Commute schmmomute. I'm working in Berkeley from now on, so there. Is there anything better than sitting on a train, listening to music, staring out the window at the city in the rain? There is not.

Nothing interesting to report.

Well, there's always something. We had Thanksgiving on Friday instead of Thursday, since Stewart was feeling sick, and I was the only American in attendance -- two Brits, two Canadians, an Australian and me. I explained it to everyone. I only ate as much as made me less hungry, a claim you may or may not believe, it's up to you.

Also, two of my favorite writers have new books out, which I bought this weekend, Decreation by Anne Carson, which is already wonderful after the briefest and most cursory read; and Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marias, which I haven't opened yet. But it's delightfully heavy.

And, Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash/June Carter biopic, was pretty good. Hint for Metreon 4th and Mission garage parkers: park in the basement.

Moreover, I listened to a lot of music this weekend, which I'll put into another post, and have been playing guitar. For the first time in a long time I have a life. (I've always hated that phrase. Because I think you have the life you want to have, or you don't want that 'other' life enough. Or your deferring it because you have to live this life first before you can start the next, life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards and all that. As my friend Jim always said, you can live many lives, but that means you must die many deaths. True true true.)

Urban hiking is something I've been doing for years, though never exerting myself quite as much as the guy in this article, sent along by Andrew. My most ambitious project, never undertaken, was walking the entire perimeter of Manhattan Island, as Walt Whitman was supposed to have done.

I was reading Repetition (what? this beautiful book is out of print?) on the flight back from Europe after our wonderful trip...it's a book about Filip Kobal, 20 years old, who in 1960 has travelled to Slovenia to try to find his missing brother, Gregor, an agricultural student, blind in one eye. The first section "The Blind Window" is about his home, and his travels away from it, and his feeling of never being at home among people, even in the house where he grew up:

The second section, "The Empty Cow Paths", begins like this:

A while ago, Bryce (same Bryce responsible for this nifty Flickr infographic) sent me a link to a blog that looks at old stories from Omni magazine, and sees how the various predictions have panned out. Sadly, most of the gee-whiz technologies (cleaning robots, clothing and parachutes made from spider silk) were pipedreams, or are still stumbling along, but the site includes various fun factoids, I'm assuming gleaned from Omni, such as the following:

• A blowfish's toxin is 100 times more potent than cocaine; a lethal dose, about 1 mg, could fit on a pin head.
• Apollo 8 astronauts used a new adhesive to fasten down their tools in zero gravity -- silly putty.
• The oldest rocks retreived from the moon's surface are 4.72 billion years old -- older than any found on earth.
• It's only the female mosquito that bites.
• Studies of fossil coral suggest that 370 million years ago, a year was 400 days long.

Some great people I've met here at the Design Engaged conference, which is a small gathering of designers, thinkers, researchers and philosophers here in Berlin:

• Adam Greenfield who did a great talk about designing for disaster; how with the decline in oil supplies and the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012 :-) we are potentially headed towards an apocalpytic future, and anticipates how the local, our immediate surroundings will become of great importance. As a proponent of new urbanism, I love his unintentional new urbanist prognostications. :-)
• Ulla Maria Mutanen whose Craft Manifesto I linked to a while back, it is great to meet her! Also, Jyri Engestrom is here, both from Finland. They talked about Thinglinks, their project which enables people to attach an identifier to their creations, to take the place of an UPC or ISBN code, so it can be referenced and referred to in other contexts, very cool! I hope Etsy is going to integrate this.
• We Make Money Not Art is by Regine Debatty, who showed us a bunch of projects by artists and designers using RFID tags, I'll try to link to some of them later, there was some lovely/curious/scary/weird/fantastic stuff.

• Something that Malcolm said just now: sublime irrelevance, again, since everything is filtered through Bataille these days, sublime irrelevance sounds like a great form of waste we should really look into.
• We had tea and dim sum at Yauatcha in Soho in London, which was good, and drank lovely "blue tea". Remembered what I hate most about London: obnoxious drunks. We had to move to a different table. The lovely and bashful group of people next to us told us they'd been obnoxious for hours, they themselves were too shy to move.
• Jet lag being my fate, Stewart and I got up at 5 AM and walked all around Berlin this morning, were screamed at by a nutty homeless lady; it is strange when people scream at you in a foreign language, this happened to me in Amsterdam too -- usually they are angry and urgent and want to tell you something, usually how they have been wronged, or that you are wrong.... We found ourselves in Alexanderplatz with a party of teenagers just letting out, screamy like teenagers everywhere, but wearing weird wigs. No other costume, just wigs.

I am fascinated by this book,which I've been reading through the jetlag-caffeine-vampire phase of the trip. I want to find a good quote that distills what this is. The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille, is a book of economics in which he posits that it is luxury, and not privation, that is the primary cause of all human ills. What a culture does with the inevitable surplus, or excess, is what defines it.

More on this in a bit; I'm at Design Engaged now in Berlin, and the first talk has begun, and I will be paying attention.

