What Army?

So ABBA gets into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but KISS doesn't? That's just not right. I don't care what kind of music you liked in the '70s (if you're old enough to have lived through it), KISS is just way more rock & roll than ABBA could ever hope to be.

Thrifting and Sleuthing

I haven't really been big into thrift-store shopping for a number of reasons, but mostly because I tend not to find anything that I like. This has to do with fit, quality, style, taste, and the fact that I'm a very fussy human being regarding my clothes.

But since I came across the blog An Affordable Wardrobe a while back and saw that its creator lives and thrifts in the Boston area, and has similar taste, I have been thinking that this is something I should be more open to exploring. I'm also seriously jealous of some of the deals Giuseppe at AAW has scored, like a pair of Bill's Khakis, new with tags, that retail for $98, for $1. Yeah, a dollar. Are you kidding me?

So on Saturday we went over to Davis Square for some sustenance in the form of burritos from Anna's. Next door, where there used to be a video store, there's now a place called Buffalo Exchange that opened a couple of months ago. This is a national chain of stores that buy and sell gently used clothing. I'd never heard of it before it landed in Davis, but it certainly seems like a logical location for it.

We weren't in any hurry, so we went in to have a look. At first I wasn't even sure they had any men's clothing, but a quick walk down to the back revealed the men's racks. I saw some fairly high-end stuff I wasn't expecting; I recognized one Italian brand that I think is sold at Louis, or at least used to be, and one fashion-forward and pricey UK brand with a store in New York that I've never bothered to visit.

I was almost finished going through a rack of shirts when I found a traditional button-down (the collar, not the front) in narrow red and white stripes. The cloth was finer and nicer than oxford cloth, and the tailoring was a notch above the usual (you don't see a two-piece back yoke on a typical department store shirt). It was even my size, but there was no brand tag. None of the other shirts had missing tags, so it wasn't like a Building 19 situation where they are not allowed to reveal the brand in order to protect its prestige.

There was a tag that said "all imported cotton" inside the collar, a laundry tag on the end of the hem, and a small size tag at the neck that also said "made in USA." Well, how about that? The shirt, like all the other long-sleeve shirts I'd looked at, was priced at $17. Not exactly what Giuseppe (or anyone) would consider a thrifting bargain, but Buffalo isn't really a thrift store in the traditional sense. Regardless, it was a decent price for an American-made shirt, and I still got the feeling that I should go ahead and buy it.

When I got home I took a closer look at the shirt. Sometimes there are markings on the buttons, sometimes there is a secondary laundry tag on one of the inner side hems, sometimes there is a season tag telling you when a garment was produced and sold. The shirt had none of those. But all the tags were green, which was ringing some sort of bell in my head, and the style of lettering on the "cotton" one looked familiar. Older J. Crew clothes had green tags, but this seemed too nice for J. Crew, and I didn't think they had manufactured in the US in a really long time, if ever.

There was one other clue: the laundry tag had an RN number. Maybe you've never noticed this, but all clothes have it. It's a way to identify the manufacturer. I remembered seeing a reference a while back on a blog to a Federal Trade Commission database where you could look up these numbers. I just couldn't remember on which blog I'd seen it. I knew it wasn't AAW, so I spent a little while going back through some of the other style blogs I frequent, and eventually I found the link, on The Trad.

The database revealed that the shirt was made by Gitman Bros. of Pennsylvania. They've been around for over 60 years, and still make all their shirts in the US. I used to see their shirts at Syms when they had a store downtown; if you look at the lower right corner of their home page at that link, you can see their logo on a green background, which is what their labels look like and why this shirt was seeming familiar to me. I could still see the thread holes in the shirt from where the label had been removed. Maybe it was irritating to its former owner's neck?

Domestic manufacturing is of course now more costly than having your products made overseas, so Gitman's shirts sell for north of $100 each. So I guess I ended up getting a pretty good deal after all.

(If you're interested in doing some sleuthing of your own, the database can be found here. Of course, your mileage may vary.)

This Week in Awesome (12/12/09)

I had intended to post yesterday, but apparently my brain didn't have anything useful to contribute. No matter, as today I have what may be the biggest TWiAs ever. Back the truck up...

A Toyota dealer in Silicon Valley somehow got Steve Wozniak to participate in one of its commercials. The result is unquestionably one of the strangest things I've ever seen. (Fake Steve Jobs)

Toshiba attached a bunch of helium balloons to a chair and released it up into the sky (to show off its video camera technology, I think). (YouTube via Very Short List)

More cool camera stuff, this time a clip with some nice time-lapse footage of New York. (Digital Urban via New York Times City Room blog)

Now we move on to revisit the part of the segment that's more awful than awesome. But I do this as a public service, if only so you'll be informed, and know how to protect yourselves. I'm sure by now you've heard about MTV's new show Jersey Shore, which is just like all their other "reality" shows except for the setting (which you can guess from the title) and the fact that all the participants are Italian-Americans.

If somehow you've managed to remain unaware of this cultural watershed, I've thoughtfully prepared a little primer for you. You'll want to watch this clip first, then this one, this one, and finally this one. (Soup blog; note that a short ad plays before each clip)

Next, you're ready to check out a Jersey Shore nickname generator (Rum & Monkey via The Frisky). Not enough for you? Here's another one. (Unlikely Words)

Now, as a sort of mental palate cleanser, you should go watch these funny commercials from Scarlett Johansson's appearances on Saturday Night Live. (Hulu)

Finally, for some context, a column from Thursday's New York Times on the show.

I suppose I should be offended by the perpetuation of these stereotypes, but I can't muster enough energy to be bothered by them. I am sad for our society in general, though. And I have to say, the guidettes frighten me far more than the guidos.

Watch Wednesday Thursday (12/10/09)

This time I didn't forget, I was just otherwise too busy. Last night I was doing laundry, loading and running the dishwasher, and taking photos and preparing some eBay listings (trying to get rid of some stuff and capture some holiday sales). I managed to shoot this picture, but it was closing in on midnight and I didn't have it in me to do the post.

This is a relatively recent addition to my collection (from eBay, of course). There are three or four companies that sell what they claim are "Swiss Army" watches. I have no idea if any one is more official than any other one, or even if such a thing as "official Swiss Army watch" exists.

I was drawn to this watch because of the simplicity of its design: the big round case, the big white numerals set against the black face, the way the bottom parts of the hands are painted black so they seem to float on the dial. I do, however, think there ought to be something printed below the center of the dial to better balance the overall appearance of the face.

Suggested retail on this watch is around $200 ($225 on a metal bracelet), but you can find them for much less. Last time I was in Kohl's, they were selling a watch like this for $90; I spent a few days looking on eBay and got this one for $45. It had been used in a store display window, but had not been worn, and came with its accompanying boxes, manual, and usual assorted paperwork.

I'm not a huge fan of the brown strap, but it will do, and it's a weird size (21 millimeters wide--watch straps are more typically an even width like 18, 20, or 22 mm) so the effort I'd have to expend to find a replacement is probably not worth my time.

Cheese to Go

I took care of a couple of errands on the way home from work tonight, so I was a little later than usual. At North Station I switched from Green to Orange, and as I was walking across the upper level of the station, there was a table right in the middle. I thought it was one of the people who sells Celtics or Bruins stuff before games, so I breezed on by without really paying any attention. Just after I'd passed I heard the guy behind the table say, "Free cheese!"

Wait, what? There was no train coming, so I turned and circled back around to the front of the table. Free cheese is almost as good as free beer. Turned out he was handing out samples of Cabot cheese, little flat slabs in cute packages.

The one he handed me was mild cheddar, so I traded it for the "seriously sharp" variant. Having had it before, I knew I preferred it. When I got home, I ate it with some roasted-garlic flavored Triscuits. Mmmm.

Holidazed

Still catching my breath from the weekend. New York in December may not have been the best idea. There were teeming hordes everywhere. I don't teem; it's bad for my skin. Plus it rained all day Saturday.

It was still fun, but I have to temper my enthusiasm. We viewed the Rockefeller Center tree from across Fifth Avenue in front of Saks; we couldn't get any closer because the sidewalk on the other side of the street was completely filled with people. The city had put up those metal things they use to hold people back during parades and such, and it's a good thing, because otherwise people surely would have been falling into the street.

By comparison, parts of the city that are normally kind of crazy, like Soho on a Saturday afternoon, didn't seem as bad. And we spent a very pleasant hour at the Strand Bookstore later that night, where the store was certainly busy but was still rather hushed and civilized. So it's a mater of perspective.

This Week in Awesome (12/5/09)

While I'm away, I've left you some goodies to enjoy over the weekend...

For those of you who just don't know what to do with your piles of money, a compendium of outrageously expensive high-fashion holiday gifts. Don't forget who tipped you off to this valuable resource... (Refinery29 via Racked)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, and in the tradition of Look at This Fucking Hipster, we have Hipster Is the New Homeless.

And here's another video mashup for those of us of a certain age who fondly remember a cheesy 1970s sci-fi show (starring Martin Landau, no less) called Space: 1999. (TV Squad via James Lileks)

Overheard: Glazed Cruller Edition

As the Orange Line train was pulling in this evening at the Massachusetts Avenue station, two guys came down the stairs and passed behind me, engrossed in a conversation. Just before I boarded, I heard one say to the other, "Remember that girl you were supposed to sleep with at the Dunkin' Donuts?"

I almost didn't get on the train so I could hear what came next, but the desire to get home won (barely). Is that some sort of secret menu item you hve to know how to ask for? Was he supposed to have sex with the girl at Dunkin' Donuts? Did she work there? Would doughnuts be involved somehow? The mind reels...

Charlie's Trip

Most people in the Boston area have at least passsing familiarity with the old folk song "Charile on the M.T.A.," but did you ever wonder how the song came to be?

On Monday the New York Times published the obituary of Bess Lomax Hawes, of the eminent Lomax family of folk-music scholars, who passed away last week. In the 1940s she performed in a folk group with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and later co-wrote the song (its official title is "M.T.A.") that became a hit for The Kingston Trio in 1959. But the song's origins are somewhat surprising, and if you hit that link above you can find out more.

(Related trivia: the head of our department took banjo lessons from Ms. Hawes as a boy in Los Angeles in the 1950s.)

Season's Greetings

On Sunday I accompanied friends on a visit to the Enchanted Village, newly installed at Jordan's Furniture in Avon. This was largely for the benefit of a six-year-old boy whose mother is trying to instill and foster a sense of wonder and joy regarding the holiday season that is centered on more than just toys and goodies.

The Village is a throwback, a reminder of a simpler time in many ways. It was commissioned by the late Boston department store Jordan Marsh (no connection, and the source of many radio-ad jokes over the years) and was first displayed in 1958 (the link above has a somewhat more detailed history). For a lot of people of a certain age who grew up in this area (including the boy's mother), a visit to the Village was an annual tradition. I am of the right age, and I grew up in Rhode Island, which is not that far away, but I come from a family (and a state with a cultural quirk) that did not like to go far out of its way if it could be avoided, so I never experienced it.

After Macy's bought Jordan Marsh in the late 1990s, the city of Boston bought the Village, but after a few years they could no longer afford to display and operate it. Jordan's bought it at auction and restored it, and is displaying it in an effort to revive a local holiday tradition, so parents can share their memories with their own children.

So what was I doing there? I'm not a parent, and I don't even like kids all that much. Why would I stand in line for 90 minutes (!) to look at a bunch of mechanically "animated" figures in scenes that look like Norman Rockwell paintings and would have been considered quaint when first shown over 50 years ago? Curiosity, mostly. Obviously, people have fond memories of the Enchanted Village and feel a strong connection to it, and even if I missed out on the experience when I was young, I can still appreciate its spirit. I don't think I need to go back and see it again, but now I can say I've seen it.

Of course, the Village was also a marketing tool for Jordan Marsh, just as it is for Jordan's Furniture today. Even so, people who experienced the Village as children identify with it on that level, just as we all identify with other seasonal traditions that have nothing to do with gifts. I enjoy giving and receiving gifts as much as anyone, but it's important to remember that this time of year is about much more than that.

In my own family, decorating the house inside and out was a ritual nearly on the level of going to church. It's what people mean when they refer to the "spirit of the season." It's that feeling I get when, heading home from work in the dark of December, I get off the bus and I can see decorated houses lit up all the way down my street. We want to share that warmth with others.

[So, since it's December first, is it okay for me to plug in the holiday lights I have strung on my cubicle?]

This weekend, we're going to New York (yes, again) with the same friends. We're going to take the boy to see the tree at Rockefeller Center (something I've never done, so I'm looking forward to it), and we're going to walk along Fifth Avenue and look at the holiday displays in the store windows, and all the lights and decorations, and we're going to love it. Except maybe the Mrs.--she's kind of a Scrooge where the holidays are concerned. But we're working on her.

This Week in Awesome: Bonus Bit

This clip should have gone into the weekend post, but I forgot to go find it after watching The Soup last Friday night. Pretty clever in a "Why didn't I think of this?" way.

This Week in Awesome (11/29/09)

Holiday week, everything's off schedule, and I only have a couple of things, but a couple is better than none...

The Muppets do a cool cover of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." (YouTube via TV Squad)

This is from last week, but it's still amusing: some of the letters in a Queens hospital's sign were burned out, leaving an uncannily appropriate sequence of letters. (New York Times City Room blog)

Style File: Boots

Yesterday is a blur... of nothingness. I was home all day, I did some laundry, I walked the dog, and that's about it. We did venture out last night for a couple of hours, but not for Black Friday shopping. It was more for errandy stuff.

I wandered into an Old Navy for a few minutes while waiting for the Mrs. There was a sign on the window that said "Everything in the store is on sale." I guess that's a good thing for some people, but since I can't get my gray undershirts there anymore, it didn't help me. And of course, the checkout lines were ridiculous. (What is it about that store? There can be three people shopping in the whole place, and you head up to the checkout and it takes ten minutes.)

Anyway, this is the post I was planning to do yesterday: fall is boot season. (Maybe not if you have to wear suits to work, although there are options that work for that.) I think I inherited my affinity for boots from my father, who was a motorcycle cop. He wore tall boots with breeches, always shined to perfection.

When I was getting ready to go to college, we went over to the local shoe repair place. The proprietor carried a small selection of boots, and I bought a pair of waterproof, insulated Herman Survivors, which were that wheat-yellow color that later became so popular. I didn't realize I was ahead of the curve at the time; I was just looking for winter protection. I had them for more than 20 years, and when I eventually donated them to a winter clothing drive, they still had useful life in them.

In the 80s I had an amazing pair of Zodiac boots that I bought at Urban Outfitters. They had pointy toes and angled heels like Beatle boots, and a thin strap that went all the way around with a buckle decoration. I wore them for years and years. I had them resoled a couple of times, to the point that the leather and padding under the sole inside had also worn away. At that point I had to get rid of them. Recently I saw a pair of the exact same style on eBay, but not big enough to fit me now. And I'm not sure I'd want them now anyway; they belong to my youth.

But I have plenty of other boots. Back at the beginning of the decade, you could get quality, Italian-made shoes at Banana Republic and J. Crew for very reasonable money, and they typically went on sale at the end of the season. That's how I got these great side-zip boots.

They were originally $150, but by the time I came across them at J. Crew they had been marked down to $100 and then again to $70. Usually by that point only the very small and very large sizes are left, but they had a good selection. I was working at Trader Joe's at the time and not making much, but I couldn't pass them up. Now, though, they don't fit so well anymore, so I'll probably be putting them on eBay. I tend to be more comfortable in wide shoes, and I think that's why. These only came in medium width, which is typical of J. Crew shoes. Now their $150 shoes are made in China, and they're making a big deal about a new group of styles that are made in Italy, and sell for $300.

Another style I've been wearing for some time is this work boot from Caterpillar (made by Wolverine under license). I got my first pair about ten years ago, and after I'd worn them to the point that they were no longer appropriate to wear to work, I relegated them to outside duty for things like snow shoveling and got this new pair. Because they are intended to be used as work shoes, they are very comfortable to wear for long periods, but these don't have steel toes so they are not as heavy as some others. (The logos are conveniently covered by my pants.) I like these so much, I got another pair in a different color:

A few years ago I was seized with the urge to get a pair of motorcycle boots. I must have seen them in a store somewhere, or maybe in a magazine. The decision came down to a choice between engineer-style and harness-style. I went with harness, mainly because of the more distinctive squared toe, which is called a "snip toe." Marlon Brando I'm not, but these are rugged and look good, and they are made in the USA.

Recently I had another of those urges, but this time for a Chelsea boot. I didn't want one that was especially dressy (this is what I was getting at above, to wear with a suit) because I don't dress dressy that often. Timberland (a company whose shoes I generally don't pay much attention to) has a nice style that is waterproof, runs wide, and has a lightweight, flexible rubber sole. I tried them on at a Timberland store, but I didn't care for their color choices. The brown was too dark, and the tan was weird--it looked too orange.

