Various & Sundry Autistic Ramblings

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:43:42 GMT

Why are so many of Metrobus' riders simpletons and half-wits? I get sick and tired of people delaying everybody by asking the bus driver 10,000 stupid goddamn questions which indicate the person is either too lazy to do basic research or TOO GODDAMN STUPID TO READ A FUCKING MAP. Jesus!! How did these people graduate from 3rd grade?

(Nobody asked questions in Sweden; people there are smart enough to know how to get where they're going.)

Only-barely-related peeve: when I'm walking down the sidewalk, there's always some clown who pulls over and asks me for directions. What do I look like, Rand McFuckingNally? Go buy your own damn map.

Autumn Vacation, Part II

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:57:51 GMT

They stamped my passport when I got to Iceland, but when I entered Sweden, I went under the sign that said "nothing to declare" and . . . no counter. I just walked out into the airport. Knocked me for a loop; I had expected an interrogation like when I visited Canada five years ago.

Went to a lot of museums which all run together in my mind. Lots of wooden furniture, log cabins, medieval tapestries, including one which looked uncannily like graphics from some early '80s video game!

I ate at restaurants every night, and since service charges are included and waiters there are paid a living wage, tipping is not done. It felt really weird to pay only the amount of the food.

One day I took a train up to Uppsala so I could see the ruins from pagan times. Their rail service beats Amtrak all hollow. You just buy a ticket from a machine and get on the train. No one asks to see your papers or anything.

The sixth-century mounds:

Since it was such a nice day I decided to walk the 6 km back to town instead of taking the bus. Gorgeous countryside.

Ford's in his flivver, all's well with the world!

Uppsala or La Jolla?

On a 19th-century building, ivy looks picturesque; on a 1980s structure, not so much.

Crossing the river. (Parenthetical note: there seem to be no gnats in Sweden.)

Uppsala's old city.

I ate at a local fastfood place called MAX; the counter girl misunderstood my fumbling attempts at Swedish and sold me two complete meals! I didn't mind, though, since all that exercise in the hot sun had made me ravenous. Wolfed them both down.

Since I hadn't thought to get a map of Uppsala, I got lost downtown and ended up making my train back to Stockholm with just two minutes to spare!

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:01:05 GMT

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:20:33 GMT

Österlänggatan in the rain

Fountain in Gamla Stan

Subway car (note the Green Party ad!)

Subway art: psychedelic sperm!

Watch out; Bob Newhart's coming at you!

More later . . .

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 14:16:53 GMT

Just back from Stockholm and I had a great time!

Sweden is a beautiful country, and I got lucky with the weather: warm and sunny almost every day. I even got a suntan!

My flight was on Icelandair, so I connected through Keflavik. After the frightening bleakness of Iceland, Sweden's familiar countryside came as a relief. There's a considerable amount of forest, most of it probably concealing abandoned nineteenth-century farmsteads.

I stayed at two hostels, Zinkensdamm for six nights and Rygerfjord the remaining time. The latter is actually a boat permanently moored in Stockholm's harbor. (And devilishly difficult to find; I spent two hours tramping all over the waterfront, looking for "Kajplats 12." But they gave me a private room, rather than a bed in a dorm, and that was pretty nice. The toilets and showers were up a steep flight of stairs, though. (And to get anywhere away from the harbor, you had to climb some more: the two closest "streets" to the ship aren't streets at all, but steep staircases.

(I lost some weight. Heh.)

Stockholm is gorgeous. I fell in love with the Gamla Stan, the oldest part of the city, situated on a separate island, with narrow and twisting cobblestoned streets, and alleys some of which are less than six feet wide. Nice and cozy. (I'm a claustrophile!)

The city's mass transit goes everywhere, and it works. Trains and buses run frequently and on time. Even the suburban shopping malls have direct entrances to subway stations -- not like here, where you have to cross half a mile of parking lot and at least one major highway to get to even the most Metro-convenient mall.

City streets are bright and bustling, lined with apartment houses with neighborhood shops on the ground floor. Every block seems to have a supermarket and a Pressbyrå (local version of 7-11, though there are also a lot of genuine 7-11s.) I wandered all around the city and I never saw a neighborhood that I would call "bad". Even vacant stores are rare.

