was also making a face because I thought it was fucking fantastic.

The most exciting sight on I-15.

Road trips are great. I enjoyed crossing the U.S. twice in 2004, even on a limited, rushed schedule. When I had the time to do it properly in 2007 - two weeks instead of less than one - it was one of the best trips I had ever taken. With more time, we could take state roads instead of interstates, and spend time at every stop instead of only sleeping and then moving on.

On state roads, everything is awesome.

So if a road trip for one week is good, and two weeks is great, it follows that six months would be amazing.

Unless, of course, it turns out there's a sweet spot somewhere between rushing frantically from one place to the next and ennui, group tension, cabin fever, murder and cannibalism.

I can think of a few suggestions for staying sane on an extended trip.

Have a goal:

I don't know about you, but six months without something to do sounds excruciating. I'm planning a ten-day trip to the Philippines and even that long without something to procrastinate about would make me pretty uncomfortable. Come up with something to work on. It could be a document of the trip, whether in words, sounds, images, or video. It could be a project that you've just never had the free time for till now. Obviously, it'd have to be something portable. You don't want to lug around a two-ton block of marble.

Take a vacation from tripping:

Periodically take a day or two, or even a week, off from traveling every once in a while. Find a cheap place where you can hole up and catch up with what's going on back home. Work on your project. Sunbathe, chill out with a book, watch movies all day long. Take a break from sightseeing, going from one place to another, meeting new people, the works. It's hard to keep the good times rolling indefinitely. After your vacation vacation, you'll face the world with renewed enthusiasm.

Take some time off from your companions:

totes sole m8s 4eva!

Who knows, you might be soul mates that want to see exactly the same museums, the same pubs, the same sights. Go at different times anyway. Especially to museums or art galleries, everybody has a different pace. If you're based in the same city for a while, plan some days to pursue your own interests. Or go separate ways and meet up in a city further down the road. Absence makes the heart less murderous, reducing the festering resentment of the million little quirks you're subjected to on a daily basis.

If (when, dammit) I get a job here, I won't be able to go on an extended road trip for a while. Even if I don't, it would be pretty hard to justify one. So I guess I'm just envious.

Battleheart

A real-time tactical rpg for iDevices, Battleheart is the closest thing I've seen to our vision.

You have a squad of four characters and battle your way through a series of progressively more difficult levels.

You control your characters by clicking and dragging them to a location, to an enemy, or in the case of a support character, to a comrade. If you drag a character to another entity, it will begin auto-attacking or healing that entity, as appropriate.

The art style is vibrant and cute, reminiscent of the super-deformed style of characters from the Super Nintendo era (though much crisper and smoother).

The first boss battle.

The first half of the game is a joy to play, with new characters, equipment, special attacks, and monsters being smoothly introduced on a fairly linear curve. The difficulty level remained steady and the rate of rewards made it feel like you were getting one (or even several) new things every fight. Even better, special abilities can be reconfigured painlessly at any time, eliminating the need for the player to worry about selecting the "right" ability and giving them freedom to experiment and change tactics in between battles.

The boss fights are unique and require the player to think of new strategies to handle them, adding extra spice to the gameplay.

Tragically, you only get a brief taste of the spice: these strategies are one-off things. They're completely unnecessary for any other monsters, or for other bosses. And you only fight a boss once, unless you specifically revisit the stage - the bosses are not recycled as monsters in later levels.

Color the goblins dark blue, and the bat red, and voilá! All-new monsters!

Speaking of recycling, after the first half of the game, there are no new monsters - merely palette switches and dramatically higher difficulty parameters.

While the first half does truly shine, the second half comes to a grinding, screeching halt. Namely, the time it takes to level up (and consequently acquire new special abilities and equipment, as well as survive tougher monsters) goes up dramatically.

The end result is that the reward received for the amount of effort put in plummets. Yes, I spend more time playing it than I would if I were able to continue through the game at the same pace throughout, but my overall enjoyment is far less due to having to replay a level again and again and again in order to have a chance to survive the next one.

Greater attention to play balance would have made this game enjoyable all the way through - with the simple adjustment of a few numbers.

Next, a more critical look at the control scheme.

It's largely unimaginative and could be replicated with a mouse, despite the iPad's innovative interface. While it is possible to move two characters at the same time using multiple fingers, in practice it covers too much of the action.

The second and larger problem with the control scheme is trying to select a character when several of them are next to each other. Especially during critical moments when I need to select a character and activate a special technique to rescue someone from the brink of death, it's extremely frustrating when I select the wrong character and a character dies as a result, which usually means that battle is lost.

I imagine these issues are exacerbated on a smaller iThingy.

Despite its flaws, Battleheart is among the cream of the crop of iPad games. I hope to one day be able to create a game like this - but with richer and more reliable controls, not to mention an engaging story.

Gotta get back to coding.