Speaking of i-cafe in Teele Square, I just saw this little tidbit on Chowhound:

got to talking to the owner, ali, who, it turns out to be the original owner of soundbites. he sold out to the breakfast nazi 9 or 10 years ago. made me a banana crepe on the house — nice touch.

I haven’t been to Soundbites since the time the breakfast nazi threw our check at us and told us to leave, the very second that our friend John picked up his last forkful of omelette. And yet, John keeps going back every time he’s in town. It must be the crack in the hash browns.

Terri’s the stuff.

There’s a piece in this week’s Dig about our estranged former co-worker John Hargrave, Zug-meister and prankster extrordinaire. Apparently, there’s a book.

1 oz. Cap’n Morgan’s
2 oz. Soy milk
6 oz. Orange juice

I had an epiphany last night in the bathroom while I was getting my pajamas out of my suitcase.

I get blog-block more often than not because of that damnable title field. Sometimes, I just don’t have something to say that’s enheaderable, and this was not meant to be the kind of blog where I’m actually supposed to have Something To Say.™

So when I get into that state, my title will be “Daily Dispatch, DD-Mon-YYYY”. Problem solved. Let the blather begin.

I’m with Terri at the Trident slurping down beer by Beck’s (not bad– why did I never try one before? Better than a Heine, better than the other $2.95 options at the Trident (Miller Lite, Dos Equis)) and slurping down free bandwidth by NewburyOpen.net. Terri is off looking at magazines high as a kite on some tranquilizer that she took before her MRI tonight. I picked her up at the Harvard Vanguard in Fenway so she wouldn’t have to navigate the T alone.

Dinner was a breakfast burrito and a basket of fries.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I had my suitcase in the bathroom because I am still not unpacked from Christmas. I took it into the bathroom to get out some toiletries on Monday and have been taking an item at a time as needed. Such is the nigh on bottomless depths of my ability to procrastinate.

OK, computer is crashing and Terri has returned. We must get her home before she crashes, too.

More tough love for the Democrats.

The NY Times has an editorial that sums up what I was trying to say last night when I said I wasn’t very excited even though theoretically my side won. Basically, this is just a lesser-of-two-evils vote.

The Republicans created their defeat by focusing obsessively on the right-wing “base,” ostracizing not only the Democrats but their own party’s more moderate legislators. The conflict between the extremist House and the conservative Senate created a phony center, far to the right of the general public’s idea of where the middle ought to be. Yesterday, moderate Republicans in heavily Democratic states were done in by their party’s excesses. In Rhode Island, more than 60 percent of the voters told pollsters that they liked their Republican senator, Lincoln Chafee. But he was soundly defeated anyway.

That’s moderate Republican Lincoln Chafee who voted against the war (unlike our own Democratic junior senator John Kerry), but got the boot anyway because 72% of his constituency was opposed to the war in Iraq (which says that either people didn’t check his actual record, or the opinion that his loss was a referendum on Iraq that news outlets keep putting forth is wrong).

The Democrats won a negative victory, riding on the wave of public anger about Republicans. The new House majority will certainly call the administration to account on any number of issues, but it will have to do far more than run investigations if it is to build on its victory.

For years now, the Democrats have been not only the minority party, but a particularly powerless minority, elbowed out of virtually any role other than that of critic. The House Democrats will have to shift from the role of tactical opposition to shadow government. They will have to pass bills — bills that might not make it into law, but that would provide a clear idea of what their party would do if it were really in control.

Saying they were “elbowed out” gives them too little blame; curling up and dying is more like it. And.. er… why do they have to be a “shadow” government? Last time I checked, congress was part of the actual government. I think that wording is a subtle example of progressives being timid about leading and being in power; sometimes I think they prefer being the opposition with their babble about “speaking truth to power”. Time to be the power, folks.

Anyway. Last night I also mentioned the Republican “revolution” of 1994, which I think, as a temperature check of the voting public, was fantastically overstated both then and now. But they did have a well-spoken leadership who had a came at things with a coherent set of principles, and it made the election seem like a referendum. What do the Democrats stand for these days? Beats me.

As far as I’m concerned, the Democrats didn’t win this because they’ve found their way, they just got lucky. Let’s hope that another way this is not like 1994 is that this momentum keeps up for the next presidential election (but I’m not too optimistic there either, to be honest).

We’ve taken it pretty easy this vacation, opting not for the “Oh, my god, we’re never coming back here, so we must see everything!!!” mania that drives us to every park, museum, shop, cemetery, library, pedestrian street, festival, and parade in whatever place we’re visiting. I exaggerate, and I have deeply enjoyed prior vacations, but I think we needed a more low-key, recharging type vacation this time. California in general and San Francisco in particular seems like somewhere where we very well may return in the future, so we haven’t been packing it in too hard.

(You know, maybe we should; I guess it’s not impossible that a bald madman will purchase a lot of real estate along the San Andreas fault and then send some nukes into the fault so that all of the current coastaline will drop off into the ocean, which, as a child, is what I assumed would happen someday, after watching the original Superman. The plan seemed so obvious to me then that I figured it was only a matter of time before someone just carried it out.)