Sweden is a surprisingly diverse country. I saw people of all races speaking fluent Swedish. One suburb, Rinkeby, seems to be nearly 100% immigrant, mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

These suburbs, built in the 50s and 60s, are much more well-planned than their US equivalents. They center around a public square with a subway station and neighborhood stores. Around it are high-rise apartment blocks, with lower-density apartments and houses farther out. Everywhere there are separate pedestrian pathways and highway underpasses. Also, all the sidewalks in the city have demarcated bicycle lanes.

That's enough for now; more later! (Always leave 'em wanting more!)

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:45:11 GMT

Only 12 hours to go! I'm pretty excited; could sleep only 5 1/2 hours last night.

I leave for BWI at 1:30; there's a bus that's supposed to get me there by 4. The weather gods seem to have decided to give me a preview of Northern European conditions: cool and wet. They're supposedly serving dinner on the flight and I'll be able to have lunch before I leave.

I'll be in Stockholm until the 20th. If my plane crashes, well, it was nice knowing y'all. Heh.

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:02:08 GMT

Really nice weather this weekend. I went to the DMV yesterday morning to get my ID renewed; only took me an hour. Then I walked the 2 miles to Target and bought six boxes of caffeine pills. (Their brand is a third of the price of NoDoz, the next cheapest, and last time I went to Target, at Springfield Mall, they were out.) Also stopped by the PetsMart to admire the cats they had up for adoption.

My kitchen is infested with tiny ants. If it was just me, I'd spray the place until they were no more, but my mother doesn't want to use bugspray in the kitchen, so every day there are ants running around the counter.

Little Miss Sunshine is an excellent picture; saw it last week and laughed my head off. Looking forward to next weekend's Snakes on a Plane.

Only 24 days until I leave the country! I wasn't planning to take shampoo or bottled water anyway. I will need my caffeine pills and my vitamin C and E supplements, but so far as I know they haven't banned those.

Oh, one finds the most interesting names on property deeds. There's an Asian woman who's married to a Mr. Cox, and her name is . . . wait for it . . Mi Suk Cox. I don't know if anyone's let her know she'd really be better off changing it.

There's also a man named Kevin Bang Ho.

And a Mr. Bauernfeind, which means "enemy of the peasants." A badge of pride to his ancestors, perhaps??

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:18:43 GMT

It's rained almost non-stop for two days around here, accompanied by tropical humidity. I wonder if this is what it's like to live in the Amazon basin. Perhaps it's closer to India during monsoon season!

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:52:54 GMT

Last night we got hit by some serious thunderstorms. Lightning every few seconds, thunder that shook the house. I was really afraid the building would be struck. The racket kept me up till 1:30 and I got a whole four hours of sleep last night. We never lost power, though many in the area did.

This weekend and into next week, it's supposed to be thoroughly nasty: heavy rains, upper 70s, high humidity.

Lance Bass was truly a moron on Match Game last night. I'd never seen the show; loved the 1973-vintage orange carpet!

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:47:42 GMT

Okay, I haven't updated in a billion years, but my life was just too boring to post about.

But things have been happening, mostly computer-related.

The Acer LCD monitor I got just four-and-a-half months ago quit on me. It had started to display thin vertical lines in fields of solid color only a month after I got it. The problem would cut in and out, accompanied by shimmery white patches. Annoying, but I could live with it. As recently as Memorial Day it worked perfectly for the whole holiday weekend.

Then on Sunday night, June 4, gray horizontal ghosts appeared, extending from lines of text and image boundaries. I tried using Acer's web form to put in a service request, but it always bombed with the message "SiebelSearch - SOCKET ERROR: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it". I'd have to call their toll-free number, and I have a mild phobia about talking to people on the phone. I always put it off as long as possible, and when I contemplate doing it, my heart pounds and my bowels turn to water.

The monitor was still usable, and I continued using it -- until [i]last[/i] Sunday night, when the whole image turned to vertical bands of black and white "snow." I swapped in my old Sony CRT and that worked -- except the ghosts are still there, leading me to conclude my video card must also be going bad.

Couldn't escape an irrational feeling that this was a punishment for hubris: for buying the top of the line model, something which should be out of reach for a commoner like me!

Somewhere in there, I found out my DVD-ROM drive would no longer read discs. (Hmm -- just tried it again and it worked!)

This afternoon when I got home I bit the bullet, called Acer, and arranged to send the monitor in for repair or replacement. I wonder if it's the dusty environment around here that did it in. Dust does pile up [i]very[/i] quickly around here, to say nothing of the tobacco smoke.