Later I found the same style online in a rich, beautiful darker tan that, for whatever reason, the Timberland stores and web site don't carry, so I ordered them. They arrived damaged--one of the leather pulls was torn completely off the boot at one end--and of course, when I went to return them for an exchange, they no longer had any left in my size. More than a month later, they still don't. But a couple of weeks ago, I found this pair of Cole Haans on eBay:

They are similar to the Timberlands, though the leather is a little darker and they are just a bit dressier overall. They have leather soles, but whoever had them before had rubber caps put on the soles and heels, and then didn't wear them. I had seen these in DSW for around $160 (from an original retail of $250) and thought that was too much; I ended up paying less than half of the DSW price, and still significantly less than what the Timberlands cost.

But what about when it gets cold? Around here you have to be prepared. The Caterpillar boots are surprisingly cozy, even though they are not insulated. They also are not waterproof. (I really need to invest in a decent product to prolong the life of my shoes and make them more weather-resistant.) When it gets down to about 30 degrees, they are not warm enough. I used to have a pair of insulated Orvis boots that I bought from Sierra Trading Post, but my feet were always cold when I was outside waiting for the bus, and then when I'd get to work they would be too warm, so I gave up on them a couple of winters back.

If it's cold but dry, I have these Banana Republic boots with a shearling lining that I got a couple of winters back at an after-Christmas sale for around 1/3 of their original price. Made in Italy, too. They are slightly "distressed," which I wasn't crazy about, but for the price I was willing to overlook it.

For seriously bad weather, I bought these Chippewa pull-on boots that are waterproof and heavily insulated. This was more about practicality than anything else (a pull-on boot is easier to deal with than a tall boot with long laces), but they look good enough that I can keep them on when I get to work.

Watch Wednesday/Thursday (11/26/09)

It's still Wednesday night somewhere, right? (I think it's the reverse; it's already Friday morning somewhere...)

Okay, let's get serious. This is an Omega Seamaster De Ville automatic from somewhere in the early 1960s. I don't know the exact year, but I'm sure there's a way to date it from its serial number. I like to think it's from 1963, the year I was born.

Vintage Omega watches are not as popular (or as expensive) as Rolex and some other brands, but they made plenty of interesting watches with quality movements. I acquired this one back in 2001; at the time it was a pretty good deal, but now it's unlikely I would be able to afford a comparable watch.

I think what makes this watch distinctive are the cross-hair lines on the dial. The Accutron Deep Sea also has them, and it's a small detail that elevates a classy but otherwise plain design. I've seen other Omegas that are otherwise the same but don't have the cross-hairs, and they just don't look as nice.

I apologize for the awful picture, but I'm in the midst of getting ready to leave for the day and I don't have enough time to fuss with lots of pictures. I'll try to post a better one tomorrow.

Update: I think this picture is better.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

The Next Few Days

Programming may be light for the next few days. I'm off work today, but I have a bunch of things I need to do, and we're busy tonight too; there will be a watch post later tonight, I promise.

Tomorrow I'm heading down to Rhode Island, but only for the day. The Mrs. has to work tomorrow and Friday, so it's easier if I don't stay overnight. I am working on something (hopefully) interesting for Friday though.

Oh, and here's my annual anti-Black Friday pitch: stay home. If you absolutely need to shop, there's this thing called the internet, and there will be plenty of deals there. Plus it's going to rain (where I live, anyway). My plan for Friday: eat junk food and watch TV.

Two Left (and Two Right) Feet

For the past couple of months, I've been selling some of my excess stuff on eBay. Most of it is clothing and shoes, with a couple of messenger-type bags and a couple of watches that I no longer wear. There are some things I've bought on eBay that didn't quite work out for one reason or other, and the best thing to do is to turn it over again to someone else. Often I make only a few bucks on each auction, but after a dozen or so sales it accumulates to a respectable amount of money.

Due to the amount of time involved in setting up an auction--taking decent pictures, writing a good description, posting the information, answering questions, packing the items and shipping them to the winning bidders--I tend to post only one or two auctions at a time on a sort of rolling schedule, one new auction every couple of days or so, so that I am not completely overwhelmed by the process.

Last week I sold a pair of adidas sneakers to a guy out in California. To maintain my ranking as a trustworthy seller, I make the effort to ship the winning bidder's item the next day. It's easy enough for me to stop at the Milk Street post office, which closes at 6, on my way home from work (I used to stop in the Prudential Center, but they cut back their hours and now close too early). I usually pack the item and get it ready the night before, but for some reason this time I didn't, so in the morning I had to scramble to find a shoebox-sized box and some packing material. (Given the amount of stuff I buy, I have amassed a substantial stash of boxes and packing supplies in the basement that comes in handy for this.)

Yesterday I got an email from the buyer: I sent him the wrong sneakers. I had two pairs of adidas sitting next to each other in their boxes, and I posted the auction for the second pair a couple of days before the first auction ended. In doing so I mixed up the boxes, and because I was in a hurry I didn't bother to look at the shoebox before enclosing it in the outer box.

Sending him the correct pair is the easy part. I had a few people watching the other auction, but no bids yet. Thinking it would take too much time for him to send the shoes back to me, I asked him if he would be willing to send the "wrong" shoes to the winning bidder if I reimbursed him for the postage. He replied that he could do that, but then he offered to buy the other pair. Under the circumstances it was the easiest solution, and even though I'm probably not making any money on this situation, I guess I'm lucky he liked those other shoes too.

Gray Area

I have a small crisis on my hands, and I spent a good portion of my free time this week trying unsuccessfully to deal with it.

Old Navy has stopped carrying the gray undershirts I've been buying for years. I don't know when exactly this happened, because I haven't paid attention in several months. But about a week ago, I was folding my laundry when I noticed that some of my gray Ts were looking kind of old, and then I wore one to work and the neck got all stretched out of shape during the day, so I figured it was time to replace some of them.

I took a look online and saw that they had only white, where they used to also have gray and black. This launched me on a search, both online and in stores, for suitable replacements, and so far I'm not really having any luck with it, but I'm running out of places to look.

I'm not even sure why this happened. Used to be, almost every store had something like what I'm after, but now no one seems to. I've tried every store I can think of, except for places like Saks that sell ridiculously overpriced underwear by the likes of Armani. Yesterday I found a two-pack of gray Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts at Macy's for $20, which is twice what the Old Navy shirts cost. Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, Jockey--all the usual suspects have nothing available. I've checked Marshalls and Kohl's, and even places like Sears--nothing.

I have a couple of options: Old Navy sells individual gray T-shirts in a slightly heavier fabric which are currently priced at two for $15, but I have some of these that I bought a few months ago when they were three for $15, so I'd rather wait and see if that deal comes around again, especially with Christmas approaching. Target sells something similar for $5 each, but the sleeves are longer than typically found on undershirts, and they stick out of short sleeves. Fine for the cooler months, but no good when warmer weather comes back around.

I did find a site that sells American Apparel shirts for about half of their usual retail price. The company's president and founder has a reputation as something of a creepy sleazebag, but I have to give him credit for building a manufacturing business in the United States that pays its employees a living wage and provides them with health benefits, so maybe that's the way to go. I've also found some gray Hanes T-shirts on the Kmart web site, but they are not sold in stores so I'd have to get them shipped, but they are a much better deal than the American Apparel shirts: currently a four-pack is $9 before shipping.

This is such a silly, trivial thing, bit it does serve to remind me of the value of buying and stockpiling things that may not be needed until several years down the road, because you can't rely on them always being available.

This Week in Awesome (11/21/09)

Busy day, didn't have time to post these this morning...

For your upcoming holiday parties, this product is all kinds of multiculturally festive. (Oriental Trading Company via Unlikely Words)

Here's a clever flow chart to help you figure out what to eat when you're on the road. (Eating the Road via Grub Street)

And, in the vein and spirit of People of Walmart, the inevitable People of Public Transit. (Universal Hub)

New Wave Flashback

My monthly deadline has been met, so I can return to the land of the blogging. This afternoon while working I was listening to the 1980 DEVO album Freedom of Choice, which I've always thought was their best. I remembered that when the album came out, the band made an appearance on the ABC late-night show Fridays (which was a short-lived attempt to emulate the success of Saturday Night Live) that I saw.

I wondered if there might be video of that appearance floating around on the web, and sure enough, a quick look at YouTube found it. So, please to enjoy... (There are two songs, and in the first one, "Girl U Want," the video appears choppy at times, but having seen the original broadcast, I can say that it was done this way on purpose.)

Where's That Bus?

Last week, the state's Department of Transportation announced a pilot program to release real-time location data (from GPS transmitters) for buses on the MBTA's five busiest routes. Within a couple of days, an enterprising programmer by the name of Joe Shaw had written a program that embeds this information in a Google map. Well done, Joe.

Well, imagine that: the T gets half a clue. I first had the idea that this would be useful years ago while standing at a bus stop one cold winter morning, though I didn't share it in this space until a bit over two years ago. Admittedly, at the time I was still thinking of it too narrowly, in the form of a system that would disseminate the information via some sort of readout affixed to bus stop sign poles. Clearly that's a terrible idea relative to a system that puts the information in front of you right before you leave your home or office or, even better, puts it in the palm of your hand while you're standing at the bus stop.

For the moment the service is limited to just the five routes, which were chosen because they are the most heavily used in the system. That makes perfect sense to me, and I can even take advantage of it because one of the routes is the 39, which I sometimes use when heading home from work. And you iPhone users don't even have to download an app, because Joe has made the information available on a simple web page.

Pretty Hype Machine

"So, I heard there's some movie about vampires coming out this week?"

"Oh god, please make it go away..."

That was a little (over)dramatization of the two sides of my brain fighting with each other in a valiant struggle to ignore the revving engine of the Twilight/New Moon hype machine. This is not easy, believe me, because as I'm sure you've noticed, the coverage is frickin' EVERYWHERE.

And the bad news is, there are two more books in the series (with more to come, if the author has any sort of sense), and they plan to make and release movies based on them on more or less a yearly schedule, so that means we have at least two more years of this to endure. At least...

Now, don't misunderstand me. I like vampire stuff. I cut my horror teeth on the Saturday afternoon "Creature Double Feature" on channel 56, which had its share of schlocky vampire movies. On Halloween night the Mrs. and I watched The Hunger, which is a rather sexy twist on the vampire myth. The brilliant Buffy The Vampire Slayer is among my all-time favorite TV shows. Vampire stories of all kinds are pervasive, and they've been part of the cultural vernacular for centuries.

So what's the problem? Well first, the target audience for these particular books and movies is teenage girls. I know this because I read reviews, and because the media coverage is heavily weighted toward young ladies screaming and swooning over the two pretty, hunky dudes who star in the movies. The young lady seems to get less attention, and in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, she doesn't even look all that happy in the photo spread, like she'd rather be somewhere else. (I read that she's been cast as Joan Jett in a biopic about The Runaways, which may better suit her sulky mien.)

Second, and probably more important, an all-consuming hype machine tends to have a repelling effect on me. The bigger it is, the less likely I am to be interested in it. I don't do this to be contrarian (though that's a sometimes beneficial side effect); it's just who I am.

In the case of the Twilight saga, at least after the movie opens, the roar dies down for a few months, until it's time for the DVD release, then another few months until the next movie opens.

This Week in Awesome (11/14/09)

I'm up a bit earlier than usual for a Saturday, but the coffee's hot and it's raining outside, so I'd rather be posting TWiA.

More weird products... this one is in the vein of the Snuggie, but is more, um, inclusive? (Consumerist)

As you know, I think Twitter is a stupid waste of time. But this guy has it figured out. I really should have tipped all of you off to this a while ago. Now he's gone and gotten himself a sitcom deal. I can't imagine the show will be any good, but I'm also worried that the twits will go downhill as well. (News article: Hollywood Reporter via TV Squad; original twit clue-in: Dave Rationale)

Here's a nice little commercial parody that popped up this week. (Back of the Class via Sex and the Ivy via Universal Hub)

For those of you suffering, like me, until next summer when Mad Men returns, here's a compilation clip of some of Roger Sterling's one-liners. The clip describes them as "complete," but it's more like a smattering. (New York Magazine's Vulture blog)

And one more Mad Men parody, a good one too. (Atom Films via Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog)

More Substitutions

After my shirt story from a couple of weeks ago (and no, I did not for a second consider saying "shirt tale," you weirdos), I realized that I'd recently had another similar experience. You want to see how obsessed I can get about clothes? Read on...

A few months back I came across a guys' style blog out of Vancouver called On The Daily (which has since changed its name to Inventory Updates). Their tastes run to a lot of obscure, very expensive Japanese labels influenced by classic American workwear that are typically available only in Japan, but they're also into a lot of basic, classic made-in-America stuff like Filson coats and Red Wing boots that I could appreciate.

Reading through some of the older posts, I learned that they had a web store, and they'd had some cool oxford cloth shirts made just for them in a collaboration with Pennsylvania shirtmaker Gitman Bros. The shirts were available in white, gray, and red. When I saw the red one I flipped out. I'd been looking for an oxford cloth shirt in this exact color for a long time, but I'd kind of given up, figuring that no one was bothering to make anything like it. The gray oxford was pretty nice-looking too. I don't wear a lot of solid color shirts (I tend toward stripes and plaids), but these were very nicely done and I could see wearing them with a tweed vest, of which I have a couple.

The shirts had been produced in very limited quantities and had gone on sale months before I'd discovered their site, so of course they were sold out. Even if they'd had any left, they were $150, which is an awful lot of money to even consider spending on a shirt. I was also a bit wary of how the shirt might fit, since it seemed like they were cut on the slim side. Near the end of August I saw a post saying the red shirt was back in stock, but when I clicked over to their store it had already sold out again (it looked like I'd missed it by about an hour). The same thing happened a few days later with the gray shirt. I figured this was a message from the universe that I was better off not having to face the temptation.

Then the Mrs. and I went to New York near the end of September, and made our now-customary trip to Uniqlo in Soho, eager to check out their fall offerings (our previous visits to the store had been in early spring and summer months). They stock dress shirts year-round, but I was more interested in what they might have in the way of long-sleeved casual shirts. I came across oxford cloth shirts that were made of a much heavier fabric than a typical oxford, but were also very soft. They had them in white, blue, pink, and what do you know, gray:

I already have a pink one and didn't want a blue one, so I got the gray and a white one, since I didn't have one and they were only $19.50 each. (Yes, you read that right. That's one of the reasons I love Uniqlo so much. A similar shirt would be $40 or $45 at the Gap and would never be of such a nice, substantial fabric.) I left the store happy, and hoping Uniqlo would add additional colors down the road, maybe some stripes.

A few weeks later I was still thinking about the red oxford, but I hadn't seen anything comparable except for a shirt at J. Crew that was more of a brick red that wasn't doing anything for me. One Sunday the Mrs. said she wanted to go to Kohl's and I went along. Kohl's is a store I don't bother with much, but I have bought the occasional pair of jeans or khakis there, so I typically do a quick once-around and then go see what the Mrs is looking at.

Kohl's carries a lot of clothing by Chaps, which was a low-end brand started by Ralph Lauren back in the 1970s before Polo got big. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that it still has a connection to RL, but they unloaded it years ago and probably wish it never existed. The clothes are inexpensive and look it, generally made of poly/cotton blends and not of particularly good quality, but they usually have one slightly nicer collection of all-cotton items each season, and I have a plaid Chaps shirt (that I got at Kohl's a couple of years ago) that works fine for the office, so I stopped for a look.

All of a sudden I see... a red oxford cloth shirt. I thought I must have been seeing it wrong from a distance, but when I got close to it I saw that's indeed what it was. They wanted around $30 for it, which just wasn't worth it to me. But for kicks, I looked on eBay when I got home and found someone selling one, in my size, new with tags, for $15, so I bought it.

(Just as a point of reference, that's 10% of the cost of the one from the Canadian guys, and while that shirt had some nice little details and I know that it's of much better quality, I would just feel way too guilty spending that much on one shirt.)

There's only one problem: the shirts from Chaps that are 100% cotton usually have an ugly embroidered logo, and as you all know by now, I can't stand logos.

But I figure that if I wear it under a vest or sweater, no one's going to know. At some point, though, I'm probably going to want to wear it on its own. I may try removing the embroidery, but I know that can end up leaving holes in the fabric. If I want to venture into really obsessive territory, I can wait until the end of the season and pick up another of the shirts on clearance, and have the Mrs. use it to make me a new, plain pocket. She rolled her eyes at this and shook her head in exasperation, but she also likes a challenge, and she admitted she could do it.

Watch Wednesday (11/11/09)

What's this? A Watch Wednesday post--on Wednesday? Why, it's a miracle... or not. You can thank the powers that be for giving me the day off and thus allowing me the time to do this when it's supposed to be done.

