Author: vargocity

Last night I attended a class on derailer installation, tuning, and maintenance put on by the local bike co-op. All in all it’s a pretty ingenious design but the more I learned about it the more complicated it sounded and the more I began to understand the appeal of the simplicity of the fixie. I also found it ironic that I went to learn about derailers at a shop where maybe half of the people who show up regularly are on bikes without them.

I can’t wait to try my new skills with my own bike. It needs a quite a bit of work to get everything going smoothly. Luckily one of the hardest parts (making sure all the components are designed to work together) is already taken care of.

You can learn about derailers for yourself here.

derailer FAIL pic curtosy of theoelliot

Today I have been wasting a lot of time on the internet watching stupid videos and laughing at pictures, etc. But I wanted to pass on this pool of interesting videos captured at the World Science Festival. I guess it’s from a discussion of music and neuroscience which featured Bobby McFerrin. If you go to the conference’s video highlights three of the four videos feature McFerrin. Watching the videos, his talent and knowledge of music is evident but his creativity to experiment with how we react and interact with music is the reason he’s on stage. Interesting stuff.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5732745&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

I have been hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting a lot lately about bacon. It seems that there is a certain something about bacon that appeals to a lot of people. It’s a unexplainable feeling that’s visceral and which convinces us if bacon is good, more bacon is better. Similarly we also like to think that everything is better with bacon. I’d like to present a few examples.

First, Tony’s side of bacon. On our trip up to northern MI we stopped at a Brich Run restaurant staple known as Tony’s. It is known for the huge portions and, in particular, their sides of bacon. Matt and I had heard about it all the way there from my mom and dad and it sounded too interesting to pass up. I think I have eaten there before but have no memory for these anecdotal events and a different taste in my mouth from those days to these. As we ordered I waited for the famous bacon to be added to someone’s meal or picked up as a side but everyone shied away from what had been the talk of the trip up there. I had to do it so I added a side of bacon to my order of french toast (see photo). It’s effectively a basket full of bacon, and by bacon they mean huge cuts of fried pig (no thinly sliced strips here). I got help from some of the others but we could not finish it.

Second, Camp Bacon. On the same trip we also visited Ann Arbor and stopped by one of my favorite place to eat, Zingerman’s. It’s more than a deli, more than a bakery, it’s a mailorder, publishing, olive pressing, cheese aging, explosion of taste. Anyway, they are celebrating the release of their newest book, Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon with a bacon extravaganza of sorts. They’re offering a number of bacon-enhanced recipes at their various shops and encouraging people to try them all in what they call the Tour de Bacon. This includes bacon scones and reduced price bacon add-on for any ice cream order. I trust their appreciation of food to do right by bacon but it’s still a shock to see it on some of these dishes.

Finally, the Bacon Explosion. I have only posted a teaser picture, please visit the website and look at it in all its bacony glory. I found out about it from a series of tweets by a friend of mine, Chad. He has recently come into a new smoker and is busy experimenting with the limits of what meats can do. The Bacon Explosion appears to be the epitome of bacon exuberance. Glutony is too simple a description, it’s the gastronomical equivalent of a Bernie Madoff-size ponzi scheme. Average people can only begin to imagine the limits of its wealth. You bring home a lot of bacon and then you bring home more and more. You revile it but you also want it. I imagine I could take about 2 bites but I have no idea what to expect with them.

I’m anxious to hear other bacon experiments and eccentricities as we continue to search the mysteries that are bacon.

Not a BLT or a homemade sauce, this is the fate of more than 20 of the ripening tomatoes in our backyard. The cause: squirrels. They are systematically picking apart the tomato plants and trying each fruit. If it’s not ripe they make a few bite marks and move on to the next. The picture was of the specimen I found today, one I had hoped they would continue to passup due to its size. It used to be a ripening bradywine variety, but now it’s compost.

I have not mentioned much about the garden this year but it has, until now, been a fairly successful followup to our foray last year. We added a bed and a more substantial fence and even planted some flowering plants for decoration and maybe bees. Also we tried lettuce and started most of our vegetables from seeds. The first setback was the now annual attack of the squash vine borer. This moth lays eggs on squash which hatch inside the stem and eat the plant from the inside. We found them last year and they struck again on our best squash this summer. Next year I think we’ll definitely go with the easier and more consistant cucumber. Also, the peper plants have taken forever to come in from seed. They may just now be getting there. Now the squirrels have moved in and they are tearing up the tomatoes. The good news is that the compost is going gangbusters and we should be able to greatly improve our soil over the winter. We’re slowly grwoing our GA clay into noteworthy soil.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

A lot of press has been devoted to the King of Pop’s passing and it will probably be one of those events where people remember where they were when they heard the news (at least for a while). On the day Michael Jackson died I was attending another monthly meeting of The Dirty South Beer Club over in local Decatur. Indeed I will remember for some time how I was greeted at the door with the news that Michael Jackson had died. However, lest I forget some other events of the night they were documented in the lesser known, but still important, journalistic endeavors of Creative Loafing’s Jeff Holland. This bit of news aired online six days following the now famous events of June 25th, but you may not have seen them between all the MJ coverage. Read it here!