Today I intended to get a new PC in the near future, but that's not so urgent at the moment now that the DVD drive has decided to work. I haven't kept up with the tech world in the past few years and I was amazed at how cheap new machines are.

And USB flash drives -- I'd never heard of them! Up to 8 GB in a thumb-sized package you can attach to your keychain! The perfect means of transferring my files to my new machine. Beats the hell out of Iomega zipdisks which I used last time, or 1.44MB floppies the time before that.8 gigabytes. When I read that, I got a picture in my mind. An immense wagon, drawn by a team of Clydesdales, piled high with books and bundled documents. Then the camera pulls back to show a long train of similar wagons. That image, for some unfathomable reason, brought tears to my eyes.

Cars was a pretty good picture. Once you can wrap your mind around the idea of anthropomorphic motor vehicles, the story draws you right in. Makes you wonder, though: before 1900, were the characters' ancestors all horses?

It might be my imagination, but I think children's entertainment is getting better. None of the previews before Cars made me grit my teeth, as trailers before previous Pixar films did.

Also been watching Game Show Marathon on CBS. The Let's Make a Deal episode reminded me why I never watched that show: even as a kid, it insulted my intelligence.

I'm also planning to spend two weeks in Stockholm this September. I've always wanted to go there; it's a city without slums! Cleaner, safer, more orderly and more civilized than any US city of similar size, the closest approach probably being Portland, Oregon, a vacation there will really recharge my batteries. Why two weeks? I dislike feeling rushed, and after I've seen all the sights I want to wander through the city, walk around the neighborhoods, people-watch and absorb the ambiance.

Applied for my passport in late March and got it in early May.

I'll probably end up flying Icelandair from BWI, as they seem to consistently have the lowest fares. I also joined HIUSA so I could stay cheaply at hostels (which I'd never consider anywhere other than Scandinavia).

Hmm, is that all? I guess it's enough for now. Don't want to overflow LJ's buffer!

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 11:40:05 GMT

These immigration protests. Jesus, this country is really going down the toilet. "Our economy needs illegals?" Fucking bullshit. There was a time, 30 or 40 years ago, when we had hardly any illegals in the DC area and you know what? Lawns got mowed, dishes got washed and buildings got built. Somehow you never see anyone mentioning _that_ obvious fact in the newspapers!

Once we had a stable, native-born, English-speaking working class. This has pretty much vanished. Employers nowadays are just too goddamn greedy to pay people a living wage so they tacitly encourage lawbreaking. Is this the kind of country we really want to live in? One with a permanent alien underclass? One where you can't make anything more than coolie wages unless you put yourself deep in debt by going to college -- even if you don't want to and even if you aren't that bright?

I wish I had access to alternate universes so I could check out a US which gave the INS some teeth and was really serious about limiting immigaration to 200,000 a year -- an amount which could be assimilated without causing ghettos or crashing wages, where Culmore and Langley Park are still livable, decently-priced neighborhoods instead of gang-infested hellholes, where the Anglophone Caucasian is not an endangered species in Farifax County.

TVsDepot.com

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:14:07 GMT

So my monitor died on Thursday December 29 and I need a new one. (Temporarily I'm using a tiny 15-inch monitor rescued from the back room). I think to myself, I'm going to be using this thing for several hours each day; I should splurge, get the biggest and best I can afford. After reading reviews I decided on the Viewsonic VP231WB. Used Froogle to find the lowest price and TVsDepot had it.

I placed my order early on December 31, expecting it would ship on Tuesday or Wednesday. Every day I check the website and it still says just "Order Received." The product listing has no indication as to whether they actually have any in stock or not. So by Friday morning I start getting a little impatient and I send this email to their customer service address:

I ordered a Viewsonic VP231WB monitor on December 31, but almost a week later, the status is still "Order Received". Is it out of stock? Why hasn't it shipped yet? I'd really like to get it before the next holiday weekend (MLK Day).

I thought that was nice and polite, right? So Friday afternoon I get home and find an email from TVsDepot. I think, wow, I've galvanized them into action! Yay me! So I open it and find

Dear Neidhart,
Your order (xxxxxx) has been Cancelled.
Please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you!

WTF??!? Not a word of explanation? I'm not allowed to even ask a fucking question? If it's out of stock just say so! You made me waste a week waiting on a goddamn chimera!

Pigfuckers.

x-posted to bad_service

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 02:38:10 GMT

As I write this I'm listening to Hot Jazz New Year's Eve on WAMU. Boy, Al Jolson's voice would really be annoying if you had to hear it more than once a century.