This is the last of my three Casio analog watches, and perhaps the most interesting. I got sucked into this one because of its technology. It's called a Wave Ceptor, and it receives time signals (on a radio frequency of some sort) several times a day, calibrated to the NIST atomic clock in Boulder, CO. Pretty heavy stuff, but also pretty cool. It requires a little fussing with those buttons on the sides to set it to the correct time zone, but when that's done it's fun to watch the hands move on their own to the correct time. Because of its accuracy, I use this watch as a baseline for setting my other watches and keeping track of their accuracy.

Once again, this watch came with a cheap, uncomfortable resin strap--pretty much the norm for any Casio that isn't on a metal bracelet--so I replaced it, but again it was a quick and cheap fix and I don't really like this strap either. I found one I'd like to replace it with, but it's been out of stock for some time, so i don't know if that's going to work out.

I think this watch also has features like an alarm and a stopwatch, but to be honest, I haven't bothered to try to figure out how to do anything else with it other than set it to the correct time zone. It didn't come with instructions because it was some sort of store display model, so I downloaded them from Casio, but they're kind of difficult to understand. I'll take another crack at it some time.

This Morning's Observations

On the bus this morning I ended up sitting next to T-Mobile guy. I noticed a couple of things about him that I hadn't before:

He always carries a duffel bag, but I had never gotten a close look at it until today. It's made of black vinyl or pleather or something like that, in a cylindrical shape, and the ends of the bag are Volkswagen hubcaps, presumably from a vintage Beetle. For real.

Also, he was using an iPhone. This means that he's either got an AT&T account that he pays for in addition to (I would assume) a free or subsidized T-Mobile account, or he has a jailbroken iPhone that he's using on the T-Mobile network.

I realize that none of you care about these things, and that's fine. I just can't help but notice and comment on them.

Shut The Door. Have A Seat.

The third season finale of Mad Men was very satisfying, and showed once again just how great the show is, and why. (Spoilers, if you haven't seen it yet...)

Most of the focus of the story was back on the business, the agency, the partners, something that many people, including me, felt the show hadn't spent enough time on this season, so it was nice to have some of that sense of balance back. I predicted this outcome back at the beginning of the season, though it was a statement that only the Mrs. heard, and her recall is not always the best, so I have no way to back it up and you'll just have to trust me.

It was good to see Don have to humble himself a bit and admit that he needs people like Pete, Peggy, and even Lane around because they are good at things he isn't. Don has certainly been taken down a few pegs this season, both at home and at work, but it was also good to see him be the one stepping up to convince Bert and Roger that they needed to act to preserve the business they have all worked hard at for a long time.

And Lane--who saw that one coming? Sure, he was acting in his own self-interest as much as anything else, and the others couldn't have pulled off their little stunt without him, but he seems to have come around to a greater appreciation of his American colleagues, and saw that ultimately he would be treated better by them than by his own people. Loved his kiss-off to his boss in London ("Happy Christmas!") and to his smarmy assistant.

Pete may be good at client relationships, but he's still a clueless, utterly self-absorbed child (he thought Roger and Don had come to his apartment--on a Friday night--to fire him because he'd gone on an interview at a competing agency), and I imagine he will continue to be all those things. On the flip side, I think Peggy still needs to become a little more self-aware; she needs to realize that being with Duck isn't going to get her anywhere.

It's wonderful to see Joan back in the fold and taking charge of things like she always did. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be seeing Sal again, since the tobacco company was the key account they needed to make the move, but I'd like to be wrong about this. If not, I'll miss his wit and style. It appears that Paul and Ken were also left out in the cold, but we may still see them again next season--part of the fun of getting wrapped up in this show is speculating about what will happen in the future.

Some people seem surprised that the Drapers are really going to get divorced, but I believe it was inevitable. If you think about it, how families coped (or didn't) with familial strife and the changes it wrought is as important an element of the sociocultural environment of the 1960s as civil rights, Vietnam, the changing role of media in people's lives, or any of the show's other major themes. Showing the effects of the split on Don, Betty, and the kids is going to be a significant part of the show's storytelling next season and beyond.

I was wrong about my Miss Farrell prediction. Will Don take up with the free-spirited teacher again now that he's going to be a swingin' bachelor in the city? Or will she no longer interest him when there's no illicit allure to their liaisons? And I really don't get what Betty sees in Henry. You have to figure he's not quite the white knight he appears to be.

So much to mull over and discuss. Now comes the hard part: waiting the nine months or so for season four.

This Week in Awesome (11/7/09)

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but we had some unanticipted drama today: the Mrs. took the dog to a greyhound open house for some dog socializing, but one of the other dogs up for adoption bit our dog, and our regular vet was closed, so we had to take the dog to Angell Memorial for treatment. She's still a little groggy and refused food (!), but she should be fine in a few days.

Now, let's look at some stuff on the internet... Unlike last week's ill-chosen parking lot clip, it's okay to go ahead and chuckle at this forklift driver's misfortune. Mmm, schadenfreude. (Gizmodo)

Ford has a solution for people who need a car but can't afford one. (Onion News Network via Jalopnik)

There are a couple of movie mashup clips making the rounds. This first one takes a rather literal approach to some famous lines from the movies (you'll see what I mean)... (VideoGum via The Awl)

...while the second blends in bits from TV shows, and gets an assist from Auto-Tune. (YouTube via Waxy.org via Unlikely Words)

And I leave you with a mashup of a different sort: Kristen Wiig reads the poetry of a famous person. (Best Week Ever via TV Squad)

Anticipation

It's already time for the third season finale of Mad Men, which airs this Sunday night, November 8th. The waits between seasons are tough, but I don't think I'd want them to do more than 13 episodes a season. I think it's better to produce a season of a show (not just Mad Men, but any show, really) that's as good as can be and leaves the audience wanting more. This past spring and summer, FX aired a 22-episode season of Rescue Me, and while I thought it was one of the show's better seasons overall, it felt a little stretched out and overlong by the time the end rolled around.

One of the quirks surrounding the production of Mad Men is the terse, obtuse episode descriptions that deliberately give almost no information about what's going to happen in a given week's episode. These blurbs, which appear in listings and accompany DVR recordings, always pull out the most minuscule and unimportant bits of information, or understate more significant developments.

For example (this is gonna get kinda spoilery), for last season's episode "The Mountain King" the blurb says, "Don meets up with an old friend." Technically that was true, but (a) it was during his business trip in LA when he abandoned his work and literally disappeared for weeks, and (b) that "old friend" was his fake ex-wife. Or from this season's episode "Souvenir": "Pete helps a neighbor." Sure, Pete helped the neighbor's au pair deal with a stained dress that belonged to her employer, but then he also helped himself to the au pair, so I guess by "helps" they meant "drunkenly forces himself upon." See?

The same vagueness and misdirection extends to the little preview clips at the end of each episode. These are always disjointed assemblages of moments from the upcoming show that have nothing to do with each other, but are sequenced in such a way that they suggest Something Big is going to happen, but it's deliberately misleading: what they portend is never what actually ends up happening.

Clearly show creator/executive producer Matt Weiner keeps a very firm hand on exactly what information is revealed about each week's episode, and I suspect that if it was entirely up to him, the blurbs would contain nothing more than the episode titles, and there would be no preview clips at all.

Before seasons two and three began, there was much speculation as to how much time would have passed on the show. (This info usually ends up being revealed a few days before the season premiere by critics who have received review copies of the first episode.)

But even from week to week, we don't always know how much time has passed. Two episodes ago it was Halloween 1963, and then we saw at the beginning of last week's show that Roger Sterling's daughter Margaret's wedding had not yet taken place; early on in the season we'd seen the invitation with the date of November 23rd, so we knew it was somewhere between those two dates, but it wasn't until the scene in Harry's office, with the TV on in the corner, that we knew it was That Day, the one we'd been anticipating the show's treatment of all season.

And it was brilliantly done: Harry turned down the TV so he and Pete could talk seriously, we the viewers saw the bulletin appear on the screen and could just barely make out the voice of Walter Cronkite, but the two of them paid no attention to it until the door flew open and a bunch of people burst into Harry's office to commandeer the TV.

But rather than finding all this annoying, I find it endearing. I appreciate the show's commitment to building some anticipation for the episodes, and I applaud their restraint and secrecy, unlike some other networks (cough *NBC* cough) that are in the habit of giving away far too many details about upcoming shows in their promo ads.

And you know what? It works. I time-shift just about all of my TV watching, but on Sunday nights I try to watch Mad Men live, because I just don't want to wait until the next evening to see what happens. In fact, since the Mrs. goes to sleep rather early, I usually end up watching the episodes again with her on Monday evenings. And I usually go back later and watch the whole season again.

At the end of last week's episode, I was expecting AMC to show the usual batch of incongruous and unrelated snippets from the upcoming finale. Instead we got this clip, which is a rehash of things that have already happened this season. How's that for not giving anything away? And the blurb reads: "Don has an important meeting with Connie [that's Conrad Hilton, a client]. Betty receives some advice. Pete talks to his clients." We know what those things mean, but we don't know what the outcomes will be. I imagine critics won't be getting any advance copies of this episode.

Good thing the Patriots-Colts prime-time game is next week, but if I had to choose, I'd watch the Mad Men finale and record the game.

Last Week in Pinhead

In last Saturday's TWiA, I linked to a video clip of an SUV suddenly accelerating and climbing up onto another car, kinda sorta crushing it, then driving away.

I realized, too late, that including this clip might be sending the wrong message. I do not think what the BMW driver did in this footage is awesome. I think it was cowardly and despicable. My only excuse is that I was taken in by the fact that you don't see this sort of automotive gymnastics every day, but really, I should have known better.

Yesterday I read that the owner of the blue Hyundai that was the unfortunate victim of the parking problem was given a new car by Hyundai Canada, which is certainly a happier ending.

TV Fatigue

You may recall that back in September I did a fall TV season preview. At the time I talked about a couple of promising new sci-fi shows on ABC, FlashForward and V. FlashForward has been on for about six weeks now, and V premieres tonight. So this is the point I should be telling you how good FlashForward is, and that you should plan to watch V because it's also really good. But I'm not going to do either.

I recorded the first five episodes of FlashForward before I ever watched a minute of it; it was only because the Mrs. was working on a sewing project one night last week that I found myself in front of the TV alone and decided to finally check out the pilot (she'd made it clear she wasn't interested in the show). After watching it, I went back and forth for days about whether or not I wanted to keep going with it, and yesterday I decided to delete the unwatched episodes and cancel the season pass from the TiVo.

Which is not to say it isn't any good. I have heard that some critics, after seeing a few episodes, don't think it's living up to the promise of its pilot, but I really didn't get far enough into it to form an opinion either way. Right now I just don't feel up to the task of keeping up with another show every week, and I figured it was better to cut the cord before getting any deeper into the show's overarching mysteries.

Normally I will give a new show at least four or five episodes before deciding whether or not I consider it a keeper, and that may continue to be the case with future shows, but at this moment I just can't muster the energy to care about FlashForward. If any of you are watching it, I'd love to hear what you think.

The reviews for V that I've read have generally been quite favorable; if anything, it sounds like a better show than FlashForward, but again, I'm not sure that's enough to draw me in. The mitigating factor here is that, if I decide not to watch it and later change my mind, I can catch up online.

The bottom line is that I believe it's only possible to handle regular watching of a certain number of shows at a time. Even someone like me who loves TV has to have a limit, and I find that there is always one show that settles to the bottom of the TiVo queue that we end up having to catch up on later. We are watching two new shows this fall, but both are comedies: Modern Family on ABC and Community on NBC. Sitcoms are much easier to digest, because you can watch one in 20 minutes if you skip the commercials.

Elsewhere in TV land, if you're a fan of the CSI franchise, you probably already know about the three-part crossover coming up next week. If you're like me and only watch the Thursday show (which I like to refer to as "CSI: Original Recipe"), you'll probably want to be home on Monday and Wednesday nights for the Miami and New York editions of the show, or set your recording device, because the case is going to carry across all three shows next week, and Laurence Fishburne's Ray Langston is going to appear in all of them. At least the producers and writers had the decency to structure the story so that it starts on Monday and concludes on Thursday.

That Was Intense

(I had originally intended to post this during October, so it's not quite as on-target as it might have been, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway...)

25 years ago this autumn, I first became acquainted with a movie that came to mean a great deal to me: Repo Man. Directed by Alex Cox, the dark, twisted low-budget punk/sci-fi satire quickly became one of my favorite movies, and it still is.

According to IMDB, Repo Man premiered in May of 1984, and the Boston Globe archives show a review from July (which I unfortunately can't read or link to because they still expect people to pay for access to their archives), but I became aware of it after returning to school in the fall, and I first saw it at the Nickelodeon Cinema near campus (now gone) at the beginning of October.

It's long enough ago now that I don't remember who I saw it with the first time, but I do remember that it made such an impression on me that, for the rest of the month of October, I convinced different groups of people to see it with me every Saturday night. I ultimately saw the movie more than a dozen times, and of course I own the DVD (a gift from a fellow admirer).

What I loved most about it was its attitude, the perfectly encapsulated gleeful nihilism expressed in lines like, "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are" and "Ordinary fuckin' people... I hate 'em." And also, it was sort of about the cars, which made it automatically of interest to me.

A couple of months ago, the car-nut site Jalopnik did an interview with Cox, which was what triggered the idea to write this. The interview is mostly about the cars used in the movie (no surprise on a car site), but it's also revealed that there is a sort-of non-sequel on the way: Repo Chick, according to IMDB, is scheduled for a 2010 release. I can't imagine how it can possibly live up to its antecedent, but I'll go see it anyway. "Let's go get a drink!"

This Week in Awesome (10/31/09)

Happy Halloween, everybody. I'm going to eschew the obvious and not do a Halloween-themed post, because we've all had about enough of it by now, right? I mean, Halloween is fun, but everything is so overdone these days that it's hard not to get sick of it. Just go buy some 50% off candy.

I was originally heading toward a completely different theme this week, but I decided it wasn't really viable in this context. So, onward... (BTW, all this week's links are video clips.)

This motorist had a slight parking problem that was captured by what seems to be a security camera. Funny, unless it happens to you. (YouTube via BoingBoing)

A mashup of sorts, comedically combining crime-fighting and tasteless fashion. I like this, and hope they do more with it. (Funny or Die)

Finally, see what happens when funny lady Amy Sedaris visits funny lady Chelsea Handler's show. It gets a bit, un, clinical, though not in a raunchy way, and Chelsea seems a bit taken aback at first, but really, what would you expect from these two? (YouTube)

Smoke Signals

Another day, another incident with an ignorant smoker. I had intended to write about something much lighter and fun today, and maybe I'll still do that later, but I'm still so angry about this I need to vent.

The bus stop near my house is generally smoke-free, but occasionally someone lights up while waiting. Generally they have the decency to stand where their smoke isn't going to bother anyone. But there's one woman who clearly doesn't care, and she arrived just after me this morning, and her noxious cloud arrived a couple of seconds later.

I stepped over to her and asked her if she would move to where the smoke would not waft toward the rest of us. She just stood there and acted like she hadn't heard me. Bad sign, right there. I raised my voice and said, "What are you going to do, just stand there and ignore me?" She retorted with, "This is a public sidewalk, right?" (That comment suggests to me that she's had this type of encounter before.) "I'm standing away from everyone else."

I tried again. "You're not standing far enough away, and the wind is carrying the smoke right past the rest of us. If you would just go and stand on the other side of the group..."

She turned to the others. There were maybe three or four other people, though none of the people who are usually waiting at the same time were there today. "Is this bothering any of you?" They all just stood there, and no one else said anything. She gave me a look that said fuck you, I win.

(By the way, big thanks to my fellow commuters there. Way to step up and do the right thing.)

Not seeing any other viable option, I moved back from the curb, and the bus arrived a minute or so later. But I'm absolutely livid about this woman's selfishness and disrespect for other people. In my experience, people who smoke are by nature somewhat less concerned with others, otherwise why would they inflict their exhaust on the rest of us? But this was jerkage on a higher level. This was willful disregard for my discomfort.

When I find myself in such situations, I always approach the person calmly, with initial respect, and try to make an appeal to their sense of common decency. If it's an open, outdoor area with no specific prohibition posted, I will only ask a person to move rather than put out the cigarette. But I think this is the first time I've encountered someone who obviously carries sociopathic tendencies and simply refuses to capitulate.

So I'm asking all of you, in complete seriousness, what would you do? Continuing to berate the woman wasn't going to do any good. I considered taking out my newspaper and using it as a fan to send the smoke back toward her, but at that point my behavior would have turned aggressive, making my behavior no better than hers, and might even run the risk of a harassment complaint. (If she won't move when asked to, who knows what she's capable of?)