Back when I was a kid blowing up the moon was only a dream, but this weekend I heard a story on the radio confirming that NASA was indeed planning to create an explosion on the moon to blow some of it up. Here’s an article talking a bit about their plans. It also says that there are people collecting signatures to actually blow up the whole thing. The story immediately reminded me of one of my favorite Mr. Show sketches, seen below. Regardless of what happens with this it is worth 10 minutes of thought and a laugh. I wonder if we’ll be able to see it.

In the last month we’ve been on the road a lot. We spent a week in Utah, heading to National Parks and hanging out Salt Lake City. But we’ve put some miles on the car attending some destination weddings throughout the south and east.

The first was in Asheville about a month ago. It was the union of two friends I met while at Emory. We headed up to one of our favorite mountain towns early on Saturday and spent a few hours eating and walking around and hitting up a great store in town. Before I get too far ahead, I should mention that we had a brief shopping spree at the outlet malls on the way up to outfit ourselves. Dress codes have varied for these events and we’re always feeling less than certain in our attire. For this wedding Lauren picked up a new dress that turned out to be the same as the bridsmaids’ only in a different color. The wedding was on a farm outside Asheville in Weaverville. It was a beautiful setting and very laid back. The ceremony was in a field surrounded by hills and there was an old barn where we ate and outside of which our dinner was smoked for hours. There were also tons of activities like a big soccer game, horseshoes, smores-making, and even game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals (and that’s all I’ll say about that). It was a great event.

Two weeks later we set off for Kiawah Island, outside Charleston, SC. Pre-trip emails confirmed that this would again be a semi-casual affair, no jacket or tie required. We carpooled with another work friend of Lauren’s and were staying in a condo on an adjacent island. Both islands were operated like compounds with restricted access and we felt like VIPs. The ceremony was held on the green of a country club and looked out on the sunset over the reeds. The wedding had a live band and excellent food. I, unfortunately was one of three people to be without a suit. On the short ride back to the condo, my glasses fell off the dashboard and out the window. They were run over by a car. The lenses are fine but one of the arms fell off. Then we nearly hit a road-crossing alligator. In the end we got to spend some time on the beach and had a good time with some new friends.

Next we headed to Utah for a week, but more on that in another post. This weekend we drove up to West Virginia for the wedding of two other Atlanta friends. This one was on the family farmhouse in the countryside. We stopped somewhere on Friday night to break up the drive. We had picked out a backcountry site at Crowder Mountain State Park, NC but decided to keep driving and find a car spot further north. We were able to land the last available spot at Claytor Lake State Park in Virginia. The weather and setting were perfect for the wedding yesterday and it was great to see a lot of friends we haven’t seen in awhile. We all wondered if Michael Jackson songs would be played and of course they were. The dance floor got packed when they came on. Nothing too crazy happened, we enjoyed ourselves and had a long drive back to Atlanta today.

I haven’t grown tired of all this traveling yet. It’s fun to have new destinations and things to do and seeing your friends get married and helping them celebrate is always fun. I have yet another couple weekends of roadtrip left in me, as I set off to MI next weekend and drive back to Atlanta the week after that. I’ll be sure to post more about the trip once it happens.

I have been MIA for a bit and there is a lot to catch up on but I am writing a quick post to let you know (if you don’t already) that The State is finally coming out on DVD on July 14th. Here’s a classic sketch to whet your appetite.

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtv.com:375233

On Wednesday night I went to see a screening and director Q&A for the new documentary about industrial design, Objectified. This is the second film from director (design junkie) Gary Hustwit. The first was an exploration of graphic design centered around the film’s namesake typeface, Helvetica.

The film interviewed several designers of yesterday and today while showing well placed and positioned images of the objects they design. In some cases they showed the process by which these products came to be. Jonathan Ive of Apple talked a biit about how designers can not effectively design and produce the final form without designing elements of the production process. One of the most important things that the film helps you realize is that everything has been designed. A lot of the designers also talked about the evolution of an object’s design as we use it. Particularly interesting was the idea of trying to design something that wears in and become better the more you use it. One critic from the New York Times suggested a marketing campaign to rediscover the things we already own.

While the designers talked about form vs. function, the film did not examine the intense focus on function that we assume engineers to use when designing. Another way to explore that would have been to discuss how the ‘creative’ design types interact with the engineers. I think they touched a bit on this in one portion that discussed office layout but it may point to something more important. That is, that design may be ever more connected to technical skills and today’s designers really need to be both technically proficient and creative. This is probably something that those in the field have known for a long time while the rest of us have been keeping the segregation of tasks alive in our heads.

I still haven’t seen Helvetica but I interested to catch it, especially since most of the stuff I do is graphic. If you have seen it let me know what you thought (take the bait, Katy) and if you see Objectified tell me what you think. Remember that almost everything has some design that goes into which makes each of us designers as well. Take on your tasks with a new sense of responsibility.

