Little Italy fest last weekend. Lots of sausages, wanted more pannacotta.

Museums before it’s too late.  The Met.  The Moma.  PS1.  Natural History.  Other suggestions?

I’m going to buy a 1 year family pass to the Moma/PS1.  You can only do it with 2 or more folks and you save over the individual 1 year pass.  Anybody want in?

I’ve been in New York exactly 1 month now. This is from our roof top. 400tx.

Dialing 411 on your cell costs about 75 cents per call. Google, purveyor of all that works well, just introduced a new 411 service. 800-Goog-411. It’s totally free, all voice recognition, and seems to work fairly well.

Rock Salt Encrusted Snapper. 400tx.

I’m going to go walk around Chinatown in slow motion, wearing a suit, listening to Yumeiji’s Theme on my Ipod.

Kowloon, Hong Kong. (400tx)

I’ve been devoting less time to this blog and more time to Yelp.

I’m a place person. I like knowing places–restaurants, bars, stores, sights—what the real deal is and how to get there. I like when people say, hey, what’s a good first date restaurant, and I can name a few and give recommendations. I also like being critical.

Yelp is like evolved social networking—myspace with purpose and mature adults. It’s ratings for restaurants and more, with of course, profiles and all of the other goodness that comes with facebook and myspace. Most users are foodies too, so they have some idea of what they’re talking about. Here’s me.

Sashimi. Tokyo Fish Market. Fresher than any restaurant sashimi at 1/3 the price. Hamachi and Ahi.

ICE is the new black. ICE stands for “In Case of Emergency,” and there’s an ongoing campaign to try to standardize this as a mobile phone entry. You should enter it in your phone, and the contact info should be “your person” as Meredith says. (Man…why do I watch Grey’s?) In my case, it’s my motha. I also have another entry for “LOST PHONE–if found please call,” which is my roommate’s cell. The linked Washington Post article is from July 2005, but I hadn’t heard about this, and I’m up on my shit, so I thought I’d try to propagate it again.

Holed up in my room, determining my next steps in life. Only a small window, a brick wall and a bit of light.

I checked my credit record through two of the big 3 bureaus. There must be a law that requires free credit reporting (as it should be). I signed up with Experian and TransUnion. To get your free credit report, you have to give them some current credit card info. You get a 30 day trail of their free credit checking software, then $9.95 per month automatically charged after that. It’s like when one of my former roommates thought Girls Gone Wild was awesome so he ordered the latest tape (it was vhs back then). But then kept on sending and kept on billing, only $100 and a couple of months later did he figure it out and cancel it. With credit scores, the $9.95 is also in the small print. There’s no easy way to cancel either. You have to call up their customer service, wait on hold, then tell the rep that you want to cancel because there’s absolutely no good reason that you’d need daily updates on your credit record. To his chagrin, he complies and assumes a bitter emasculated tone for the remainder of the call. They say you should cross check with all 3 bureaus. I still haven’t canceled with Experian…I need to get on that. To top that off, all of their websites look semi-shady, like maybe they really are trying to take your money. All in all though, I got an 84 out of 100, but it’s graded on a curve. Kidding.

Ack. Need to shoot something…in NY, not old pics of a stupid dog show. (sensia)

My most viewed Youtube Video…with a paltry 1200 views…It’s a lobster in Qing Dao, China. They pull it from the tank, cut the head off, cut the tail off, remove the tail meat, plate it sashimi style, then plate the still kicking head, antennae and legs on a bed of ice. It is served quick as the dickens such that the lobster is still kicking when it arrives at your table. It’s unstomachable for 99% of the US population and a delicacy for 99% of the Chinese population.

So, while I was back in the Bay Area, waiting for my rocket to come, I found myself with an unnatural tendency to pimp my mom’s garage. I guess I’m a home repairs-garagey kinda guy. Or I will be when I get a garage of my own. I went through all of my old high school crap that was stored in boxed and threw away most of it, save for every scrap of high school work I ever did, including our quadrat project from AP bio. But then I replaced the dearth of my old stuff with paucity of new crap from college. I fixed the garage door, by loctiting (tite not tit) every bolt holding it together…nylock nuts were prohibitively expensive. I painted the entire garage, as the walls were all unfinished drywall. When my mom asked why I painted it, I said, “mom, not everyone is so foturnate to have a drywalled garage…many people just have studs and tarpaper, which would look silly. Let one hundred flowers blossom.” She said, “wtf greg, but ‘ok’ if your’e going to hook it up.” Last but not least, I pressure washed, alkali etched, and epoxy coated the garage floor, so now it’s like a race car garage. The whole garage is 200% brighter and a whole lot cleaner (looking). I can’t wait until I have my own garage.