If a nearby factory was disgorging polluted smoke into the air in my neighborhood, I'm sure people would not tolerate it. Inconsiderate smoking is still a public health issue, just on a smaller scale. If we just walk away and stand somewhere else, every selfish smoker wins, and this allows a minority (currently less than 20% of the US population, I believe) to inflict its toxins, which are known and proven to be harmful, on the majority. I can't just stand there and say nothing.

I'm not asking people to pick fights and put themselves in danger. I'm saying that we, as the majority of nonsmokers, need to stand up for ourselves and make it clear that smokers' behavior is offensive.

I know there are far more important issues we all need to deal with in our lives. I know some of you are going to think I'm just nuts. But I would like to know what you think about this.

Watch Wednesday Thursday (10/29/09)

AAUGH! I forgot again... (Since it's Halloween week, the Charlie Brown exclamation seems appropriate.) Seriously, why doesn't anyone email me and say "Hey, why no watch post?" I guess you'd rather sit back and enjoy watching me screw up. All right, fine...

This time we're back to vintage, and while by no means have I exhausted all my Accutron-Bulova-Caravelle holdings, I thought it was time to venture elsewhere. This is a Zodiac Aerospace Jet from, I believe, the mid-1960s. They didn't date-code them the way Bulova did, but a couple of minutes of searching on the web seems to confirm my assumption.

You probably noticed that the watch has a 24-hour dial, because it has a 24-hour movement, meaning the hour hand goes around the dial only once per day. In the picture above, the watch is showing 8:10 PM. As you might imagine, telling time with this watch takes a little getting used to. I made a reference to this in the Accutron post last month, but other companies made such movements too. They were popular with pilots and military personnel. I tend to gravitate to watches that do things that have nothing to do with my boring life, but that's because those are the watches that tend to be the most interesting looking.

The watch doesn't do anything other than tell time--no date, no chronograph functions, no alarm. I guess Zodiac figured telling the time on it was tricky enough. As far as I can tell, it's completely original too: it has the correct case back with Zodiac markings, and the crown is marked with that little cross-in-circle symbol that's on the dial. I added the strap, my standard black leather with white stitching. This is one time when I'm not unhappy with the strap; in fact, I bought three of these from The Watch Prince.

Zodiac has always been a below-the-radar brand, and they still are. It's very European, and I don't even know who carries them--maybe Tourneau? Consequently a watch like this is not especially valuable compared to other Swiss brands, but it's rare and cool, and that makes it valuable to me.

Tweed Encounter

This morning my bus came pretty late, and sometimes when that happens I'll switch to the Green Line at North Station. Even though I dislike riding it, sometimes it makes more sense to take it, because while there are numerous buses that run through Ruggles that can get me to work, they run less frequently after 9 AM. On Wednesdays we have our weekly breakfast at work, so I don't eat breakfast at home, and I didn't want to get stuck waiting for a bus and end up late and hungry.

So this morning I was on the Green Line, sitting in one of those perpendicular seats near the middle of the car, reading the paper and minding my own business. I noticed a really strong cigarette smoke odor, so I glanced around. There was a guy standing directly in front of me, and clearly he was the source of the smell. He took the opportunity of me looking up to get my attention and start talking to me.

"Is that cap a Donegal tweed?"

I was in fact wearing a Donegal tweed cap, so I knew he had to be talking to me. He told me he was from county Donegal in Ireland, and he certainly sounded the part. I hadn't completely disengaged my brain from the paper, I wasn't entirely awake yet, and I was still a little distracted by the smoke stench, so at first I wasn't sure how to respond and I managed only, "I haven't been there, I got it here."

We proceeded to have a conversation about the Irish imports shop in Cambridge where I'd gotten the hat some years ago (in fact, it was so long ago that the store was actually in Quincy Market at the time) and how to get there. Not knowing whether he was familiar with the area, I told him it was on Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Porter, on the northbound side of the street. He allowed that he would just go to Porter and ask someone there where to find it, which seemed fairly sensible to me.

I considered mentioning the Scottish import shop that's also in Porter Square, upstairs above the bagel place, but decided it was too early in the morning to provoke that sort of angst. By that point we were pulling into Park Street, and he abruptly left the train, without saying goodbye or thanks or anything. Maybe he was just a figment of my imagination. Wait, did I meet a nicotine-addicted leprechaun on the T?

Substitutions

As you all know by now, I love clothes and shopping. I also love getting a good deal, because value is an important part of the shopping experience. Almost anything in a mainstream store will go on sale if you wait long enough, so long ago I learned to wait. There is some risk that if you wait too long, the size you want will be gone, but in this age of national chains and online stores that complement brick-and-mortar locations, it's fairly small.

But what happens when the item you want doesn't go on sale? What if it's not something available from a large retailer, but rather is an esoteric item, or one that was made in limited numbers? What happens if your size is indeed sold out? There is almost always an alternative, if you're willing to look hard enough, though sometimes the alternative finds you.

J. Crew started selling this shirt online back in the spring. I wanted one immediately, without ever having seen it in person at a store or even in a catalog photo. But $100 is a lot for a casual shirt, especially one that's a little too casual to wear to the office. (For that matter it's a lot to pay for a dress shirt, but if you need to wear dress shirts to work every day, I think that expense can be justified if you buy for quality and durability.)

So I waited. And waited, all spring and summer, but no markdown. J. Crew has gotten stingier with the markdowns over the past few years, mainly because it helps their bottom line. The stuff that ends up going on sale is usually not the stuff I want. There are exceptions, of course, like last year's flannel-lined khakis, but often I end up passing up things I want because I won't pay their asking price, and it looked like that was going to be the case with this shirt. (I've also noticed that some of the stores have cut back on their sale sections, but this seems to vary by location.)

About a month ago I went into a Gap to see what new fall things they were offering. I tend to do this about once a month just to keep up, and also to see what's been marked down. I came across a shirt I'd never seen that was pretty much an exact copy of the J. Crew shirt. (I can't link to it because it's not on the Gap site, but this shirt seems to be the same style only in a different color.) All the key details--the white contrast stitching, the two patch pockets with buttons (the left one really ought to have a pencil slot, huh?), even that little extended tab thing at the neck--were the same.

Stores' collections often mirror one another in a given season to an extent, but I don't think I've ever seen such a blatant copy of one store's item in another store while both stores were concurrently still selling the items. The best part was that the Gap shirt was only $45, and I had a $10 reward card (earned from purchases on a Banana Republic card that I mostly use at Gap and Old Navy these days) to spend.

When I bought the shirt, I happened to be in a shopping area that also had a J. Crew, so I wandered over to do a little comparison. The fabrics are about the same weight and the cut is about the same, but the Gap shirt was a slightly lighter shade of gray, which I found I liked better when I saw them side-by-side. The J. Crew shirt has one quirky detail that isn't apparent from the pictures on the web, nor is it mentioned in the description: hidden buttons under the collar, like some early-90's department-store shirt. It's an odd and incongruous detail that adds nothing to the shirt, and I'm glad Gap didn't copy it.

The Gypsy and the Hobo

(Caution: Mad Men spoilers...)

Guess I was wrong: Don seemed completely unprepared when Betty confronted him about the contents of the box. Some people seem surprised that this took place so soon, but after Betty got into the desk in last week's episode, I could not see her biding her time sitting on those unanswered questions for long.

I think last night's scenes between Don and Betty regarding the contents of the box were the finest moments the series has given us yet. I'm always prepared for something to come along and cause me to change that opinion: after season 1 it was the Kodak presentation followed by Don's return to the empty house; during season 2 it was replaced by Don's visit to Peggy in the hospital, and later in the season that scene was replaced by the one where Peggy told Pete she'd had his baby. There's no question that Mad Men is one of the all-time masterworks of American television, and it's thrilling to be able to witness it on a weekly basis.

When she surprised Don at home, Betty was clearly ready to let her anger loose, but for once she was able to keep it in check and act like an adult. Don was the one who was childish at first (his wounded, plaintive "it's private!"), but he realized that in order to have any chance to set things right with Betty he had to give her the (almost) complete truth, which he did (except for the part about the dog tags). This is not the Don Draper we're used to; this was a Don we've never seen before, one that Betty had never seen either. Amazing acting by both January Jones and Jon Hamm in these scenes. Hopefully this will earn Jones her belated Emmy nomination, and will bring wins for both of them next year.

And of course, looming over the whole evening was Miss Farrell sitting outside in the car. I need to go back and watch the whole episode again, mostly because I was distracted by that little detail, and kept expecting her knock on the door, which pulled me away from the story. And would Don have been so distracted by the illicit getaway that he'd fail to notice Betty's car, indicating that she had returned unexpectedly? I tripped over that too.

This Week in Awesome (10/24/09)

This week, some sites that can help make your life a little easier, and some other stuff...

Is your office the kind of place where everyone can see what everyone else is doing? If so, this site offers ways you can look busy while not actually doing any real work. (UrbanDaddy)

In a similar vein, the site ThinkGeek offers accessories that can be of assistance, like this convex mirror so you can see bosses and coworkers approaching behind you, and this USB foot switch can make switching between not-work and work super-easy.

There are a number of web sites that do one thing but do it well, such as tell you what color the lights on the Empire State Building are going to be on a given day and why, or whether or not Abe Vigoda is alive. The New York Times City Room blog was kind enough to provide a link to a list of some of them.

Have you ever wanted to have an action figure made in the likeness of yourself, or someone you love? Now you can. There's also a site out there that will make you into a bobblehead, but I couldn't find it again... (Thrillist via Racked)

And finally, another reminder that foreign countries produce much better commercials than we do. This one's a bit NSFW, so put those headphones on... (YouTube via Jalopnik)

Youth of Today

I just got back from doing an errand. It's about 45 degrees out today, somewhat cooler than was forecast, and I was barely warm enough in my coat and cap. On the T there was a young woman, probably a Northeastern student (it's where she got off the train) wearing a snorkel parka and flip-flops. I can only imagine how uncomfortable she must be when walking outside.

I also happened to overhear another student talking to one of his friends (the train was fairly crowded, and like me, they were standing): "Dude, I would love to be in a wheelchair. Getting to sit down all the time would be awesome."

In the Air

The Mrs. has been suffering with a cold this week, and I think I may finally be getting it. Every day I go to work on subway trains with, typically, dozens of coughing and sneezing commuters, and I don't catch anything, but my immune system can't fend off her feeble germs?

The wise and thrifty Giuseppe over at An Affordable Wardrobe, a bit under the weather himself, posted a hot toddy recipe yesterday. If things get worse I'm going to sample it. In the interim, it's time for bed.

Homophonally Yours

Dear Gap,

As someone who works with words for a living and who expends a fair amount of effort in achieving correctness in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, I feel compelled to bring this error to your attention.

This item on your web site is described as a "buffalo yolk puffer jacket." By "buffalo" I assume you are referring to the buffalo plaid that's crawled back from the dead along with all the other 80's fashion cues and is everywhere this season. I can also handle "puffer," although I think it's a stupid term to describe a jacket.

It's "yolk" that has me confused. Even if buffalo could lay eggs, I don't see how they could have anything to do with this piece of outerwear. I mean, they'd spoil, right? Perhaps you meant "yoke," referring to that area across the shoulders where the buffalo plaid has been placed? Oops, how embarrassing.

Or maybe not: if this sort of mistake made it past your production staff and onto your web site, then maybe the majority of your customers are just as poorly educated and won't ever notice. Kids these days just don't know how to spell anymore, but who cares? They can still aspire to get jobs writing product copy or doing web production for the Gap.

Your intrepid blogger,
Some Assembly Required

P.S. If you decide you want to hire someone who can do this sort of thing correctly, get in touch. But I don't work cheap.

The Color Blue

(Caution: Mad Men spoilers...)

So, Betty finally got into the desk drawer. I think we all expected her to eventually; it was just a question of when. Obviously she's upset, and being such an emotional child, she's going to stay that way.

As usual, more questions than answers. For me, Betty's discovery raised more questions about Don than about her: why would Don keep all that sensitive, potentially incriminating stuff in the drawer to begin with, and then leave the keys in his robe pocket? It would be easy, and make much more sense, for him to get a safe deposit box near the office. And he's much too careful about everything.

I can understand him wanting to keep his family photos nearby, but in that case he should have had copies made so there would be no revelatory writing on the back. But the deed, and the divorce papers? (By the way, shouldn't Anna have that deed?) The more I think about it, the more I think Don wanted Betty to find these things. I think part of him enjoys putting her through the mind games. But I could be totally wrong. This show usually doesn't end up going where you think it will, which is one of the reasons I love it so much.

I am going to make one prediction, though: Miss Farrell was in fact the one who called the Drapers' house, even though she denied it, and she is going to wig the fuck out at some point before the season ends. I mean, showing up on Don's commuter train? That's getting dangerously close to Fatal Attraction territory.

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday I woke up (at 9:30) to find it raining hard. I knew we didn't need to go anywhere, so I decided it was going to be one of those days where I just threw on some old comfy clothes and didn't leave the house. I spent the remainder of the morning enjoying organic Mexican coffee and "two-bite cinnamon rolls" from Whole Foods.

The Mrs. had put on the TV (not something I would typically do on a Sunday morning, but she is who she is) and The Remains of the Day happened to be starting. She had never seen it, and I hadn't seen it since it first came out; its sadness was quite appropriate to the gloom of the day. After that we watched a documentary about the heavy metal band Anvil that I'd recorded from VH1 a couple of weeks ago. Slightly opposite, yes.

I took the dog out later in the afternoon, and by then it was raining harder, so she didn't even want to be outside for more than a couple of minutes. I came back inside, assembled a little tray of cheese and crackers, and tuned the TV to the Patriots game, to find it was SNOWING 30 miles away in Foxboro. What month is this? (For some reason I'd thought yesterday's game was being played in Tennessee; guess I'd read the schedule wrong.) That was one of those strange games that happens every once in a while, and even though I did feel a little bad for the Titans, it is kind of fun to watch a blowout, as long as you're on the winning side.

I didn't do anything more productive than a load of laundry, though I did have to trudge back outside around 8 PM to put out the trash. It was still raining hard, so apparently it wasn't cold enough where we are to become snow, which is really just as well. This week we're supposed to have a few days of temperatures around 60, which is what it's supposed to be for this time of year.

This Week in Awesome (10/17/09)

This was deadline week at work, so I wasn't able to goof off online quite as much as usual, but I have a few items. In order, from coolest to strangest...

England is releasing some sweet postage stamps of classic album covers. Why can't we get something like this in the USA? (The Awl)

Now something can come between you and your Calvins, but only if you're the sort of guy who feels like you need some enhancement downstairs. Ick. (NY Observer via Racked)

And finally, a cute little animated video illustrating the challenges faced by the people who do all that driving for Google Street View. (Funny or Die)

Watch Wednesday Thursday (10/15/09)

Hmm, what did I forget to do? Again? I may have to start marking up a calendar or something...

Anyway, it's time for another contemporary watch. This is another Casio analog watch. This one is a large and rugged diving model that I got on eBay (of course) back in the spring, for less than $50. The second button above the main crown is for a light. There are actually two LEDs set into the rim that runs around the outer edge of the dial, one at the 12 position and the other at the 6. It's got to be the brightest illumination I've ever seen on a watch, and makes Timex's Indiglo light look sad and weak. Seriously, I think you could use this watch as a flashlight in an emergency. Unfortunately, it doesn't stay on long enough to get a decent picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.

The strap that looks like a tire did not come on the watch; as usual, I had to change the standard diver's strap because it was ugly, uncomfortable, and made of a cheap resin that I figured would crack and break after just a short amount of wear. These tire-tread straps are made of rubber, which is more comfortable on the wrist, more flexible, and last much longer. I got quite a bit of wear out of this watch over the summer, because rubber straps tend to be easier for me to wear in warm, humid weather.

Thursday Afternoon Distraction

Kinda busy this week, so I thought I'd find something tasty for you to read until I can resurface...

I have not attempted to make (or wear) any sort of Halloween costume since, oh, probably around 1993. You may be one of those people who enjoys doing so, but you don't have to be to enjoy this piece over at The Awl.

And I'm not sure if I've said this before in this space, but just about everything at The Awl is pretty frickin' awesome, so you may want to browse around for a while. I mean, how can you not like a site whose tag line is "be less stupid"?

A Chill in the Air

The cold sneaked up on us kind of quick, huh? It's been about ten degrees below normal during the day, and this morning it was 39 degrees. Whoa. The dog was whining at 5 AM because she had thrashed around and knocked off her blanket, and was cold.

We're in the somewhat awkward position of still having the air conditioners in the windows. Okay, maybe not "awkward" per se, maybe it's more like "lazy." I completely forgot about it over the long weekend until Monday, when the Mrs. was working and I couldn't deal with them by myself.

And as much as I don't want to be turning on the heat this early, I would be inclined to, but there's no point in doing that, yet. See, I'm the sort of person who is compulsive enough to have cut blocks of foam to fit around each of the AC units to create a tight seal. That works great when we want to keep the cold in and the heat out, but not so great when it's the other way around. I'm not going to turn on the heat before October 15th just to have it wasted with cold seeping in around the AC units.