This past weekend I took a trip with some friends down to South Georgia for a couple nights of camping in the wilderness. The trip involved a night at Stephen C. Foster State Park near Fargo, GA and then a 9 mile canoe trip through the Okefenokee Nation Wildlife Refuge to camp on a platform, with return to the park and our cars the next day. Nerves were high for this trip because of the isolated nature of our destination which lies in the middle of 700 square miles of intact ecosystem. Complete with alligators and black bears. Also worrying was the prospect of being eaten alive by mosquitoes given that South Georgia had recently declared a health emergency because of booming mosquito populations following this springs’ rains. Still the weather looked good and we had already put money down for the reservations so we headed south with extra DEET and sunscreen.

The first challenge of the weekend was to make it into the state park before 10PM when the gates closed. In total we were a group of eight in two cars and despite a few necessary stops and a missed turn we made it to the park in time. We set up camp and had some time to socialize before heading off to bed in preparation of the next day. One thing that was completely perfect about the timing of the trip was its coincidence with the peak of the lunar display. Both nights we were there we had a nearly full moon. This made for poor star gazing but afforded us a glimpse of the swamp at night without the use of headlamps.

Friday night when we arrived at the ranger station to pick up our camping permits they were waiting for us outside but oddly the door to the ranger’s office was unlocked even though they had left for the evening. The next day when we packed up camp and headed down to the pier/dock/livery/ranger station we encountered more of the same relaxed, if not negligent, work ethic. We paid our money for the canoes, were given a canoe number, and told where to find cushions, life jackets and oars. That was it for the orientation, no instructions on how to handle alligators, no emergency procedures for snake bites, no supervision getting the canoes in the water. It was all surprisingly informal. We turned the canoes over, loaded them up and launched them ourselves.

At the beginning of the trip my nervous curiosity around alligators and snakes was high. The water is the color of tea, so much so that you expect the smell of tea to get stirred up each time you move the paddle through the water. You can’t see anything below the surface and you wonder what you’re gliding over and how deep it is. After we went through the first narrow canal and got out into more open waters we spotted our first gator basking on the edge in the lilly pads and some of the tension was nervous tension was released. When we saw the second one, we were already talking about moving in for a closer look.

We stopped for lunch at a platform about halfway between the launch and our final destination. There we saw some other folks canoeing and got our first taste of what our digs would look like. The day was clear and beautiful so we were making use of all the sunscreen we brought but were only beginning to realize that the bug spray and DEET weren’t all that essential (of course it was only the middle of the day). We forged ahead through the second half. It seemed a bit longer and tougher as we were going against the current and the sun became more intense.

We arrived at the small turnoff for Big Water at about 3:30. The platform was another 100 feet down a narrow inlet. We set up our tents and began to adjust to the new space we’d be sharing for the next half-day. At first I found myself moving around a lot, not sure where to settle an trying to get out of the sun. The other thing that kept people moving around a lot at first were the huge spiders we were finding. Like the alligators our initial nervous energy subsided. We continued to pass the time with conversation and pretzels until we spotted a visitor in the water just off the platform. It was an alligator that would continue to lurk back and forth in the canal the whole time were staying there. Nick named him (for some reason, everyone refers to all alligators using the masculine pronoun) Nubs because of his characteristic short, nubby limbs.

At night we played games by lantern light and listened to the chorus of frogs. Behind all the different frog noises you can also begin to hear a low and long bellow that belongs to the alligators that you realize are all around you. (see video here) Unfortunately we couldn’t really see anything around the platform because it was located in the middle of trees and other brush. I was thinking it would be something with more of a vista, where we would be able to see for a mile in every direction and get a great sunset but it was a lot different. Even when you’re in the canoe you can always see what you think is the shore and it becomes very strange to think that the ‘ground’ at the edges is hardly ground. When we got closer to the forested edges you began to understand that it was under water as far as you could see into it.

The trip back to the park entrance was much easier on Sunday when we were heading with the current. By the time we arrived at our cars the surprise absences of mosquitoes that had only begun to set in by lunch on Saturday was fully realized. While on the platform I did not even have to use bug spray, there just weren’t mosquitoes. We had mosquito coils set up and smoking around the platform but I really credit the biodiversity of the place with keeping the mosquitoes under control. The trip was forecast by everyone to be a swarming nightmare with regard to bugs yet it was anything but. The number of predators like dragonflies, snakes, spiders and birds in the swamp must help tremendously in keeping the pests under control. Or we somehow hit a spell of fine timing.

South Georgia is still a venerable mystery to me, but a trip to the swamp is a great way to introduce yourself to the area, even in May. That is not to say that I wouldn’t also consider booking a trip in the winter months when the water is lower, the bugs are guaranteed to be low and the sunsets may be better through thinner vegetation. regardless I recommend taking along some friends. Spending hours confined to a platform in the middle of an alligator-infested swamp (it’s like your childhood fantasies come true) is a great way to bond.

more pictures here