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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.”

Now that I’m playing again (with rigorous practicing because time is short) I really wish he were around to help me learn songs. But he’s not. He’s in, like, Colorado last I knew. Even Greg doesn’t get his calls returned, he says. (Hey, I understand the Will to Hole Up). But now there’s the internet. Where tons of people, most of whom are as tone deaf as I am, transcribe songs using guitar tablature so you don’t have to learn to read music. It’s generally crap, or at best hit-or-miss, but it can provide a jumping off point at least.

So, since I’m a community kind of guy, I figure I should give back. As I play more, many of the songs Rick figured out and taught me come back through my fingers. So I transcribed one of the easiest but most fun, “I’m Bored,” by Iggy Pop (and Scott Thurston? It’s credited to Iggy, but a guitar player made this shit up, I’d bet). From the album New Values. Transcribed by axlotl. Figured out by Rick, in, like, 1982. The transcription is impressionistic - this is how I play it. Or did as I typed.

(I should shut up now but an aside: this is a fascinating album. Obviously some A&R guy got ahold of Iggy’s contract and hustled him into the studio and probably had to simultaneously feed and deny drugs to him while employing some talented sidemen in the service of milking out some product. It reeks of mid-70’s Stones but still manages to emerge a pretty amazing piece of work. Deep in Indiana -and thanks to Rick- it was the first Iggy I heard. Obviously it’s no Fun House, but frankly the guitar work is more interesting.)

I'm Bored. Iggy Pop.
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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….

So I took the bike into the shop where I bought it, Gotham Bikes because derailleur replacement and tuning is frankly outside of my skillset. And a poorly tuned derailleur blows. When I eventually got tired of waiting for them to call and called myself, they said they needed a couple more days. A couple days later they informed me they had discovered a fracture in my carbon-fiber frame, a fracture that must have occurred last July 16th in the wreck that cost me my left posterior cruciate ligament (we’ll leave aside for now the fact that I took my bike into them after that wreck for a thorough going over where apparently the fracture was missed). So I need a new frame.

I went in and a guy brought my frame up for show and tell. I was kind of interested in upgrading the frame (from a roubaix elite triple) but wasn’t sure where my returns on investment would start diminishing. By which I mean: I use this bike to commute around NYC and for pleasure, but most decidedly not for racing. One can spend many multiples of the roughly 2 grand this bike cost me but it seemed to me that once you’ve got a carbon frame and a nice gear train the amount of actual performance enhancement you get for additional expenditure starts to wane asymptotically. Shaving grams off when I carry a 12 pound locking chain starts to feel like throwing money away. So I put it to the guy holding my frame: got any advice? He pointed to an especially expensive mountain bike he had recently purchased and said, “I couldn’t be happier.” So, I said, “You’re suggesting I should spend as much as I can possibly afford on my bike without reference to what I actually use it for?” He was. “Can I talk to someone else,” I asked. I couldn’t, they were too busy bringing in a new shipment of parts (that store - the one on West Broadway, is seriously undermanned).

So I left and came back three days later and eventually found Henry, who knew all about just what I needed to know, namely available Specialized framesets and the crash-replacement program ins and outs. My faith in Gotham Bikes renewed. I selected a Roubaix Pro Triple. “Got an ETA on that frame?” He did, it was Tuesday, now 9 days ago. I called a week ago on Thursday and still no frame. “We’ll call you.” So now we’re nearing July 11th and that will mean my bike’s been in the shop a whole month while I hobble around on a recently healed broken toe; this makes walking painful. Faith in Gotham Bikes waning again.

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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.

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.

1. 
   This baby brought me low as it rose up out of the dark beneath me while I was drafting a city bus. Unfortunately, though I didn’t know it at the time, I had broken a toe three days before and I fell on that foot, so this was an especially painful spill. I’m not quite sure how this road-formation came to exist, but my guess would be that the road was widened but the original curb was not fully removed. At least, that’s what it looks like. However it came to be, woe be to bicyclist rolling up to Lafayette on Fulton from the West because an invisible curb rises up in the middle of the lane.
2. 
   So we have an intersection that’s had its blacktop patched so many times that driving over it can shake your fillings out. Yes, that describes about half of Brooklyn streets, but this one came up on a list or something. We need to do two things at the same time (what a happy coincidence!): 1) replace some utility pipes underneath said intersection and, 2) cover the entire intersection with fresh macadam. What would be the proper order in which to do these two jobs? In Brooklyn, we put down the new roadway, and then cut a trench in it to get access to the pipes (Navy and Flushing).
3. 
   Let’s say there’s a school crossing zone. Let’s say it’s on DeKalb around Clinton. Let’s say you don’t want that zone to be a school crossing zone any more. But there are all those words painted on the street already! What to do? In Brooklyn, apparently, this is what you do: bring some heavy road machinery to the now ex-zone and just scrape the very pavement from beneath that paint. Sure, now the road is scarred by traffic-direction-oriented grooves almost fiendishly effective at catching bicycle tires, but at least it doesn’t say “SCHOOL X-ING” any more. Or at least not in the same color.

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.