No, we just have to deal with them, so we'll remove and store the units tonight. Regardless of whether or not we turn on the heat, it's too cold to wait until the weekend.

Condiment Deficiency

We took a little day trip up to Portland yesterday. Nice day, cute shops, lots of pretty foliage on the drive up, etc.

At a brewpub where we went for lunch, the menu had a pastrami sandwich that was described as being served with dijon mustard. I asked the waitress if it was possible to get the sandwich with Gulden's mustard instead. She replied, "I don't know what that is, so the answer's probably no." She also volunteered that they had yellow mustard and honey mustard.

Needless to say, I ordered something else. I was willing to overlook the fact that the sandwich had provolone instead of swiss, but the mustard is non-negotiable. Those poor Portlanders have it tough.

This Week in Awesome (10/10/09)

Lots o' good stuff this week:

First, a callback of sorts: if you remember the Traffic Barrel Monster I mentioned a few months back, you may be pleased to know that he has found himself a friend. (WRAL-TV via Jalopnik)

Halloween is just around the corner, and these treats seem especially appropriate. (AdFreak via Kempt)

Here's a quick little video clip for anyone who was a fan of the cheesfest that was Baywatch  I don't count myself in that group, because a person has to have some standards. (Funny or Die via TV Squad)

Here's a site that spotlights the darker side of making and selling your own craft items. I'm honestly not sure if this is a spoof or real, but that's part of its appeal. (Gizmodo via Racked)

And finally, those of you with small children may want to think twice before giving them one of these cookie cutters to use with the clay. (Consumerist)

Happy long weekend to those of you who don't have to work Monday...

Bad Clothes Day

Last week I thought it was fall for sure--I needed a jacket in the mornings, it was cold enough at night to need an extra blanket--but the weather can't make up its mind. Yesterday it was raining but also kind of warm (definitely much too warm for my Barbour coat), and I decided I didn't feel like wearing my blue L.L. Bean rain jacket because I tend to get overheated in it (Gore-Tex can claim whatever it wants, but I've yet to find a waterproof rain garment that does not cause this feeling).

A while back I'd picked up one of these on eBay, and it seemed like the right sort of day to wear it. As it turned out, I got just as overheated wearing it, even though it's very light. The other thing about that, though, is that because it's so light and is only lined down to about the mid-chest, it doesn't really have any body or drape. It's kind of floppy, and yesterday was very windy. I didn't get especially wet, but if you'd seen me walking around the Longwood area you might have thought I was trying to swat away an errant bee or something. I'm contemplating whether it's worth keeping, and wondering if I can convince the Mrs. to sew some fishing weights into the botton hem.

I think this is the sort of problem that women experience with their clothing more often than men. I hate wearing clothing that I have to keep fussing with once I've put it on. To compound the situation, I'd chosen to wear a pair of corduroy jeans (yeah, the ones I bought at Gap last weekend). Those fit fine, but the color, which indoors looks like brown, gray, and olive all at once (Gap calls it "gray pearl") looked green outside in natural light. Like, Mr. Green Jeans green. I wasn't too pleased. It was the sartorial equivalent of a bad hair day.

Oh, and the forecast says it's going to rain again tomorrow. Swell.

Promotional Consideration

A while back I wrote about some mints I like. After that post I got a nice email from a person who does PR for the company. She had found me through a Google alert for "Newman's Own Organics" and wanted to thank me for writing about the company and the product. She offered to send me a sampling of some of the company's other products, which I gratefully accepted.

Since then we've been enjoying items like cookies, chocolate bars, pretzels, dried fruit, and more mints. (There were also some soy crisps, but those are not our thing at all, so I brought them to work and put them in the kitchen.) She even included some dog food (which I had requested for our spoiled girl). I thought it would be a small sample of dry kibble, but it was several full-size cans of "wet" food. Our dog was beside herself with food joy, but we only gave her a small quantity of it on a few random occasions, and mixed it in with her regular dry food, because we didn't want her to get too used to this luxurious delicacy (and thus expect it every day).

I liked everything and would recommend it, though I think the pretzels and the chocolate are particularly good. The chocolate bars come in six flavors: milk, mocha milk, dark, orange dark, espresso dark, and super dark. I didn't find the super dark as exciting as I thought it would be, but it may just be my palate and personal preferences. I liked the plain dark the best; I thought it had an excellent balance between bitterness and sweetness. And if you are the sort who prefers milk chocolate, this one is better than most.

[I had been planning to write about these treats at some point, but in light of the recent news that the government may require bloggers to disclose items they may receive (for review or as gifts, if I understand correctly) I thought I might as well go ahead and do it now. Thank you, Newman's Own Organics, for the extremely generous box o' goodies you sent me.]

Hard to Forget

About a month ago in one of my TWiA posts, I alluded to a story involving my father-in-law Bill and Al Gore. Today seems as good a time as any to spin out the tale...

For a number of years my father-in-law worked as a journalist. He was old school before it was even called old school, and was thoroughly versed in churning out concise, accurate copy on deadline, which also meant using proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation at all times. (And believe me when I tell you that even if he wasn't writing for a living, he was the sort of person who would have followed those rules anyway.)

He spent about eight years at the Nashville Tennessean as a science and environment reporter. During that time he mentored some of the younger reporters, including Al Gore, who worked there for about a year around 1970. He felt it was his responsibility to emphatically impress his beliefs regarding the fundamentals of good writing upon all the young reporters, including Gore.

Many years later Bill ended up working as a consultant to local political candidates in the southern California town where he lived, so he was acquainted with many members of the city government. At some point after Clinton and Gore left office, Gore was scheduled to give a speech in one of the nearby towns, so Bill went with one of the city council members.

Outside the venue, they stood behind a barricade along the path Gore would take to enter the facility. He arrived and climbed out of his limo along with his Secret Service detail. Gore made his way down the walkway, waving at various people. He spotted Bill, shouted out Bill's name, and veered off his path toward him, confusing the Secret Service agents.

He shook Bill's hand and Bill said, "I wasn't sure you would remember me." Gore replied, "Remember you? I used to have nightmares about you."

Jean Therapy Revisited

About a month or so ago, the Gap brought out its new line of jeans for men and women. I had read about them several months before they reached stores, and I was somewhat curious, as I have been having a minor moment of enlightenment about my jeans. I finally realized that I've been buying jeans that are cut much too full for me and don't look good. While I avoid slim-fit pants, there is certainly a lot of space (no pun intended) between these two extremes.

So Friday night we needed to go to the mall to take care of a couple of errands, and I decided it was time to check out the Gap jeans. For me "check out" means "try on." I generally hate trying on clothes in a store, and tend to buy things and bring them home to try on, which means I sometimes have to go back to the store to exchange or return items. I guess I just don't like fitting rooms, but in this case I figured it was easier to do the trying on at the store.

There are seven fits for men, ranging from skinny to loose. To me this seems like too many, but I understand that Gap is trying to appeal to the broadest possible range of customers. I was able to eliminate anything that was too slim, low-waisted, or boot-cut. Knowing that I was also trying to avoid anything too loose meant being able to eliminate styles from the other end of the range as well. Eventually I was able to settle on the appropriately named Standard, which is in the comfortable middle of the range. Not tight, but not a lot of excess fabric either.

I was very impressed with the fit and construction of the jeans. The fabric is nicely soft and broken in, unlike a lot of other jeans. They sit nicely just below the waist. The leg openings are neither too wide nor too narrow. I was ready to buy a pair, but then I ran into the fail: every single style of Standard jeans has some kind of wash or treatment or finish that is distressed, discolored, or whiskered. This is absolutely a deal-breaker for me. If I'm going to spend $55 on a pair of jeans (not an unreasonable amount of money, but not throwaway either), I expect to be able to wear them to work, which means the color needs to be consistent. They aren't of much use to me if I can only wear them on weekends.

I did find corduroy jeans in a slightly different fit that were not faded or distressed in any way, so I bought a pair of those. (J. Crew has taken to sanding the thighs of theirs so they appear worn, and theirs cost $20 more than Gap's.) Cord jeans have been a staple of my wardrobe since I was in high school; I went to a parochial school with a dress code, and denim jeans were not permitted, but cords were, so I had them in many different colors. Now I stick to tan, brown, gray, and olive-ish green, but they still are just as comfortable and versatile.

I'm hoping Gap gets a clue and brings out additional denim styles that are not distressed. In the meantime, I'm going to have to look elsewhere.

This Week in Awesome (10/3/09)

For this week we have a small but tasty selection...

You knew this one was coming: Sesame Street spoofs Mad Men. (YouTube via Basket of Kisses)

Just discovered this site yesterday, courtesy of Consumerist: Your Logo Makes Me Barf.

This site is one I have been visiting regularly for a while, and I thought it was time to share with the group. I guess you'd call it an image blog, but it really ends up being much more than that. The name alone makes it worth checking out. (Note: there are a few images that may be a little NSFW.)

The Peggy Olson Freakout

(We've been catching up on some of the TV we missed while away, hence the delayed sentiment of this...)

Oh, Peggy. Peggy, Peggy, Peggy. What were you thinking? I mean, how could you? Ewwwww. Just. Eww.

Watch Wednesday (9/30/09)

Welcome back to another edition of Watch Wednesday (now actually appearing on Wednesday again, but subject to possible future schedule adjustment due to middle-aged brain malfunction). This time around the watch is an Accutron Deep Sea from 1970. The Accutron completes my personal trifecta of vintage watch obsession, as it was and is a sibling brand to the Bulova and Caravelle watches previously featured.

Accutron was started at the beginning of the 1960s as a showcase for Bulova's technological achievements in watchmaking (which, of course, could be sold at higher prices than even the fanciest Bulova models). The Accutron 214 movement was the world's first battery-powered watch, but quartz watches would not come to market for another decade or more. The battery supplied power to a movement that ran off the vibration of a tiny tuning fork; if you hold one of these Accutrons up to your ear, you can hear it humming.

Accutron produced mamy desirable (and now valuable) models, including the Astronaut, which had a 24-hour movement (the hour hand goes around the dial only once per day instead of the more typical twice), and my personal favorite, the Spaceview, which exposed the electronic movement to view by eliminating the dial altogether. I had a Spaceview a long time ago, pretty early in my collecting, but sold it some years back when times were tight. I've been looking for another one for a while, but they have gotten consdierably more expensive in the intervening years, and if I'm going to make that kind of investment again, I want to find exactly the right one.

The Deep Sea was marketed as a diver's watch, which is fairly obvious given its rotating countdown bezel and the depth rating of "666 feet" marked on the dial. Other cool features of this model: the Accutron tuning fork symbol at the end of the second hand, the red numerals on the date wheel, the magnified date window on the inner side of the crystal so that it doesn't protrude on the outside, and the crown tucked in unobtrusively at the four o'clock position.

I love this watch, but it has always run fast. It can gain a couple of minutes over the course of a work day, which isn't terrible, but it should run more accurately than that. However, when I took it out of the drawer to take the picture, it was about 30 minutes slow, so I have no idea what's going on. I may have to think about having it serviced.

New York Thoughts

A few observations and thoughts from my most recent visit to New York:

Everyone should visit the observatory at the the Empire State Building. It's a little corny, but it's one of those things that you really ought to do. I had been twice, as a kid of maybe ten or eleven, and once during college, on the way back from spending spring break with a friend at his grandparents' place on the Jersey shore. If you have been, you should go again, at night. The Mrs. had never been, so we went on Friday night. It was beautifully clear and just a bit windy a thousand feet above Fifth Avenue. The stars, the lights, the night air, it's all truly an amazing experience. We even saw a group of Tibetan monks in line.

I also recommend walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. You can get the same view by riding the subway line that passes over one of the bridges, but it's gone in a couple of minutes. You can walk the bridge at your chosen pace and really soak in the magnitude and grandeur of the city.

All the fashionable people in Manhattan were wearing scarves looped and draped loosely around the neck. Mostly women, but a noticeable number of men too, and no one seemed to have any regard for the temperature. I mean, it was around 70 degrees the whole time we were there, and the parade of scarf-wearing folks never let up.

It's almost impossible to walk down the sidewalk on Broadway in Soho on Saturday afternoon. On Sundays, most of the stores start opening at 11, but hardly anyone shows up until at least an hour later.

Greenwich Village, particularly west of Seventh Avenue, is an excellent place to park the car for a few days. There are no parking restrictions other than street cleaning, which means you can park on Friday afternoon and not need to move it again until Tuesday morning.

And you won't need the car. Between subways, buses, cabs, and just walking, you can get anywhere you need to be. Just being there encourages walking, which is great.

Go to ground zero. Just go down there. Don't go as part of a big tacky group of bus-riding tourists from out in the flatland, though you'll have to work your way around plenty of them. Go and stand and look at the actual site, sixteen-plus acres, and contemplate what happened there. Go over to St. Paul's church on Church Street, on the east side of the site, and look around at the commemorative displays they've set up inside, and think about how incredible it is that one of the oldest buildings on the island, that close, was not damaged. Then go around the corner to the firehouse on Liberty Street, on the south side of the site, and look at the bronze memorial that runs the length of the building. I've done this several times, and I'll keep doing it long after the new buildings are finally finished.

Breakfast at Junior's on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. We go every single visit, without fail. Get the french toast.

Three

We're back, and we had a wonderful time. And, as it happens, today is my third blogoversary. Each time I hit this milestone and look back, there is so much more to reflect on. I keep coming up with new ideas that take the blog in new directions, and I appreciate that dozens of you (yes, I track the stats, no point in being modest) stop by on a regular or semi-regular basis to read my often self-indulgent windage.

Having an audience is terrific, though it brings with it a sense of responsibility. But the great part is that, the more I do this, the more it energizes and motivates me to keep producing stuff that's entertaining and worthy of an audience. So thanks to everyone who reads, everyone who's commented. I could and would keep going even if you weren't visiting, but it's much more satisfying because you are.

This Week in Awesome (9/26/09)

Hi there. I'm away for a few days and probably not in the general vicinity of a computer, but you're still reading this fresh installment of TWiA through the magic of post-dated posting. Isn't technology cool?

There's a site called Old Jews Telling Jokes. Really. I wish it had been around a couple of years ago; we could have tried to get my father-in-law on it, except they probably would have run out of videotape before he'd finished telling the joke. (The Awl)

Three words: Lego. Iggy. Pop. (Telegraph UK via Unlikely Words)

In the vein of last week's "MA Men" but not quite as over the top, there's a new McDonald's commercial that's geared specifically to the sensibilities of New Englanders. (YouTube)

Programming Notes

The Mrs. and I are heading to New York for a few days to celebrate our 11th anniversary. I considered borrowing a TV-network approach and running a repeat of an earlier TWiA this weekend, but concluded that would be pretty low-class and tacky, and I was raised better than that.

So I've prepared an episode that will appear on Saturday (the clever folks at Blogger have given me the ability to write posts and schedule them to go live on a future day and time of my choosing). After that I don't expect to post again until Tuesday.

And best wishes to all our friends who are also celebrating wedding anniversaries this weekend (it's a popular time of year to get married), including APB and The Prof, W&C, and our Brooklyn friends whom we'll be seeing Sunday (what was that line Peggy Olson said early on in the first season of Mad Men? "I’m from Bay Ridge; we have manners." Completely irrelevant to this, but they live in Bay Ridge so my mind just jumped there...)

File Under "Fanatically Obsessive"

Last week on the season premiere of Fringe, there was a nice little shout-out to The X-Files, its obvious television antecedent. Actually, there were two. The first was in the first scene, when the guy in the apartment was watching the show (the image of Scully and Mulder was briefly shown on his TV set), and then later, during Agent Broyles's testimony before the Senate committee, one senator made a reference to more than 50 years of budgetary indulgences of "the old X designation" and Fringe Division.

While reading a post on TV Squad about these references, I followed a link posted by a commenter that's pretty seriously brain-bending. If you remember the 1980s TV series St. Elsewhere, then you'll probably recall that in the final scene of the final episode, it was strongly implied that everything that had happened in the six seasons of the show's run had been a figment of an autistic boy's imagination.

What I didn't realize is that, based on character connections, crossovers, references and other links between St. Elsewhere and other TV series, and further connections between those shows and others, there is a school of thought that contends that all shows within this web of connections would also have to be products of this boy's imagination.

This theory is referred to as the "Tommy Westphall Universe" (referring to the boy with the vivid imagination), and it encompasses nearly 300 TV shows going back as far as I Love Lucy and includes The X-Files, and thus Fringe as well, although this is debatable: the mythology of Fringe is predicated on the existence of a parallel universe, or possibly many of them, so I'm not sure that would count under the rules of the theory (yes, there are rules), or whether or not it explains how Fringe can link itself to the X-Files and have someone be watching The X-Files within the same episode. Ouch.