Sky on the floor.

Finished product.

I thought the inflatable Chinese myopic testing mascot at the Food Expo was rofl. But apparently it’s serious business. This 3 year old kid has it pretty bad, but what really drove it home was that he got myopia with intercurrent astigmatism and amblyopia from marathon sessions of Counterstrike. On the other hand, since I’ve started playing first persons shooters again, mainly bf2, my visual acuity and hand-eye coordination has definitely bettered. His corrective glasses reminded me of those crazy oakleys that Michael Jordan promoted back in the crazy late 90’s.

In SD David, Jake and company like to play games. Speed scrabble is a variation of scrabble where you get 7 letters and you make your own arrangement. When you use a letter, you say “honk my horn!” and everyone takes another letter such that you always have 7 letters in your hand, plus your arrangement. Points don’t matter, only who ever finishes first. If you’re slow in the head, like me, you get overwhelmed by constantly having more and more letters to deal with. I tend to think outside the box (read: outside the rules of the game), so I just waited till I had tons of letters and aimed for high humor scores. (Sensia 400)

Carbonfund.org’s slogan is “toward a zero carbon world.” I’m thinking about donating because I also despise methane, proteins, sugar, pencil lead, diamonds, explosives, wood, pvc pipes, plastic, macaroni and cheese, gatorade, pine trees and basically every living thing and earth as we know it. Yes, it’s a technicality, albeit a rather large one.

Shiba Inu at the dog show in SF. Yeah, I know, dog show. I went. But really, I’ve never had a legitimate pet in my life, no dogs, cats, birds, turtles. Being around so many dogs and people who are obsessed with their dogs was quite shock in terms of culture. I’m starting to get the feeeling that I missed out on something. My first faux pet was at UCSB. I stole/borrowed some gold fish from the Storke reflecting pool. Yeah there are some fish in there. No wonder I care so much about my bonsai. (Sensia 400)

Tanbark. Know what it is? You either most definitely know it, or you’ve never ever heard of it. I feel like it’s Bay Area thing. If you know of it, you know it because it’s the stuff that used to surround the play structure or jungle gym in elementary school to soften the blow when you fell from the ring bars or got thrown off the slide playing king of the mountain. It was the lava in 9 lives. It’s the stuff that you’d always get splinters from. It’s the stuff that would form mysterious quicksand-indeterminable-depth pools. When it rained–the wood chips would all float to the top and look like it was hard ground. It’s the stuff you could throw at other kids on the playground if you held the chips like you were going to skip a rock.
It seems like only a handful of people had this great stuff in their childhood, but it confounds me because when I think of Rheem Elementary, I think of tanbark (and toilet monsters and skinners and pink elephants). New federal regulations require that “surfaces under and around accessible play equipment and other play equipment in the play area shall be firm, stable and slip resistant” and that the “material shall minimize splintering, scraping, puncturing or abrading the skin when being crawled on.” Tanbark has since been replaced by more environmentally friendly materials such as chopped up old tires and recycled rubber matting. I guess skinning pine trees wasn’t very friendly.

Mother, just chillin. (Fuji Sensia 400)

We just had a bit of an earthquake, a 4.2 on the Richter scale. It was centered in Lafayette, very near where I grew up. We’ve actually had a 2 decent-sized earthquakes over the past few days, but I haven’t felt them up here in Marin. Hopefully the San Andreas fault will stay chill, as the recent earthquakes have occurred on the Hayward and Calaveras faults

SF sky line from the Golden Gate ferry., 2006. (400tx)

According to Google Zeitgeist (tracking for search queries), the most common “define” query was for the word “promiscuous.” (You can enter “define: word” and it’ll give you the dictionary entry). I’m pretty sure Nelly Furtado is to blame/thank for this. What if artists threw one solid vocab word into the chorus of their hit song…we’d all be a little bit smarter.
Meat, Honk Kong, 2006. (astia)

At a food expo in Hong Kong, the mascot for a myopia testing booth gets harassed by some kids. The mascot is a device into which you look that lets you know if you’re nearsighted. Things must be a bit more advanced in Hong Kong–I found out that I was nearsighted by things appearing blurry far away…that’s a good test right? (3200tx)

Soon I’ll see this guy. (Astia)