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So Serbia arrested Radovan Karadzic on Monday, finally. The Times had an arresting image of skeletons scattered across a wintertime hillside near Srebernecia, where Serbian forces murdered 8000 men and boys in 1995. I spent most of my commute from Brooklyn just staring at it. Often atrocities such as this seem distant and unreal but the sweater on the nearest victim, it’s patterns and knitting visible against the dead grass, renders the scene palpable. The wooded backdrop evokes the hills around the Indiana town where I grew up. I can picture the victim selecting the sweater from a drawer the morning of the day he was going to die.

In an overview of Karadzic and his crimes, John Burns reminds us of a time when he was considered one of the best international correspondents at the Times (or anywhere). But is it just me or was he getting in a dig at Obama with this bit: “The grandiose manner he developed in the years of conflict was encouraged, many who knew him then believed, by the willingness of the United Nations and the Western powers, primarily the United States and Britain, to negotiate with him.”

So when I started playing guitar in high school (it seemed to take so long to convince my parents that I really wasn’t that excited by the piano, which maybe doesn’t reflect well on me, that I wasn’t excited, not that it took so long. Anyway, I was poor but at some point they dropped $500 on a stratocaster, god or somebody bless them) I quickly realized that I was essentially tone deaf. I couldn’t tune the fucker and I could never figure out what my favorite rock and roll people were doing with their guitars on the recordings I wanted to ape. Fortunately, my friend Rick had the ear. He could listen to a chord, even a heavily distorted one (for this was the nature of the music we liked), pick up a guitar, and string by string figure out its components. Amazing. Read the rest of this entry »

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So in the beginning of June I was biking up Park Ave around 20th when my pedals went slack and I heard my chain snaking off the gears onto the pavement. I braked and dropped the bike and ran into traffic to gather the chain and when I got back to the bike I could see that my derailleur was essentially obliterated and a close inspection revealed that my overpriced Sharp in-ear headphones had fallen out of my bag and wrapped themselves around the drive train like a bolo, seizing the rear sprocket. Amazingly they survived in working order, so maybe not so overpriced….
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One of my houseplants has been inoculated with a fungus and the fungus is trying to reproduce! So on moist mornings I get a bunch of friendly little mushrooms as breakfast companions.

I love my local NPR station. I’m a total addict. There are other stations I listen to, sure, such as WFMU, but I need my talk. Anyway, my little NPR station (actually the largest in the country) recently added a new show in the morning rotation. It’s called “The Takeaway.” Joe Nocera in The Times has a really interesting column on the show and the station’s attempts to adopt its business model to the podcast age. Apparently local stations are at risk of being swept under as NPR content becomes increasingly available straight from the mothership.

So all of a sudden the show that was playing when my alarm turned the radio on wasn’t Morning Edition any more, but instead this new, worse show. I almost made it through one entire episode before I had to turn it off; it was just too awful. Apparently the idea is to recapitulate Morning Edition while “revving it up” for the ADD crowd with a theme song consisting of a fast cymbal tap and jump-cut transitions between short, punchy stories (albeit interleaved with more traditional medium-length interviews). The back and forth between the hosts, John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji is fast-paced and casual and the show jumps from continent to continent by including reports from BBC correspondents. Annoyingly, they also added a “modern communications technology” shading by leaving in the little “bleeps” that demarcate satellite transmission blocks. (Possibly these are synthetic bleeps that merely suggest the electronic bleeps used to demarcate satellite transmissions blocks, I’m not sure).

The show also features “audience participation,” maybe modeled on the BBC’s practice of reading instant listener SMS responses to stories. It actually kinda works for the BBC but in practice on The Takeaway, this aspect captures the general inanity pretty well. A few days ago Bo Diddley died and their obit was bespangled with a call-in that went something like this:

Bo Diddley, a lot of people covered his songs, so call in with your favorite cover song. bleep. “Hi, this is jamie, and my cover song is Jimi Hendrix, ‘All Along the Watchtower.’” bleep. Hockenberry: “Yes, that’s a really good cover song.”

It mystifies me that while WNYC is relentlessly plugging this unfortunate misfire, they quietly cancelled the actually funny (and increasingly polished) Fair Game (at least as far as I can tell) which is also produced there. Oh, well, there’s always podcasts.

Manhattan is a very dangerous place to bicycle, straight up. But both of my major bike-related injuries occurred in Brooklyn, and though that’s probably because I live here, and so bike here more often, I don’t know that Brooklyn really gets its proper props as a very dangerous place to pedal. Probably the greatest threat comes from other people on the road, mainly in cars, but they often won’t stop to be photographed, or if they have stopped, are hard to really capture from a prone position, what with all those EMTs and ambulances in the way. Bad streets though can be just as insidious and just lie there while you click away. So I started carrying my camera on my bike to preserve a record of the offenses (click the images for nice, big versions; the street names link to google streetview images of the roads in question).

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I had a wordpress blog for years and took totally the wrong approach to it, trying to update it regularly even though I didn’t really have all that much I wanted to say, so it became clogged full of unreadable, embarrassing crap. Thus came the day when I could no longer bear the thought of it being there on the internet, where people could see it, and I mothballed it. (It’s still viewable here, if you must.)

Eventually, though, I became tired of throwing together ad hoc pages whenever I wanted to use the internet to show something to somebody, and when I finished creating a wordpress installation for a client, I decided to take a moment to install it again on my webserver and start from scratch. And get get over the embarrassment of an archive link list that starts in 2008. But a professional web programmer really should have, you know, a website, it seems.

I expect the design to mutate pretty actively for a while here. It’s not as if I need to project and protect a brand, after all. Actually, I had been planning on using django for this, as a learning exercise, etc , but I decided to break that out into a separate step. Too often I overload tasks, hoping to kill many birds with just the one stone, and then the whole thing becomes too daunting, I dither, and nothing gets done. So, with the one step at a time philosophy, here’s this, an essentially unstyled but, crucially, extant weblog.