mia is in phila for the weekend because that’s the kind of patriot she is. she called me from the wedding of three centuries, which was taking place at independence hall. apparently the guy who plays ben franklin is marrying the woman who plays betsy ross. i had a million follow-up questions, but there was a concert starting and she had to go.

oh. wait. this actually made the news? really? follow-up questions averted.

full story here and here.

last night, mama de pooka dropped by to pick up some stuff and she started telling me about this restaurant she went to last week in tacoma that has the calories and grams of fat listed for each menu item. she and her food-companion sat down, opened the menu, dropped their jaws, and left to get food elsewhere. what surprised her were two things 1) that a burger/nachos kind of restaurant in tacoma would have nutrition information and 2) that the aforementioned nachos contained somewhere north of 1000 calories. holy shit.

this made me wonder what would happen if all restaurants had to list calorie counts next to each item on the menu. would people stop going out to eat? if not, would they change how they ate? would it be bad for business for restaurants to label? would they simply change the way they cook to use less fat? or would they lobby the fda to increase the total recommended number of calories again?

a very edited-down set of alaska photos are up on flickr now. it was hard work, i think because of the photo-major-hyper-critical-self-critique thing that doesn’t ever go away even when posting vacation photos.

enjoy.

last night i was talking to a friend who is thinking about changing jobs. he works in a large office building downtown. he told me that he enjoys his work, likes his coworkers, and is fine when he’s at his desk, but starts to get down when he rides his bike into the corporate parking lot, sees the unhappy people get on an elevator to go up to their desks and then ride back down at the end of the day even unhappier than when they started. i have exactly the same feelings, and i suspect they’re pretty common.

the elevators/parking lot/dealing with strangers bad interaction stuff is by far the worst part of my day. it’s why i haven’t taken the bus in about four months. i’d rather ride my bike in the rain than deal with the bus. today i took the next step toward not dealing with unknown humans by taking the stairs on each of my three trips up to my desk on the 10th floor. no more elevators. ever.

as an aside, i wonder if that social anxiety disorder medicine is right for me. i should ask my doctor.

before i started work at america’s biggest online bookstore, i assumed that it would be all magic and super-perks everywhere (free returns? huge supply rooms full of every book ever?). turns out that other than having it be a really good icebreaker at parties when people find out where i work (this only works outside of seattle — in seattle, everyone works here or at the other big company), there really aren’t many. i mean, i love what i do and the impact i have on the internet as a whole, but the other big company has a super-sick gym that contains the old sonics floor on which their nerds can play basketball at lunch. i’m just saying.

the biggest perk at working at america’s biggest online bookstore is getting to attend lunchtime talks by visiting authors. i’ve seen a pretty great assortment of talks and won books written by: david lynch, jonathan lethem, and floyd landis. yesterday, david sedaris came to speak. i won his new book, too. i’d never won raffles until recently and now i can’t lose. (here’s where my losing streak starts.)

there isn’t a lot i can say about david sedaris that hasn’t already been said (other than a surprising number of my coworkers didn’t know who he was, which i didn’t think was possible), so i’ll talk about waiting in line for 40 minutes so that he could sign my book. there were only about 30 people in front of me, which means that he took a fair amount of time with each person, and i got to spend a fair amount of time away from my desk yesterday.

turns out that he does a little drawing for people and the opening line is a lot like those caricaturists in central park — they start drawing you on rollerskates and then ask if you like rollerskating (at least this was the case in 1983), for me senor sedaris started drawing a turtle and then asked me if liked turtles. my only possible reply was, ‘um, you already started it, so yes.’

he then began a stream of consciousness drawing/talking thing, which i think if i had to sign a billion books per week i’d be doing, too. his went something like, ‘your turtle, he’s a smart turtle, you can tell by the glasses… and he’s reading a book… about jesus being crucified… i guess that book would be the bible…’

here’s the drawing. it’s pretty rad:

in retrospect, i probably should have told him my last name so he coulda said something about the greeks instead of something generic about turtles and jesus.

When hiking in bear country, you’re supposed to make a lot of noise so as to not surprise a bear. I’ve been yelling out ‘hey bear! Bear bear!’ Which sounds like the best beer guys at shea stadium, who yell out ‘get-cha beer here’.

Needless to say, this got old rather quickly, so we started playing ‘I’m going on a picnic…’ We started yesterday in denali.

our new mantra goes ‘apples, beers, cans of beers…xavier high school boys, youth, zaxxon’ before looping around to double letters ‘aardvark, berry bubbalicious, coca-cola…xenophobic xylophonists, yelling yeti, zippered zebras.’ This also gets incredibly old but it keeps the bears away… Or so we thought.

As we were walking into town tonight (hope, alaska pop: 150), and mia was going on a picnic (and up to g — grizzly bear repellant) we saw a dog who had cornered a black bear not 10′ away from us. We wouldn’t have spotted it otherwise.

I wish we were better about bears. No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re still a little freaked out when you actually get tested.

We’re in an rv in denali. We dubbed the rv ‘das boot’. All-in-all it’s pretty amazing. Denali is the size of massachusetts and has only one road in it that only runs 90 miles to the west of the entrance. there are school buses that shuttle people into the interior and will stop for wildlife viewing or to pick up and drop off hikers. There is a lot of very remote wilderness here.

You can pretty much hike everywhere in the interior because there are no trails and almost no trees, due to the treeline being at 2000 feet.