If you find this stuff interesting and feel like having your mind twisted, beat on, drop-kicked across the room, and otherwise blown for a couple of hours, have a look at it here.

Regardless of whether or not a sizable chunk of our collective television history was entirely the product of the imagination of someone who himself was a character on a TV show (just forming that phrase made my brain hurt), the simple fact that there are connections linking so many shows is pretty amazing on its own.

Bad Vibes

There's been some weirdness in the air. Yesterday morning as I was getting off the bus, the doors slammed shut in front of me. I think the driver wasn't paying attention, because as I reached the front of the bus I looked toward her, meaning to say thanks, but she was looking the other way out her side window, perhaps checking her mirror in preparing to pull back out into the road. Fortunately no damage done (the doors caught the tip of my shoe and reopened), but it was close. Kind of jarring when you're not fully awake yet. Some days just getting to work is work.

Later on, while on my way home, I got bitched out by a panhandler because I ignored her. That's a new one, a panhandler with issues. To be honest, I've been ignoring panhandlers for almost 30 years, mainly because I don't like the idea that I may be supporting someone's drug, liquor, or cigarette habit in the guise of a request for money for food (and in instances when I have had surplus food on me and offered it to someone, I've been rebuffed and scowled at), but also because I think it's unfair to give money to one person and not to the others who are also out there asking, so it's just easier not to make eye contact or engage. Obviously there's no easy answer, but I guess the woman had a valid point.

This morning's commute sucked, but not for the usual reasons. Traffic on route 28 (the Fellsway) was backed up as far as my street, which fortunately is a very unusual occurrence. It has happened a couple of times before, but I haven't seen cars backed up so far. There were some problems on 93 south this morning, and a lot of people take 28 south to get over to Storrow Drive or get onto 93 by Mystic Avenue. When things get messy, the backups can extend all the way through the ridiculous light cycle at Wellington Circle, but where I board the bus is about a mile and a half from 93, so things had to be really screwed today. Instead of standing around watching traffic crawl by, I opted to walk up the road ten minutes to an intersection where two other lines meet my usual one, and caught a different bus there.

When I finally made it to Wellington and onto an Orange Line train (20 minutes later than usual), there was no AC in the car, and of course the train was fully packed, and just for good measure we had to stop in the tunnel outside North Station because the trains up ahead of us were not yet moving. Yeah, good times. But really, it's been a long time since I've had a rough morning commute, so I have no real cause to complain. But we're going away this weekend, and I hope the vibes or karma or whatever has sorted itself out by then.

Analog

The older I get, the more I look backward with regard to music. I suppose this is natural; the music of our formative years tends to be deeply rooted in the psyche. I still like discovering new music, but I find less that appeals to me these days.

I have over 200 vinyl LPs in the basement, and I've started going through them with the intent of selling some of them on eBay. But I wasn't one of those people who bought duplicates of everything on compact disc when CDs replaced vinyl. I would have loved to do that, but I was making so little money at the time that it was impossible. As time went by I rebought some albums on CD, and I still do once in a while; I recently found a remastered edition of Graham Parker's 1979 new wave classic Squeezing Out Sparks.

Now it's possible to buy many of my old albums as mp3 downloads, but I haven't quite been able to give myself over completely to that notion. I have bought mp3s, of course, but only scattered singles, like the '70s classic "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult, or The Pogues' bittersweet Christmas song "Fairytale of New York."

I received an iTunes gift card for my birthday, and spent about two hours looking around, trying to decide what to use it for. I found a best-of compilation by Bauhaus, a band I'd always liked but never got into too deeply (though among my vinyl there is a 12" single of "Bela Lugosi's Dead"). It seemed like a good choice until I noticed the dreaded iTunes words "partial album" in the listing. I went looking for the CD on Amazon and found that three of the tracks are not part of the iTunes version, for whatever reason.

Eventually I settled on a two-volume, 32-track greatest-hits collection by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble. Listening to it reminded me of Jimi Hendrix, not just because of SRV's version of "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" but because he's often compared to Hendrix. I've always loved Hendrix's music, but I've never owned any of it, so I rolled over to half.com and picked up the three original Jimi Hendrix Experience releases for about $5 each. One of the sellers had a copy of the Bauhaus disc, so I got that too.

I don't get why music labels don't make older albums available at lower prices; five or six bucks seems reasonable for something that's been out for twenty years or more. I know I would buy a lot more CDs at those prices, and since the music industry is supposedly struggling, it might boost sales.

All this nostalgia must have caused some sort of brain fever, because I found myself looking through the "vintage electronics" section of eBay in search of an Onkyo analog receiver like the one I had in college (scroll down a bit to the pic with the Yale pennant). I found and passed on a couple of them before succumbing and buying one. I don't really know what I'm going to do with it. I don't have a place to put it, and I don't have any speakers I could connect to it, and looking for vintage speakers is a sure route to madness. But there's some space on top of the dog's crate, and I could haul my old turntable up from the basement...

This Week in Awesome (9/19/09)

After a busy week at work, I slept for almost ten hours today (minus a brief dog-walking interruption), and it felt great. Wish I could do that every day...

This has been around since the beginning of the week, but it's too good not to mention: a Mad Men spoof with a heavy Boston accent. Warning: extremely NSFW! (Funny or Die via Universal Hub)

I don't know if these awkward facebook moments are real or not, but they are funny. (CollogeHumor via Unlikely Words)

And I leave you with a roundup of some very inappropriate toys. (Huffington Post via Consumerist)

Fall TV Thoughts

The fall TV season is upon us. You are of course entitled to not care, but if you're reading this, then you know that I do care, at least to some extent. As with every new season, there are some promising new shows; the trick is to figure out which ones are worth your time. I usually try to do this before they make their debuts, but that's not always possible. At least now, with DVD box sets and Hulu and Netflix streaming, it's possible to get on board a show you didn't start watching from its premiere.

In 2004 I was determined not to get caught up in Lost because I wasn't sure I wanted to make the commitment to a serialized show that would require rigorous weekly attention. But there was so much buzz leading up to the premiere that at the last minute I decided to go ahead and record it (I was still using a VCR back then, how quaint), and ended up recording three or four episodes before getting around to watching them, at which point I was, of course, completely hooked.

Ours is a TV-loving household, but we are selective. The Mrs. goes to bed much earlier these days, because she has to get up earlier, so the evening's TV viewing typically ends by 9:30 or 10 PM, which means we are usually catching up on shows over the weekend. Also, I have learned to muster the strength to stop watching a show when it declines or jumps the shark, which helps cut down on the overall time commitment. And with a TiVo we save some time by skipping over commercials.

(For a handy grid showing all the networks' fall schedules, see this TV Guide Magazine page.)

I'm going to run through the networks one by one, starting with ABC. They have a block of four new comedies on Wednesdays, all featuring familiar faces like Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, Ed O'Neill, and Courteney Cox. So far the only one of these that has any significant buzz is the one with O'Neill, Modern Family, which is presented as an Office-style mockumentary about three families. I'm not a particularly big fan of O'Neill, but I'll be checking this one out because it looks pretty funny. The rest of them just look like the same old sitcom thing.

ABC also has four new dramas: one, following those Wednesday comedies, is called Eastwick and is based on the book and movie about the witches, which means it has no appeal to me whatsoever and I can skip it. There's a procedural on Tuesdays called The Forgotten that looks an awful lot like Cold Case, which I've never watched, so I don't need to watch this. As of now, there is not one single show on Tuesdays that we already watch or plan to, so it looks like it will be a good night to catch up on Sunday's and Monday's shows.

On Tuesdays starting in November, ABC will launch a remake of the 80s sci-fi miniseries V (which I never watched, as it was on during the 1980s, a period of time when, amazingly, I watched almost no TV). It stars Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet), but that alone isn't enough to get me to watch. I'm still undecided on this one.

The one that has caught my interest is another sci-fi show, FlashForward, which will be on Thursdays at 8. Everyone in the world blacks out for two minutes, and during that time has visions of themselves six months in the future. ABC is hoping this turns into their next Lost, and it even has two of that show's actors, Dominic Monaghan (Charile) and Sonya Walger (Penny), along with Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, and others. I'll probably end up getting hooked on this one too.

CBS has one new comedy and three new dramas, but not much here is looking interesting. The comedy, Accidentally On Purpose, stars Jenna Elfman as a cougarish woman who hooks up with a much younger dude, gets pregnant by him, and decides to keep the baby. Hilarity ensues? The few brief bits I've seen have been very typical, cliched, and not funny. Also, I don't care much for Ms. Elfman as an actor; she always comes across as the same character to me regardless of what she's in.

I don't care about NCIS, so I don't need to care about its LA-set spinoff. The casting of Chris O'Donnell and LL Cool J tells me that CBS is going after the female audience for this one anyway. Three Rivers is a medical drama about a transplant team at a Pittsburgh (hence the title) hospital that also tells the stories of the organ donors and recipients. My mom is psyched about this one, which tells you all you need to know. The Good Wife brings Julianna Margulies back to TV as the wife of a disgraced and imprisoned politician (Chris Noth) who must return to work as an attorney after 13 years. I dig her, but I think I'll skip this one. Thanks, CBS, for making this easier for me.

I talked about NBC's new shows back in the spring when they were announced. Since then I've had a change of heart about the comedy Community, which premiered last night (most new and returning shows premiere starting the week of the 21st). I still don't care for Chevy Chase and I never have, but the rest of the cast and the writing will more than offset his presence. The pilot had snappy dialogue and knowing nods to pop culture touchstones like The Breakfast Club, and Soup host Joel McHale is a much better actor than I expected him to be. This one looks like it will fit in nicely with NBC's other Thursday comedies.

I'm fighting the lure of Trauma, which looks to be an action-filled hour about EMTs and first-response rescue personnel in San Francisco. This sounds strangely familiar... anyone remember the 1970s series Emergency! (from Jack Webb's production company)? Hmm, what network was that on? I try to avoid shows like this, because l end up feeling like I'm wasting my time, but it's the kind of thing I might check out for the sheer popcorn, things-going-boom stupidity of it after the Mrs. goes to sleep, knowing I don't have to make any kind of week-to-week commitment to it.

There's also a show about nurses called Mercy that's going to be on Wednesdays. Consider yourselves warned.

The Jay Leno Show doesn't interest me, but I am interested in what kind of ratings it gets, considering it means five fewer hours per week of original scripted programming. On the other hand, it's five hours per week of prime-time TV I don't need to watch, schedule, or think about. Thanks (sort of), Jay, for making this easier for me.

FOX only programs from 8 to 10 PM, which means that, like NBC, there isn't as much programming to be concerned with. Glee (about a high school, with singing) may turn out to be a great show, and it's from the creator of Nip/Tuck, but I am definitely not the target audience for it. FOX also has two new comedies: The Cleveland Show is a spinoff of Family Guy and it fits right into the Sunday animation block, so I'll probably watch it by default, but I'll only keep watching if it's funny. Brothers is about a retired pro football player who moves back in with his family, and it looks like one of the worst shows of the decade.

One other note about FOX: why did they have to move Fringe from Tuesdays to Thursdays? Now it's opposite CSI (which I refer to as "CSI: Original Recipe" and is the only one I watch) on CBS and The Office and 30 Rock on NBC. It just complicates matters, and I'll probably end up watching Fringe online. Thanks, FOX, for making things harder for me.

Oh, speaking of "not the target audience," I almost forgot the CW: since they canceled the doing-Satan's-bidding dramedy Reaper, I don't need to care about them at all. It's one thing to not have any new shows I'm interested in, but to not have any shows I'm interested in at all? That's special. Thanks, CW, for making this even easier for me than CBS did.

Watch Wednesday Thursday!

Whoops, didn't take me long to screw that up, huh? This is my deadline week at work, and after I got home yesterday I completely forgot about my biweekly watch post. Anyway...

This is a Casio analog chronograph I got about a year and a half ago (on eBay, of course). I didn't realize Casio made analog watches until one time when I saw one that had hands but also displayed all this other digital stuff on the face when you wanted it to. I thought about getting that watch for a while, then I saw this one and liked it much better. Turns out that Casio makes a whole line of watches with analog movements that are accurate, dependable, and reasonably priced. I've gotten two others since.

It also comes in a version with a black dial, but I have so many other watches with black dials that I thought it might be nice to have some variety.

This watch is very large; the face is around 45 millimeters in diameter, which is far larger than someone with wrists as skinny as mine should be wearing, but somehow it looks all right on my wrist when I wear it.

This was another instance of a watch that came with a horrible crappy band, a resin diver thing with ripples. Because the watch is so large, the band is kind of wide, so it took me a little while to find something suitable for it. I ended up getting this nylon thing with a leather backing, but I'm not that thrilled with it, so I'll probably be looking for something to replace it.

The Fog

This season's episodes of Mad Men seem to be getting under my skin a bit more than the previous ones. I think it's because of the ways the characters are reacting to things happening in the world of 1963. I woke up this morning thinking about last night's episode.

(Potential spoilers ahead...)

Last night we had an extended exchange between Don and another expectant father in the hospital waiting room. At first I thought nothing much was going on there, but they kept cutting between them and Betty's troubled labor and Demerol-induced hallucinations, leading me to think that the contrast between the trauma of giving birth and the ennui of waiting for the news was meant as another reminder of how the experiences of men and women are so starkly different in our society, even today.

It looked to me like we might be being set up for something like a stillbirth, but then I thought that probably would be much too obvious a move for a show that's all about subtlety and subtext, what's left unsaid, what's beneath the surface. The baby finally arrived, but even though Betty said she wanted "everything to be perfect" when the baby came, I don't think that's really going to be the case.

(And baby Eugene was born about two months before I was...)

Then in the hallway, the other new dad wouldn't look Don in the eye, like he was embarrassed for having shared his true feelings with another guy. And of course, his earlier words about being a better man remind us again that Don keeps struggling with the same issue, and losing.

And hey: Francine! Where have you been? We missed you. Well, I did. After Anne Dudek's character died on House last year, I thought we'd see more of her in season two of Mad Men, but the opposite happened; I think she was in maybe two episodes last year (goes and checks IMDB... okay, three). Maybe now that the Drapers' housekeeper has left, Francine will come around more often to give Betty a helping hand.

But I thought the most interesting part of this week's episode was (again) Peggy's struggle with her own ambitions and desires. Sneaky old "Duck" Phillips showed up to try to lure Peggy away from Sterling Cooper, which sent Peggy to Don to try (unsuccessfully, for now at least) to get a raise. It seemed like a no-brainer for Peggy to accept Duck's offer, but I have a feeling that she feels a certain loyalty to Don because it was he who first promoted her to junior copywriter, and perhaps she feels that her loyalty and patience will eventually be rewarded. I hope for her sake that does in fact happen. I also think she doesn't trust Duck, which is probably prudent.

This Week in Awesome (9/12/09)

Apologies for the recent, unintended interruption in service (the last post was Wednesday morning). I started working on something yesterday afternoon, but I couldn't find the right way into it, and then the rest of my workday intervened, so it will have to wait a bit.

We're off to RI today, for two main reasons: my (parochial) high school is having a 50th anniversary mass tomorrow morning, and a number of my former teachers are returning for the event, so I thought it might be interesting to attend; and my dad's birthday was this week (he, my brother, and I are all Virgos) so we're going to visit and see if we can talk him into being taken to lunch or something like that (more difficult than you'd think).

So, onward... this Brooklyn store has a slightly unorthodox return policy. I wonder how many customers follow it? (Gizmodo)

I happened across an eBay listing with a strange comment in its description that deftly straddles the awesome/awful axis. Hmm, no bids yet--what a surprise. Please, readers, I implore you: if each of you contributes, say, five cents, we can hopefully raise the $3 needed to get this poor, forlorn idiot woman the fucking lint roller help she so desperately needs. And man, that is one fat dog.

Chelsea Lately is a humor/talk show on the E! channel hosted by comedian Chelsea Handler, sort of a pop culture analogue to The Daily Show (in fact, both shows are on at the same time, which is slightly inconvenient). In the first part of this clip, a reality dating show visits the set of CL (it's not clear why). In the second, much funnier part, Chelsea shows us some of the workplace perks her staff receive. (Hulu via TV Squad)

And finally, this is one of the more bizarre incidents I've seen in quite a while, which is precisely what makes it so awesome. The power of the human spirit is... oh never mind. I don't want to give it away, just watch it. (Chronicle-Telegram, somewhere in Ohio, via Consumerist)

Dodged a Bullet

Coming home from work last night I was waiting for the bus at Wellington. There was a woman standing next to me, not more than a couple of feet away, with a sheaf of printouts she was studying. I was reading the paper, and so not really paying attention to her or others.

Suddenly she shrieked, and the papers went flying in all directions. I looked over to see her looking up in the air, then she looked back down and said, to everyone, "That seagull just shit on me!" (There were a couple of them overhead, looping around aimlessly and squawking. They must have gotten lost looking for Revere Beach.) Sure enough, she had a substantial tannish blob on her right sleeve. She removed her sweater and tied it around her waist.