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 21:36:56 GMT

Happy Birthday globetrotter1!

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 13:15:09 GMT

Well, I'm back from Chicago and what a time it was! I wish I could have just gotten an apartment and stayed there. Not as unrealistic as it sounds: rents are amazingly cheap by DC standards. One-bedrooms in decent neighborhoods are going for $650 -- utilities included!

Hotel prices are getting a bit out of line, though; my motel room ran me $90 a night plus 15.4% tax and it was pretty spartan. Not even a bureau, just a few shelves. Maybe I should have gone the B&B route.

I roamed all around on the CTA. I don't care what they say; IMO the CTA beats the pants off Metro, and especially Metrobus.

Never did get to Hyde Park or the South Side; I'd have needed another week for that.

Bought a box of Frango chocolates at Marshall Fields, which I'll share with my coworkers on Monday. I should save the container, since it'll be a collector's item soon: Marshall Fields is being folded into Macy's and the name will disappear. Boo, hiss! Chicago IS NOT NEW YORK. Doesn't anyone have any respect for tradition?

Fields' flagship store, BTW, is one of the wonders of the world; anyone who hasn't been there is really missing out.

The city has the highest density of Borders stores I've ever seen. There seemed to be one at every El stop. Didn't see any Barnes & Nobles, though.

Chicago's main public library is beautiful. Nine stories, sparkling clean and I could lose myself in reading material for weeks on end if I didn't watch out. Compare it with the decaying ruin of DC's central library which hasn't been maintained since Nixon was president.

I went everywhere by myself and never felt unsafe, not even at night (although the bums wheedling for money got pretty annoying after a while). In my forays outward I used local library branches as a base since they were the one place I could be assured of finding public restrooms. Least impressive: Gage Park. Tiny and cluttered, stuffed into a storefront. The Gage Park area is obviously on the way down: every residential property was surrounded by high metal fences, every apartment building had a FOR RENT sign, there were notices outside stores that gang members were prohibited from coming on the property.

Most impressive: Town of Wilmette. Three stories and I'm pretty sure it was bigger than the Fairfax City library although it serves a much smaller area. The town, at the northern edge of the El line, is a very attractive prewar suburban community which reminds me of the better parts of Arlington. Some of the streets are paved with brick. And walking around there felt like going back in time: everyone I saw was white! You can't find that anywhere in the DC area anymore unless you go waaay out in the boonies.

I was also favorably impressed with Cicero. The library, about the size of the Town of Vienna's, is clean and new; restrooms are sparkling. The town has brick bungalows and 4-story apartment buildings on very small lots. Quite walkable. Stores are on the street instead of in strip malls. Cicero has experienced a nearly complete population turnover in the past 25 years as the older residents, mostly Bohemian, Lithuanian and Italian, moved out for greener pastures and Mexicans moved in. The town is now almost entirely Mexican, although one Bohemian restaurant still remains open on Cermak Street, in a very pretty building reminiscent of a Central European chateau. I wish I'd had dinner there; I expect the place will be gone within a few years.

I did a lot of walking: took the bus to the west edge of Berwyn and strolled down Cermak Street to the east end of Cicero: about 60 blocks! It was fascinating to watch the neighborhood change as I went east. The western part of Berwyn is still mostly white, but block by block, the Mexican presence increases.

At 18th and Paulina in the Pilsen neighborhood, there's a shop called the 18th Street Department Store. Inside it's narrow and cramped. Wooden floors, blue-painted wooden shelves, pressed-tin ceiling with one of the squares hanging loose, dimly lit with fluorescents tilted at odd angles, everything covered with dust. The merchandise, all clothing, looks like it's been there since 1975 and hasn't been dusted off since. It was incredible. There was a sign "Store Closing 50% Off" but there wasn't anything in there I'd take even as a gift.

I mostly subsisted on pizza and hotdogs. One evening I did have a nice fish dinner at Ann Sather. Tilapia in lime sauce. Couldn't eat the mashed potatoes, though; they were full of hard lumps.

For breakfast I bought a box of Total, since nearly all restaurant breakfast dishes feature eggs in some way and I don't care for them, I didn't want the hassle of going out so early in the day and trying to find the exceptions.

The deep-dish pizza at Pizzeria Due is very good, and quite filling; the individual size was almost too much -- this at 1 a.m. after I hadn't eaten since 3 p.m. and that was only some popcorn!