Yesterday on the bus, we saw a sleeping grizzly. Thing was big. And kind of sweet looking. We’re really into bear safety now. I’m kind of obsessed with it, actually.

Whenever someone on the shuttle bus spots an animal in the distance (and it can be up to about a mile away), they yell for the driver to stop so that we can all stare at the dot on the hillside and take pictures that won’t turn out. During these moments, I spend my time documenting people taking pictures, which will actually turn out.

I’ll post photos upon my return. Lots of typing because the three other occupants of das boot are sleeping in. I death-marched them to the top of a peak yesterday, so they’re tired and hate me. They’ll probably hate me more when they find out that I’ll be doing it again today.

My first impression of alaska is that it seems like a more intense version of washington state. Longer days (midnight sun!), bigger mountains, a more ethnically diverse population (surprisingly) who are even friendlier than the moderately diverse washington population. Basically, it’s the pacific northwest taken to its logical conclusion.

Also, this is where all of those huge 1970s station wagons came to live out their last days. For all of the above reasons and more, I am already 100% into it.

The plane ride up to alaska was similar in feel to a plane ride to las vegas — that super-hyper anticipatory energy mixed with weird tackiness and incredibly bad hair.

in the midst of the nuttiness, I turned to mia and said: it’s like crazy slipped its meds and decided to go on spring break. To which she added: and forgot to bring its inside voice.

I feel better now that we (and our luggage) made it to the motel. My brother and his wife arrive in about an hour (at like 2am). Tomorrow we pick up the rv and head north. Gas here is cheaper than seattle. Score.

Blogging from my blackberry. Please pardon any typos.

barack obama rode a cooler bike?

though the last one had a really sweet (though ugly colored) custom serotta, and that didn’t turn out so well for him. or us, for that matter.

last night at 4am (almost on the dot), mia shoved/yelled me awake to hear some incredibly loud clunking noises down the interior stairs of our building, followed by other assorted noises, none of which sounded like noises you want to hear at 4am while you’re in a deep naked sleep.

i bounded out of bed, crept across the creaky hardwood floors, made it to the kitchen where i had to decide between a cleaver and an 8″ wusthof chef’s knife. i opted for the chef’s knife. i looked through the peep hole in the front door, then tip-toed to the front windows. as i was standing there in fight-to-the-death battle position my only weapon being the choosiest cook’s choice of cutlery with the adrenaline slowly wearing off, i thought of my favorite line from the untouchables: just like a wop to bring a knife to a gunfight.

i stood there for hourlong minutes and nothing. i eventually returned to the warmth of bed and reported that i hadn’t seen a thing. in the clear light of day, we’re thinking it was one of the neighbors doing something. i love 4am craziness, naked and knife-wielding like some sort of yuppie braveheart.

not only is it expensive, it’s turning people into shit drivers. i think that since gas has hit $4, i’ve had more close calls than i had in the entire year when gas was sitting in the mid-$3 range. fewer cars, more room to speed? drivers furious around cyclists who are paying nothing to get where they’re going (while occupying the non-oil burning hyper-smug moral highground)?

i dunno, i don’t think there’s a causation argument here, unless you are comfortable making correlation always being equal to causation arguments. i am. because otherwise you gotta do science and fuck that.

now that i’m pretty devoted to surfing, i tend to read a lot about shark attacks. this isn’t a good idea. i don’t care. when sharks attack people in places where we’ve surfed or when the attacks are particularly awful, i send out articles to the friends i normally surf with. so when we were looking for a name for the beach-with-no-name today, i suggested ’shark pit’ thinking that it if we started calling it that and it spread, it might keep crowds at bay.

the jetty was packed but the shark pit was empty (it’s working already!), so we decided to surf it. as we were walking down to the beach, the water got really dark and choppy and looked, you know, like where sharks would swim. then as we were trying to find a good place to start the day’s surf session, we spotted a giant dead sea lion (the shape of which is remarkably similar to the shape of my board). though it probably died of natural causes, it’s still going to lend credence to the shark pit legend.

about an hour and a half in, we spotted something long and sleek swimming through the water. now i was questioning whether or not ’shark pit’ was tempting fate, but it was just another sea lion looking for his dead buddy. he popped his head up, gave us a quizzical look, and swam away. we didn’t see him again, probably because he became another victim of the shark pit.

a few weeks ago, against committee orders, i made a contentious impulse purchase of the queen mother of all juicers, which has darkened a corner of our kitchen counter and drawn stares of rage and unlovely comments from my better jewish half. i thought that this rage against the juicer was permanent, but then came soft-serve banana. mia took one bite, looked at me and said, ‘you might have just redeemed this purchase.’ it’s that good.

recipe:
frozen bananas (pre-peeled)
raw cacao (or regular cocoa powder)
raw dark agave syrup

with the blank in place, feed the bananas to the juicer, which will play-doh-fun-factory them into an awesome-textured cream. whip in the chocolate until brownish; whip in the agave until sweet. can be refrozen. next attempt: minty vanilla.

last sunday morning, i woke up with this mysteriously achieved cut across the bridge of my nose that made me look like someone (the cat?) punched me with some amount of force. it hasn’t healed yet. this weekend, pc was in town and we went down to the western bridge gallery. there was a bouncy castle installation. we went in and jumped around. i had this awesome idea to attempt a back flip, which led to me landing on my head (sucked) and then kneeing myself in the eye (double sucked). insult to injury: pc was taking video while the jumping around was happening.

there’s something awesome about receiving a black eye for conceptual art, there’s something less awesome about being taunted for it at work on monday morning.