She said the guck had hit her pretty hard, and at first she thought she might have been shot. I thought about how close I'd come to being the victim.

Under Construction

Hi, we're back. We had a nice, relaxing weekend, plus the weather up here in the Northeast has been fantastic since the last heat 'n' humidity wave left over a week ago. People apparently are still pissing and moaning about what a lousy summer it was, but hey, guess what? It's still summer. Yeah, check your calendar. And September tends to be one of the nicest months around here (assuming, of course, there aren't any hurricanes).

Only one thing marred the weekend: the people next door are having their back porch rebuilt, and whoever they've hired must be in a really big hurry to get the job finished, or something, because they were there working all weekend. Yesterday was the only morning I was in fact awakened by construction noise (to wit, a table saw), and that happened around 8:30 AM, which is not a horrible hour.

Saturday I slept in until around 9:30, and Sunday until 10. The work started right around 10 on both those days, so I do think they were trying to show us some consideration. It just wasn't particularly conducive to sitting out on our own back porch enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee.

This Week in Awesome (9/5/09)

Hello, and welcome to this Labor Day weekend edition of TWiA.

Let's begin with a funny little spoof video for a device no one really needs. Careful with that thing... (CollegeHumor via Gizmodo)

Some wag (from the UK, not surprisingly) with time on his hands decided to send invoices to companies he patronizes, billing them for the time he has lost standing in lines and such. That's kind of cute in a "what an asshole" sort of way, but he actually got a response from one company that's even more amusing. (Consumerist via #sixweeks)

Some clever folks managed to surreptitiously film a comedic soap opera inside an IKEA without getting caught. Nice. I hope they're able to do more of these. (Buzzfeed via Racked)

Now for my favorite thing this week: a candidate for Cambridge School Committee sent out a flyer that was riddled with mistakes. This is quite possibly one of the most awesome things I've ever seen on the web, and also vindicates my decades of grammar, spelling, and punctuation snobbery.

My father-in-law, who was a journalist with exacting writing standards (I'll have to tell you the story about Al Gore some time), used to write campaign pieces like this for a living, and I know he would have been colossally amused by this story, while at the same time horrified that someone else had done such a poor job at it. Thank you, Rachel Rubin. Thank. You. (Wicked Local Cambridge via Universal Hub)

And finally, it you haven't already seen it, People of Walmart. It's awesome and awful at the same time.

Ciao, amici...

Labors

Everyone is hustling to get out of town for the long weekend. My coworkers have been slipping out of the office since the middle of yesterday afternoon. One sent an email this morning saying she would be leaving around 3 today to "attempt to beat some Cape traffic." Good luck with that. I mean, no offense, but that's pretty much what everyone else is doing, right around the same time they're doing it, so you're not really going to be beating anything, except perhaps your forehead against the steering wheel.

To me, the three-day weekends that bracket the summer season are absolutely the worst time to go away to the Cape, or Maine, or any similar New England vacation destination. I haven't been to the Cape in a few years, but for three years in a row we went for a weekend in October, and it was much more enjoyable because the weather is still quite nice, but there aren't nearly as many people around. You get better hotel rooms at better rates, you get seated in restaurants faster, you don't have to sit in traffic for three hours.

So we're staying around this weekend. We don't have any definite plans yet, but as I put it in an email to one friend, "'Go somewhere and eat something there' is about as far as I've gotten. I know it lacks detail, but I'm liking the simplicity of its structure." I've got some bits for TWiA, so there will be a post tomorrow, but after that probably not again until Tuesday. Enjoy your (hopefully long) weekend.

Watch Wednesday (9/2/09)

I've decided a couple of things about this feature: first, every other Wednesday will be Watch Wednesday. It has kind of shaken out that way on its own, and I think it works better when spaced out as such--I don't want to overdo it. Also, I'm going to attempt to alternate between older watches and contemporary ones, so that means this edition's watch is vintage.

This watch is a Caravelle, which was a low-priced sibling line that Bulova introduced at the beginning of the 1960s to better compete with Timex, which was making serious inroads in the market with its low-priced models. Based on some period advertisements I've seen, a Timex or Caravelle sold for around $10 to $15, which at the time wasn't cheap, but was a lot less than typical Bulova prices of the period. Bulova hoped that the halo effect of its prestigious status in the marketplace would rub off on Caravelle, making it more appealing to consumers than Timex's somewhat more hunble image.

This watch is from 1969, and by then there was some cross-pollination going on: the Caravelle line had expanded to include self-winding models to keep up with Timex, and since Bulova was already making some excellent automatic movements, they started showing up in certain higher-end Caravelle models like this one.

Compared to some other Bulova products, this is a pretty rare model; I've seen maybe half a dozen of them for sale in ten years of collecting. It took me a long time to get hold of one--I was outbid on the first couple I encountered on eBay. Eventually I was able to buy one relatively cheaply because it was not working and was in very rough condition. A while later I came across another non-working example that was much nicer cosmetically, and I bought that one too.

A couple of months back, after they'd sat in a box for maybe three years, I decided it was time to talk to a watch repair person and get one clean, working watch out of them. It was also fitted with a new crystal, as neither one was any good. Now that I have one in working condition, it has quickly become one of my favorite watches. I like the juxtaposition of the black and white elements in the design: the days of the week on white background, the date numerals reversed, and how that is echoed on the half-and-half inner bezel.

The rotating outer bezel is also a cool touch. (The lettering looks yellow in the picture, but it's actually a very interesting metallic-looking gold-orange.) Set your corresponding time zone next to the 12 at the top of the inner bezel, and you can see at at glance that it's three hours earlier in the Pacific time zone, or five hours later in London, or something like that. It's a throwback to a time when dealing with someone several time zones away was still not an everyday thing. The little triangle says "GMT" inside it, and on the opposite side it says "DATE LINE." (They were probably hoping pilots would buy this.)

It takes an odd size strap--literally, it's 19 millimeters wide. 18 was kind of the standard at the time, though certain Rolex models did (and still do) take 19 straps. Maybe this was a conscious attempt on Bulova's part to imbue the watch with some perceived glamour, but it was probably a pain when it came time to replace it. I was able to find a very nice strap without too much trouble.

One other thing about this watch that's potentially frustrating: most modern watches that display the day and/or date have a "quickset" feature that allows you to adjust them easily when the month has less than 31 days, or when you haven't worn the watch for a while and you want to reset the day and date without having to keep turning the crown to get to the correct day. This watch doesn't have such a feature, and come the end of this month, I don't know how to get the date to advance without changing the day of the week. Should be interesting...

Overheard: Not Even Close Edition

1:30 PM, Green Line E train inbound, Museum of Fine Arts station: "Does this go by BU East?" Ah, September...

Wake-Up Dog

About a year ago, we stopped crating the dog at night. It was partly because after having her for two years we figured it was no longer really necessary, and partly because she was waking us up by whining, sometimes several times during the course of one night. The reason for the whining was she didn't want to be in the crate while we were home (it didn't seem to matter that we were asleep), so we gave her what she wanted. She started sleeping on her bed in the living room most of the time, reverting to the open crate (where it was warmer) during the winter.

This has gradually led to more freedom for her while we are not around, including leaving her to sleep where she wants during the day while we're at work, and she has behaved admirably. But there are some unanticipated consequences as well. Her latest ploy for attention is a little gimmick we refer to as "Why Aren't You Up, It's Playtime!" She wanders into the bedroom, usually around 6 AM, making sure she walks loudly enough on the carpet to wake me. (This is the same dog who gets bumped into, and sometimes stepped on, because she has a tendency to sneak up on us, so she can be quiet when it suits her.) She comes around to my side of the bed, sniffs, and waits.

If she doesn't get an immediate response, she throws herself into her "play stance," thumping her front paws on the floor with her front legs and torso extended, butt up in the air, tail wagging feverishly. Typically she can barely be bothered to lift her head to acknowledge me when I arrive home, even though she has previously done a happy dance and thrown her stuffed toys around for the benefit of the Mrs. when she arrives home. So I'm not sure why I'm the lucky recipient of the early-morning attention, but it may be because I'm the one who walks her in the mornings before I leave for work. Who knows what goes on in a dog's brain?

If I pretend to still be asleep and continue to ignore her, she starts barking, which is really charming at 6 AM. Greyhounds rarely bark, but this has happened a couple of times on weekends when she has needed to go out, so it's usually wiser to give her a little attention (she's particularly fond of having her ears rubbed) until she decides it's time for her to go back to sleep and she wanders off again. Meanwhile I attempt to grab 15 more minutes of sleep before my alarm goes off.

Style File: Shuron Freeway Sunglasses

I talk a lot about style and putting thought and effort into how you look. I thought it might be fun to periodically explore some of my personal "elements of style" (with apologies to Strunk and White).

I wear prescription sunglasses. I really have to; the sun is just overwhelmingly bright otherwise. When I wore contact lenses I could wear just any old sunglasses, as long as they were suitably dark. When I decided 11 years ago to go back to wearing glasses full-time after 15 years of wearing contacts, I knew I would have to deal with the sunglasses issue.

My first solution was a pair of glasses with the Transitions lenses. They didn't really get dark enough, and I spent a couple of years walking around squinting. In 2001 I purchased a new pair of glasses and a pair of sunglasses to go with them. (I wanted to go with the magnetic clip-ons, but I couldn't find them in a frame style I liked.) I still have both of these, but the everyday glasses got pretty beat up, so I replaced them about a year and a half ago.

Not long after that, I started thinking about getting a second pair of sunglasses. I wanted a change from my standard roundish metal frames. After much searching I happened upon the company Shuron, from down in South Carolina. They are the originators of the Ronsir, which is sometimes referred to as the "Malcolm X" frame style, with plastic temples and brow pieces on a metal chassis. (Tom Hanks also wore these in Catch Me If You Can.)

I was very surprised to learn that they still manufacture all their frames in the United States. I thought it would be great to get something classic, a little retro, and somewhat out of the ordinary while supporting an American company. I was set on getting the Ronsir with a chrome chassis and dark gray lenses, but my friend A Proper Bostonian looked at their web site and told me that the Freeway in tortoise with green lenses would look better with my fair coloring.

Of course, she was right (when it comes to matters of style, she generally is). Shuron has excellent customer service, and since their products are not carried by many stores, they will sell direct to individuals. You can purchase frames from them and take them to your preferred optometrist, or they can make your lenses and fit them to your frames in their in-house lab. You can pay for one frame and they will send you two or three different sizes of it, so you can determine the best fit, and then return the others.

With regular lenses the Freeway looks like Buddy Holly's glasses, but in the "demi amber" color with sunglass lenses it's something altogether different, I think. It makes me think me of those French New Wave movies from the early 1960s that I've never seen. I wish the green lenses were just a little darker, but otherwise I really like them. One other thing: I discovered that they are too wide to wear with curved-bill caps, so when it gets cool enough to need a hat I'll have to revert to my other oval sunglasses.

This Week in Awesome (8/29/09)

Can't believe August is just about over already... but it did have five weekends, so five TWiAs.

This is a couple of weeks old now, but it's kind of cool. There's a public art project going on in Philadelphia that involves painting "love letter" murals on buildings, in lieu of graffiti I guess. (PSFK)

I don't know how I missed a great site like this for so long: Overheard in New York.

Similar to the job interview questions I mentioned a while back, here is some of the crazy stuff people put on their resumes.

After the Bridezillas clip and the KFC thing from last week, I was thinking that we may have to start dividing this feature into "awesome" and "awful." Here's this week's contribution to the latter category, something that as a dog owner I could not conceive of using. (Consumerist, Soup blog, many, many other sites)

Just Can't Get Enough

If just watching Mad Men isn't quite enough for you, the web is happy to help you augment your viewing experience. (I promise this isn't going to turn into an all-MM blog, but I do feel an obligation to point out these things.)

Start with the show's official site, which is full of good stuff, including episode recaps, longer previews of upcoming episodes, interviews with cast and crew members, background on some of the products and companies featured as Sterling Cooper clients, trivia quizzes about the 1960s, a lively fan forum, contests, and much more.

Basket of Kisses is a fan site run by two sisters that has a very active fan community, interviews, and lots of other good stuff. They have an impressive level of access to the show and its creators and actors.

The localish blog Unlikely Words is not exclusively a Mad Men site, but one of its creators has gone to the trouble of sifting through the first two seasons in order to isolate all of Don Draper's lines of dialogue. Wow. (He's also done the same for all of Tracy Jordan's lines on 30 Rock, which is equally ambitious, but reads a bit differently.) They also do episode recaps.

Update 2:30 PM: I accidentally left out what I consider the most interesting of these sites, The Footnotes of Mad Men. They dig into many of the references made in the show that people younger than, say, 50 might not have firsthand knowledge of, like (from just this week's episode) the 1964 World's Fair, the outcry over the plan to tear down Penn Station, Pepsi's Patio diet soda, Yetta Walenda, and so on.

Loafing

Went down to RI yesterday to visit the family. My mother is still recovering from knee replacement surgery, and she asked if we would go and get her some groceries. Since the arrival in her area last year of a branch of the European grocery chain ALDI, she has done a good portion of her shopping there due to their rock-bottom prices, so that's where she wanted us to go.

You find some unusual things in ALDI, many of which are available for only a limited time. While picking up a package of lunch meat, I noticed this. I thought it was so strange that I had to take a picture of it with my phone, but getting pictures off the phone and into the computer is still such a ridiculously difficult process that it's easier just to link to it.

Has anyone ever tried this product? I'd be too scared.

This Week in Awesome (8/22/09)

There's so much stuff this week (some of it held from last week because it wasn't on theme) I almost don't know where to start.

In that case, why not start with another crazy gadget? I can't imagine anyone seriously using this, but you never know. (Dvice)

Remember the guy who wrote the song about United Airlines wrecking his guitar? He's back with the second song. (Consumerist)

This Is Spinal Tap is still one of the most brilliant movies ever made. How could it possibly be improved upon? Here's how. (YouTube)

The rest of these fall more or less in the category of "there's so much I want to say, but I just can't find the words..." You'll see what I mean:

A surprising sighting in a Walmart parking lot. (Autoblog via Bloodhound blog)

Did you know there was a show called Bridezillas? If I didn't watch The Soup I wouldn't have. Maybe this is typical of the show, maybe it's not. I don't really want to know any more about it. (Soup blog)

And finally, a fast food item that is both horrifying and strangely fascinating. (Consumerist again)

Cultural Disconnect

The Mrs. saw my Mad Men cartoon icon and decided to make one for herself to use on her Facebook page. Her sister commented on it, so she made one for her too.

Some time later they were talking on the phone and the pictures came up, and the Mrs. said something along the lines of, "It's really a great show." The SARSiL (Some Assembly Required Sister-in-Law) said, "What do you mean?" The Mrs. explained that the illustrations were related to the show Mad Men, which her sister had not heard of.

See. the SARSiL does not watch television. She has one, but she lives in a fairly remote, wooded area up in the hills north of Santa Cruz. There is no over-the-air reception to speak of, and she does not have cable or a satellite dish. So the TV is only used for watching DVDs, and she's a bit out of touch regarding a lot of pop culture stuff.

In a way I envy her ignorance, but I don't think I could give up TV.

Wet Dogs and Cheerleaders

Can't forget to mention this... you may (but probably don't) recall that last year we took our dog to a dog-washing event to benefit the MSPCA that featured New England Patriots cheerleaders helping to wash the dogs.

Well, it's that time again. This year, the fifth annual "Paw Wash" event takes place this Sunday, August 23rd, from 10 AM to 1 PM in the parking lot of the MSPCA's Angell Memorial headquarters at 350 South Huntington Avenue in Boston (last year it was at Gillette Stadium). It costs $15 to get your dog washed, $15 for a photo of your dog with cheerleaders, or $25 for the combo package.

All proceeds benefit the MSPCA's Boston Animal Care and Adoption Center.

Trade-In Allowance?

In the past three days I've seen three dorks people zipping around on Segways. Are they having an end-of-model-year sale or something? Can you apply the Cash for Clunkers discount to the purchase of one?

Watch Wednesday (8/19/09)

I was all set to shoot some watch pictures with the other camera (the one that's better at close-ups), but it needs a new battery, and it takes a weird lithium one. I keep meaning to stop and get one on the way home from work, but it's been so hot that I don't want to do anything after work other than get home as fast as possible. (Having several nearby coworkers who run heaters under their desks because their feet get cold from the AC means the office is less comfortable than it ought to be.) Since I skipped doing this last week I didn't want to blow off doing it again, so I used the newer camera that doesn't focus as well up close.