Anyway, we have done a fair bit of seeing of sights and acquiring of things on our trip. Here are some things I’m very happy with.

• A $0.50 paper accordion in Chinatown that actually plays two notes (but unfortunately can’t be controlled really)
• Several interesting zines and indie publications, most notably, Ker-Bloom, which I found on the indie shelves at City Lights, and whose author, I coincidentally noticed had done them at the SFCB where we saw the steamroller prints being made the other day.
• A corduroy jacket at Jetrag vintage clothes in LA.
• A book of some crazy Sun Ra pamphlets, also from City Lights.
• The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas by Davy Rothbart, from Skylight Books where we went with Patricia in LA.
• Various items from various spots in SF, which we were directed to by Matt Shaw in the excellent recommendation list he made us.

1. Read The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. Loved it, like Terri did, but different.
2. Read The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Very different, but also loved. Must send a copy to Quentin, because it reminds me (plot-wise) of Zorg and Andy, though, knowing Quentin, probably very different in spirit.
3. Saw Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. Yeah, what I expected. Having read a bio of Dick last year, I couldn’t help but think of the actual house he lived in which was supposedly much as the house of wacky stoner friends in the book/movie.
4. Have been watching Peep Show via Netflix. Imagine actually laughing out loud at a TV show.
5. Finally, finally watched a Fellini film, Nights of Cabiria, which was fantastic. I can even overlook the godawful “hooker with a heart of gold” plot. Why did I wait so long for this? I suspect it’s because I think of foreign films from the 50’s and 60’s and think of the French new wave which I just. don’t. get., and I guess without consciously thinking about it, I lumped Fellini in the same bucket, which is just dumb in hindsight, but there you go.
6. Watched The Wild One (the Brando movie). Unintentionally hilarious (mean, mean, bikers who are gone wild on that evil jazz music!), but now I can say I saw it.
7. Are going to see La Dolce Vita at the Brattle tonight to continue the Fellini kick.

My annual work group outing to Fenway Park was last night, and, man, that had to be one of the top 3 baseball games I’ve been to in my life.

I have seen the crowd at Fenway pretty revved up, but never that revved up. From the seventh inning on, it was really just deafening.

Kyle Snyder actually deserves a heck of a lot of credit for pitching a really good half game (he was supposed to start before it was clear that David Wells was coming back). Wells’ performance was a bit of a disappointment, though not a surprising disappointment.

But, of course, when it’s the bottom of the 9th, the Sox are down by two, two men on, and David Ortiz steps up to the plate, I’m thinking, no way. He can’t do it again. The crowd was just chanting M! V! P! M! V! P! And he does it! It just seemed totally unreal that something so astonishing happens all the time. The crowd was just totally pumped up, and nobody seemed ready to leave the park until they saw him say a few words to Tina Cervasio that got relayed to the jumbotron.

Excellent night at Fenway!

I forgot to mention that my cousin Margaret called me from the free Andrew Bird show at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, just to taunt me. I caught a couple of bars of “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left” before the signal cut out. Or she hung up, I couldn’t tell which.
I love her, but it was mean, especially because we’re not going to end up seeing him in Montreal over the 4th of July weekend.

Universal Hub has a great tidbit on why Boston, Cambridge, and other towns along the Charles aren’t as up-the-creek as some neighbors to the North:

…it might also have to do with a decision made by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1970s. …The idea was that the various parcels of land would act as giant natural sponges during floods, absorbing vast amounts of water quickly, then releasing it slowly as the river receded. And it seems to work. During heavy rain (or the spring thaw), the Medfield/Millis border becomes a large lake - but since nobody lives on the Corps land, nobody has to be evacuated, either. You can see similar flood control in action from the top of Millennium Park in West Roxbury - or even across from the northbound side of Rte. 128 just past Great Plain Avenue.

Acquiring the land cost $10 million - or 10% of what the government had originally expected to spend on manmade structures.

Oh, I love this great anti-Shaughnessy blog I found via Universal Hub’s opening day roundup.

this blog is dedicated to all those who find wrenching the mere presence of a mule like Dan Shaughnessy on the pages of a major city daily

Sign me up! At some point I will get off my duff and actually do something with the terrific anti-Shaughnessy domain name I bought after frothing at one of his columns a couple of years back. I won’t spoil the surprise.

I feel like I’m runnning 3 to 8 weeks behind on the blogging. I owe about 7 Book Reports as well as a bunch of stuff that I have saved as drafts but haven’t quite gotten around to hitting the ol’ publish button on, including reports of the Jonathan Richman tribute show a couple of weeks ago, a recommendation for a local pastry shop, and some other stuff.

This story points out that Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital, the shop that did the Computer Generated graphics for the Lord of the Rings movies are renting out their massively parallel computing facility, which is the world’s 80th most powerful supercomputer. Tolkien loathed most of the modern world, especially technology and commerce, so I have to wonder how he’d feel about indirectly spawning such a successful and potentially profitable technology project.

“…the next time you need to carry something small, flat, light and approximately 2 1/2 inches wide by no more than say, 6 inches tall-look no further than your own shirt. I have started to, and it’s paying off. Bigtime.”