My flight from DCA to O'Hare was in a small Embraer jet. Had to check my bag as it wouldn't fit in the overhead compartment. And on debarking, we didn't get a skyway; we had to use a rusty, rickety old metal staircase.

On the trip back, the plane was almost empty. Middle of the day on a weekday, during the school year, I guess.

Flying back, admiring the countryside below, I found myself wondering if you could make a GPS gadget installed in the window that painted the placenames, state and county lines on the land below so you would know what you were looking at, the same way the Xs and Os are painted on the TV screen during a football game.

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:09:10 GMT

I'm leaving for ORD in half an hour! Yippee!!

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 22:17:23 GMT

I'm the only person on Metro who can keep his balance while the train bounces through the tunnel without needing to hold onto anything. I kind of wish someone would notice, because it's one of a very few things I'm good at!

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 02:08:28 GMT

Since I'm a limited-term employee, I get a whole month off from work! Unpaid, but hey, you can't have everything.

I've decided to pay another visit to Chicago; I'll be there from Sunday the 18th till Tuesday the 27th. It'll be good to spend some time away from home. I'm really getting sick of Washington and its Third World bus system run by grunting morons with IQs of 60.

Think I'll see Red-Eye tomorrow. Maybe 40-Year-Old Virgin this weekend.

A new Barnes & Noble is opening at the end of the month in Tysons Corner in the former Woodward & Lothrop/JC Penney space.

Just this moment a REALLY LOUD motorcycle blasted past outside. Christ, I hate those assholes. Shouldn't we have noise pollution laws around here?

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 10:35:36 GMT

The bus I ride in the morning is always so crowded I have to stand, so what does WMATA do? Switch to a smaller bus to make it even more uncomfortable! I'm so fucking sick of being packed cheek by jowl with half the population of Central America. This is becoming more and more of a third world country every day.

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 22:31:18 GMT

Finally a nice July 4 weekend! We deserve it. And happy belated Canada Day, everyone!

I saw War of the Worlds today. Terrific. Beats the George Pal version hollow. There's one scene involving a train which, not to spoil it, will make you jump. Dakota Fanning wasn't as annoying as I feared she'd be after the first few minutes.

Thu, 19 May 2005 01:23:33 GMT

I had a nasty cold last week, and on Friday morning I felt so crappy I called in sick for the first time in my working history. Appropriate that it was the 13th, I suppose. I'd pretty much recovered by Sunday morning. Saw Crash on Saturday, wasn't as impressed with it as the reviewers all seemed to be.

I just bought (through Fandango) my ticket for Star Wars III: Saturday noon at the Uptown. Kind of surprised it hadn't sold out already. I'll try to show up an hour early so I can be sure of getting a seat in the middle of the row, third or fourth row back.

Name spotted on a document at work: Oral Butcher. I wonder if he's a dentist.

Weather's been beautiful lately: low 70s and sunshine, if a bit chilly in the mornings.

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 10:31:13 GMT

For some reason, I'm not having as much fun going to movies every evening as I used to. Maybe it's all the burgers and Potbelly sandwiches I'm having for dinner which are causing some kind of nutritional deficiency. Maybe it's all the popcorn. Maybe it's having to get up at 5-5:30 the next morning regardless of how late the film runs. Who knows, I'm just feeling sort of blah.

Fun fact: the Spanish pronoun yo is pronounced zho in Argentina.

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 10:42:09 GMT

It hit 80 degrees yesterday -- the first time since September 23. (We haven't had a 90-degree day since August 4.) Perfect sleeping weather last night: 63 degrees and desert-like humidity. Pity it can't last.

Filmfest DC is coming up and I'm looking forward to it. An opportunity to see the world without leaving home! Kind of worried about getting enough sleep, since the movies end so late I'd be getting home around midnight.

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 11:40:14 GMT

More snow on Monday. The really wet, sloppy kind that sticks on every surface. It just looked so beautiful walking home on Monday evening, the sky pink from reflected lights, the snow on the branches like peppermint icing on Christmas cookies. Made up for the late start. I wonder if we'll get any more.

The new season of The Amazing Race has begun! Woo-hoo! I'm rooting for Debbie and Bianca.

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:44:49 GMT

Whoo, five inches of snow yesterday! Didn't expect that after the mild February we've had so far. It isn't often we get so much snow so late in the year. And it's a heavy wet snow that clings to everything. Reminds me of February 1986, when we had three storms in the last week of the month, all in the 2-5 inch range, all with temperatures above freezing.