After the vintage Bulova, I thought I'd go with one of my contemporary pieces. This is a Momentum M1 dive watch that I bought new three or four years ago, on eBay of course. I'd been looking around for something with an orange face and came across this (it's also available in several other colors). I wear it frequently during the summer, but almost never during the rest of the year. Orange is just more of a summer color, I guess. I don't dive, but divers' watches tend to be highly water resistant, which never hurts. It's also easy to read, which is always a bonus.



This watch has had several straps since I got it, and I haven't really been happy with any of them. It came with a horrible nylon thing that I had no intention of keeping (I often buy watches knowing the first thing I'm going to do is change the strap), so I put on whatever leather strap I had around.

Later I came across someone else selling these watches on eBay who also sold silicone straps with contrast stitching in the same colors as the faces, so I ordered one with orange stitching from him. But it was shaped in such a way that the edges of the strap flared out past the inside edges of the lugs (difficult to imagine without an accompanying image, I know) and I never really liked how it looked. The strap that's on it currently is a faux-Kevlar style, another one that I just had lying around. I still like the idea of the stitching picking up the color of the watch face, so I'm looking around for something else in that vein.

One-Track Wonder

I finished watching the second season of USA Network's very worthwhile In Plain Sight. The show is about a US Marshal who works in the federal Witness Security program (what most people incorrectly refer to as "witness protection"). It's wry and funny, the characters are very nicely drawn and played, and the show made some great strides in its storytelling this season.

Typically, they left us with a cliffhanger that won't be resolved until the show returns next spring. But as the final scenes of the episode played out, they were accompanied by a striking piece of music that grabbed my attention. It was unfamiliar to me, but the show's web site is courteous enough to list songs that are featured in the episodes, so I browsed over to check it out.

I was stunned to learn that the song, called "The Lightning Strike," was by Snow Patrol, the Irish band responsible for that horrible, insipid weeper ballad "Chasing Cars." You know the one, "If I lay here/If I just lay here/Would you lie with me/And just forget the world?..." Ecch, just typing that makes me feel ill. I never would have guessed the two songs could possibly be by the same band.

I only heard a minute or so of "The Lightning Strike" during the show, but it turns out that what I heard was just the beginning; the song is made up of three "movements" and clocks in at around 16 minutes long (link to listen here). Unfortunately, the other two parts of the song are not as impressive as the first, and they probably should have been three separate songs, but I'm just a snarky blogger so what do I know?

And of course, you can't buy the song by itself at iTunes; you have to buy the whole album to get it. while that other piece of dreck is on a different album, I still don't think I'm going to be interested in the rest of this one, based on a quick sampling of the other tracks. Anyone got a copy?

Clickin' Drag

Technology is just great, until it fails you. At work I use a trackball that I bought years ago, but at home we have a small bluetooth mouse because the Mrs. has wrist issues and prefers to mouse with her left hand, and it's much easier to switch back and forth with a wireless device.

On Saturday the mouse, which is three years old, gave out. Actually, it still turns on, but its bluetooth seems to have ceased to work. I have another of those trackballs somewhere (I used to use the same kind at home), but damned if I could find it. So I had no other input device available, which is an odd situation indeed.

Yesterday I made a trip to a nearby OfficeMax. I didn't expect to be able to find what I wanted, and they didn't disappoint me. (Well, technically they did, but I was expecting to be disappointed, so...) They carry one bluetooth mouse, it's made by Microsoft and they sell it for $50. I paid $30 for the dead one, and that's about all it's worth to me.

I asked the upstairs neighbors if they might have a mouse I could borrow, but the only one they could come up with was from a pre-USB Compaq with the old cylindrical type of connector. (I think they're all using laptops at this point, so they don't need modern mice.)

It was weird to spend the weekend unable to use the computer. We have a laptop, but it doesn't have any of my passwords stored, and its screen is too small to use for long periods of time. I have a spare mouse that came with my work computer, which is going to fill in until I can get a replacement, but I couldn't get it until today.

This Week in Awesome (8/15/09)

Welcome. Are you ready for some Mad Men? I know I am.

If you're in the Boston area and feel like getting together with other Maddicts (devotees of the show) to watch the season premiere, the Noir bar in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square is hosting a viewing party starting at 9 PM tomorrow. Period dress is encouraged, but you already knew that. (I'll be watching at home, because it's a school night and I want to be able to just fall into bed as soon as the episode is over.)

If you haven't had a chance to see the first two seasons and you're looking to get up to speed quickly, New York Magazine has an extremely concise (some might call it pithy) synopsis of the first 26 episodes. If that's not quite enough detail, AMC has put together a four-minute video recap of season two. If you'd rather watch the episodes and find out what happens on your own, I suggest avoiding these links. Come to think of it, that's probably true of most of these...

The food section of Wednesday's New York Times had a fun little piece about the role of alcohol and drinking in the show and the producers' quest for accuracy in this, as in everything else about MM.

In a slightly more serious vein, the Times also talked to Matthew Weiner, the show's creator, about the seismic cultural shifts of the 1960s that serve as the show's foundation.

This month's Esquire has an interview and photo shoot with Christina Hendricks, who plays office manager Joan Holloway. The word "hotness" seems ridiculously inadequate. This is (some of) what you're missing if you don't watch, because there's plenty of beauty among the whole cast, the gents and the ladies.

And for something a bit different, here's a well-done video essay on the cinematography of Mad Men.

(By the way, the image above is from the December 2007 issue of GQ. Front, left to right: Christina Hendricks, Jon Hamm (Don Draper), January Jones (Betty Draper). Rear, left to right: John Slattery (Roger Sterling), Bryan Batt (Salvatore Romano), Robert Morse (Bert Cooper), Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell), Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson).

What Gives, T?

And now for the flip side... For the past three years, I've been going to work through Wellington station on the Orange line. My daily travels have generated some observations about how this station could be improved.

When the northern portion of the Orange line was rerouted and extended out to Oak Grove in the early 1970s, perhaps the station's design made sense. I'm not really talking about the aesthetics, because there are none; it's just a big lump of concrete. I mean the functionality, the ways that people and vehicles approach and exit the station.

For pedestrians, entering the station is needlessly difficult. There is only one entrance, with eight steep steps up from curb level, which slows people down. The station doors are almost never propped open, which slows things down more. Once you get up the steps, the corridor is too narrow for the volume of people using it at rush hours, and then you have to make a 90-degree left turn to get to the fare gates. The entire area leading up to the gates is a giant choke point. It seems like every aspect of the on-foot approach was designed to be as difficult as possible, to thwart the movement of people in and out of the station.

There is a ramp, which was probably added later, that is easier to walk up, but the bottom of the ramp is situated away from the doors, away from the direction people are moving. This entrance also serves people coming in from the parking areas. It could be widened and extended outward and made so the whole thing was a ramp instead of stairs. (The ramp could not be built inside the existing structure because of the clearance needed above the train tracks.)

But before people can even get into the station, they have to pass through other obstacles. Most buses enter from the eastbound lanes of Route 16, requiring a tight right turn that also descends a grade. Then they have to stop for crossing traffic coming from a road that runs under Route 16 (some of which is heading into the station's parking areas, some to get on 16 going east), make a left turn, and pull up to the station to drop off passengers.

I think the biggest problem is that buses coming into the station have to mix it up with vehicles near the entrance. There should be a way to establish some sort of priority for incoming buses. I think the best way to accomplish this would be to build a dedicated roadway for buses leading into the station. An elevated viaduct could funnel buses off Route 16 and into the station above and parallel to the train tracks; they would not have to contend with crossing traffic, and passengers could then descend to station level instead of climbing up stairs. Buses would then loop around to pick up passengers where they do now. Access to the roadway would be controlled by transponders in the buses that would activate a gate or bollards (those pop-up pillars used in European parking facilities).

I realize this is just idle daydreaming. It's unlikely that any of this will ever come to pass, especially given the T's always-precarious financial situation. But the station is probably going to have to be overhauled and refurbished at some point. Why shouldn't we imagine how it could also be improved?

Smart Move, T

It hasn't been a good time for the MBTA lately. Lots of malfunctioning subway trains, the general manager being shown the door last week, problems with the launch of the online CharlieCard system, etc.

But I noticed something recently that (to me, anyway) constitutes improvement: for about a week now, the T web site's service alerts page has been including information about delays on bus routes. (Because I'm a bit anal, I check this page every morning before I leave the house, so if there's a problem I can attempt to avoid it.) Most of these delays seem to be due to traffic problems. Prior to noticing this, I can only recall info being posted about diversions due to road closures or station work, but these alerts are of a more up-to-the-minute sort.

Finding out your bus is going to be 20 minutes late may not be what you want to see when you're getting ready to head home from work, but it's better than standing around waiting for a bus that never comes, and not having any information about what's happening. Knowledge is indeed power, and knowing there's a delay can help you reroute, or just kill time somewhere until things get back to normal.

Out of Focus

I didn't do a watch post yesterday, because I'm unhappy with the quality of the pictures I've been getting. I finally realized that my camera just isn't any good at close-up shots. We have an older camera that is much better at this type of thing, simply because it has a different lens that is able to focus on items as close as a couple of inches. When I bought the newer camera I completely forgot about this feature, which is very useful when shooting things for, say, eBay. I'll get to work with the other camera and go from there.

Mulch

Lucky me: I got to do yard work yesterday. It's one of my least favorite things; I'd rank it right above camping, because yard work is over in a couple of hours, but you're stuck in a tent for a whole night, or worse.

Last year, our landlord let the back yard get really overgrown. We tried to tame it with a weed whacker, but it was just too dense and thick. After he finally took care of it, I thought he might hire someone to maintain it. Instead, during the winter he told us he was going to make it maintenance-free. In the spring he had a load of mulch delivered and spread it over the grass. But the weeds grew right back, because he didn't lay down a barrier layer of landscape fabric, like you're supposed to. This year's excessive rain didn't help.

I told him the yard was getting overgrown again, and he needed to come by and deal with it. He put it off, and the weeds grew. When the biggest ones got close to my height, I sent him a photo. He finally came by a couple of weeks ago and cleared everything, and put down some landscape fabric. Last week he had another load of mulch delivered and he came by and covered the fabric with it, so we probably won't have any more weed issues.

After he'd cleared all the weeds and dirt, he put everything into heavy-duty plastic bags and left them by the curb, but last week the trash truck didn't take them. He didn't close the bags, so the contents got wet. Meanwhile, this week is the monthly yard waste pickup, but they won't take anything unless it's in barrels or those brown paper yard bags. Like a sucker, I told him that if he got us some of the paper bags, I'd transfer the yard waste from the plastic bags.

So that was my chore yesterday. There were half a dozen trash bags, and I ended up using one paper bag for each one, plus one more for a pile that for some reason he'd left in the back yard. The toughest part was keeping the bags balanced, because he had pulled everything out including roots, so there were these big, heavy, wet clumps of dirt and root balls and long, wet weeds that caused the bags to tip over. I just wanted to do the right thing and make sure the waste gets properly taken away and turned into mulch, or whatever it is they do with it.

This Week in Awesome (8/8/09)

A full bucket of awesome this week, kids:

Are you a gloom-and-doomer? Do you enjoy speculating about nightmare scenarios? This little exercise is for you. (Slate)

It was only a matter of time... the Snuggie is spawning. (TV Squad)

These go around the web every so often, but I think this is a fresh batch, because I don't remember reading any of them before. (AOL Jobs via Consumerist)

But the most awesome thing about this was a comment posted to the Consumerist story: "After a friend of mine realized he had no chance of getting the job, he replied to one of the interviewer's question with. "KHAAAAAAAAAAAN!" He was promptly escorted from the building by security." Brilliant. (If you don't understand why that's funny, email me and I'll explain.)

And finally, an amusing little clip starring Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen that comically skewers the potential dangers of watching too much television in a way that's very meta. Bonus: it also features Fred's fiancée Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy on Mad Men. (Funny or Die via New York Magazine's Vulture blog)

Next week, in honor of the show's return: an all-Mad Men edition of TWiA!

Summer Clearance

If you're fortunate enough to be employed and have money, the end of season clearance sales are in full effect. Fall fashions are starting to hit stores, but the retailers still have stock left that they need to unload. You can find summer clothing for as much as 80% off original prices, depending on the store, and still have a month or two to enjoy it.

But keep in mind that stock will dwindle as discounts increase, so if you see something you like, don't hesitate, especially if you are of a more common size, because if you don't grab it, someone else definitely will.

(UPDATE Saturday 8/8: According to a story I read in yesterday's New York Times about July retail sales, stores have less leftover inventory this season due to more conservative ordering, so your mileage may vary.)

Last night we were at our local Stop & Shop, and I noticed that they were clearing out seasonal merchandise like coolers and outdoor furniture. On a previous trip a little "balcony set" had caught my eye: a high table with a small-diameter top and two tall, barstool-like chairs with backs, intended for small outdoor spaces.

I'd thought this would fit nicely on our back porch, which is only about five feet wide. Yesterday it was 50% off the original $100 price, and there were about half a dozen sets left. Rather than return today and risk having them be gone, I sent the Mrs. to the car with the groceries and went back and bought the set. I intend to spend weekend mornings sitting out on the porch, drinking coffee and reading the paper, until it turns too cold.

Watch Wednesday

After talking about watches again recently, it occurred to me that featuring some of the watches in my collection might make a neat semi-regular feature. (This requires that I expend the energy to take an acceptable photo of each one, which is why it may end up being semi-regular, but I'll try.)

I thought it made sense to start with the first vintage watch I bought on eBay. (I had another, older watch that I had bought from another web site prior to buying this one, but I sold it some years back when money was tight, and I don't really miss it. Also, wristwatches tended to be smaller 50 or 60 years ago, and looking at similar watches now, it was really too small for me.)



My interest in watches is partly rooted in nostalgia, but I also value them for their aesthetics and as functional objects. I appreciate how a small steel container that attaches to your wrist on a piece of leather can encompass all these qualities, and so many more, and you can carry all that around with you every day.

For some reason I have always been drawn to Bulova watches, particularly those from the 1960s. The Bulova Watch Company was founded in New York in 1875 by a Czech immigrant. You can read a history of the company here; the company still exists, and you can find its watches in jewelry and department stores, but it doesn't carry quite the same cachet it once did. A half-century ago, Bulova was a high-end brand sold in prestigious stores; you gave or received a Bulova to mark a special occasion such as a college graduation, promotion, birthday, or important anniversary.

This watch is from 1967. I know this because one of the cool things about Bulova watches is that they are stamped on the back with a date code: a letter for the decade and a numeral for the year. It is not particularly valuable, and there is nothing special about it; it's a manual wind, and the hands are missing their original glow-in-the-dark material (it probably disintegrated over the years), but the simplicity of its appearance is what I like about it so much, and for its age it is in excellent condition.

Finned Glory

I've always been interested in the design of objects, which dovetails nicely with my lifelong interest in cars. The 1950s produced the most flamboyant car designs ever; some were beautiful, others were bizarre, and some could have been loved only by their creators.

The New York Times recently posted a neat piece about 1950s cars and their tailfins, which reached their exaggerated peak in 1959. If this piques your interest, you can check out one of my favorite sites, the Old Car Manual Project archive of car brochures.

This Week in Awesome (8/1/09)

I know it's no longer Saturday, but I like to think of the weekend, and this feature, as a state of mind. I'm a bit underwhelmed by this week's selection, but you know, it's August, and I'm afraid my brain took a quick vacation. Hey, not every week can be stellar.

Continuing with the meme of crazy ads for crazy stuff you can buy from TV or the web, we have two entries this week. This first one I would describe as slightly odd. (Consumerist)

The second one is in a whole other class of bizarre. (TV Squad)

Excerpts from Sarah Palin's farewell remarks, "interpreted" by a master thespian, followed by similar treatment of some of her Twitterings. (Tonight Show via Hulu)

More Chicken, Anyone?

A while back I mentioned our visit to the Revere Chelsea branch of the chicken chain El Pollo Loco. We've been back a couple of times since, and it's definitely some of the best-tasting fast food you can get.

We tried to go on Sunday, but they had closed early for a staff outing. We were trying to figure out where to eat, then the Mrs. remembered that we hadn't yet tried the Guatemala-based chain Pollo Campero that opened in Chelsea a few months back. I'd read a Globe article that claimed their chicken was causing something of a sensation, so we headed over.

The line wasn't too bad, only about eight people ahead of us, and it moved pretty quickly. I ordered three pieces, two legs and a thigh, with a side of cole slaw. (There are also beans, rice, fried plantains, and for you true gringos, fries.) The Mrs. got two pieces and rice. The chicken is delicious, living up to the hype. They also offer grilled chicken, if you're feeling guilty.

Is it the best around? Who knows. That's a mighty big gastronomic project, but I welcome suggestions for other places in the area we should try. By the way, there's also a drive-through, which can be handy for those late-night cravings.

Pollo Campero is at 115 Park Street in Chelsea (if you've been around here a while, it's where Riley's Roast Beef used to be). El Pollo Loco is at 1014 Revere Beach Parkway, also in Chelsea.