It is the year 2005, nearly 2006, and you do not have internet access in the rooms. In 2005, this is akin to saying to your guests, "Toilets? Of course we have toilets. They are down in the lobby, and you can use them any time you wish. Oh, and they will cost you 5 pounds per use. Cheers!"

Sincerely,

Grumpy Patron

• Went to Bed, Bath and Beyond today, and you, San Francisco resident who needs a bedskirt, heed my words: never ever go to Bed Bath and Beyond on a weekend, at least the one on 8th and Bryant, because the parking lot is insane, and makes the people desperate for a bedskirt even more insane. But the name still makes me giggle, and it's entertaining looking at the couples, since almost everyone there is a couple in their 20s and 30s.
• Landscape architecture and related subjects on Pruned, a great blog.
• I read two autobiographies this weekend, one by Hilary Mantel and one by Marilyn Manson aka Brian Warner, and as horrifying as it was, the Marilyn Manson one was the better one, incredibly misogynistic and ghastly, but Mantel was trying a bit too hard and used too many semicolons. And can I say: childhood isn't that interesting -- unless you're a protocriminal like Warner -- and half the book of it? No way.
• Also had dinner with David and Norma, Stewart's parents, and Chuck and Reva (Riva?) friends of theirs from way way back in the hippie days. I loved Reva, she's a winker. Oh, and Chez Papa on Potrero Hill was delicious, yum.
• Novel writing is going very very slowly. Only 2100 some words so far. :/ Too much premature editing I think.
• I rode my bike down to South Park and got my hairs cut, as my father would say. I feel stylish at last, it's been too long with the dowdy hair. I think next time I'll dye the tips of my hair blue.

On a scale from one to cool, Barabas was probably cooler than Jesus. Setting myself to the task, I couldn't think of a single person who was cool and also good. Cool is generally associated with bad or morally ambiguous. And the coolest people are always nuts, drunk, have an untoward propensity for leather, and occasionally veer completely out of control. Say, Kate Moss or Vincent Gallo. I can't think of any cool do-gooders. Bono is a rock star AND a do-gooder. Is Bono cool? Was Bono ever cool? Bono is, I think, not cool and never was. But then, was Anton LaVey cool? Unfortunately, sadly, probably. Even though he was more evil than bad, he was cool.

The idle brain is the devil's playground. And on the subject of evil, the other night I invented a game:

- Which is more evil, thief or robber?
- Thief
- Correct!
- Which is more evil, correct or right?
- Correct
- Which is more evil, tincture or stain?
- Stain
- Which is more evil, nagging or harping?
- Harping
- Which is more evil, ground beef or hamburger?
      ...and so on

Three days ago I listened to Once in a Lifetime for the first time. I'd heard the song dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, but this time it was was like daybreak, and the knowledge that this is a brilliant song shivered across me. It's about time and life, man, wow. Listen to it again:

If you're not Lester Bangs, trying to explicate songs, and how they moved you, is as futile as trying to train your dog to recite poetry, so I apologize for the clumsy helpless gesturing. This is indeed a brilliant song, listen to it if you can do it with beginner's mind, etc. you know how when you're a teenager everything is just reeling with meaning, it was a moment just like that.

One of the sweetest emails I've ever received was from Marrije who wrote that she was happy that I'd been posting again, and that it was five years ago when she first read about NaNoWriMo on my blog, which she is doing again this year, and that she has been devotedly reading my blog ever since, in times of feast and time of skinny, never-posting famine. Which is exactly what I needed to hear when I started blogging again. Thank you Marrije, really really really.

I never successfully completed a NaNoWriMo -- but Marrije's email has gotten me off my duff again. One of the things I realized is that writing -- even blog writing -- keeps me centered in a way that I don't manage to do any other way. I've been scattered, doing too much, never feeling on top of things, vaguely panicked that I'm forgetting something, but writing is slow and laborious thinking work that makes me focus myself in a way I don't do often these days. So I'm going to do some writing this month. I'm excited and apprehensive. If anything good comes of it, I'll post it here.

Through Matt McAlister and The Programmable Web I found the Potrero Hill Crime Map Mashup, and, looking around for more crime maps, found the Chicago Crime Map as well. (I can't get the Chicago Crime map thingy to load, it's hung on mt0.google.com -- maybe they should use Yahoo maps instead? ;-) And I was annoyed that there wasn't a Crime Map for my own neighborhood. As Matt notes, this kind of thing is important especially for people moving into a new neighborhood in an unknown town.

In other maps news, my friend Miles was here this weekend visiting from New York -- he is the founder of a company called Talking Street, which does cell phone tour guides for cities and other points of interest. With Talking Street, you can download a map from their web site, and then whenever you are in a location, you can call and get the recording from any cell phone. I'm picturing something like this happening on a device as well -- you are walking around a neighborhood, and you go to a web site, which can tell you interesting things such as what crimes have been committed at the spot where you are, where there's a Thai restaurant within 3 blocks, how many people got engaged on that street corner and recordings of their stories, where the nearest public bathroom is, etc.

Also, check out Platial, demo'd at FooCamp by my newest friend Di-Ann Eisnor. Location, location, location. Maps are coming alive! I am avidly watching all the pieces falling into place.