Birthday Dinners and Uber Musings

My plan was to take the Boy---just the two of us---out to Avalon on Catalina for my birthday. See, the company that takes people there and back (only 26 miles away!) have a "free birthday ticket" deal going.

Of course, that's "free birthday ticket with purchase of one adult ticket", which for a round trip is nearly eighty bucks.

Also, after staying up ridiculously late the night before after the birthday dinner party, we decided against what would have been the Boy's first boat ride.

The dinner party was nice, even though I under-cooked the salmon and didn't get the skin how I wanted it, and later Corrie told me to just forget about the skin, "We're not in France," she tells me, "you're probably going to have give up on that,"

She's right, of course.

The sea bass was great, the Brussels sprouts grubbin, the tabouli I made the day before (so the flavors would combine perfectly) was excellent, the home-made tzatziki and hummus for appetizers were both fantastic...but you always remember the one thing you'd like to redo. The roasted pear dessert was magnificent.

Corrie set up and planned the whole thing, organizing and shopping and the like. I just cooked the food...and bought the fish at the fish market in San Pedro, my first time visiting it.

Anyway, after the last couple had left---via Uber, just like the other couple a short time earlier---Corrie and I had a discussion of Uber and Lyft.

I was thinking...besides the trip to San Diego last January for Jimmy Berlow's bachelor party, I haven't been in an Uber...or Lyft...

It seemed to me, as we talked about it late Saturday night, that there had been more Uber and Lyft rides to our apartment than either Corrie or I had been a part of anywhere else. Between winter parties and birthday dinner parties, it seemed like an accurate guess.

"I guess that makes us an Uber destination?" I mused.

"I've never been in an Uber," Corrie posited. "Or Lyft. Crazy. I'm sure in this demographic and age group and based on where we live, we're serious outliers."

On NPR it sounded like a city in Orange County needed to cut bus service because of a lack of riders. One line was going to be cut entirely, but for the hundred people who rely on it, the totally rely on it and have no other options. The city has decided to subsidize Lyft rides for those affected passengers.

At those bus stops, instead of a times-table for when the next bus arrives, there are instructions for downloading the Lyft app. The passenger pays only what they would pay the bus company ($2 or $2.25) and the city pays the rest of the tab.

The program is in the pilot stages, but is, as the cliche would have it, outside the box.

Instead of Catalina's biggest city of (sleepy) Avalon, I got to hang out with the Boy and get a nice shot for the last Polaroid we had in house:

Recognition for a Useless Thing

I have a digital smart device, but I definitely don't utilize it's to the maximum abilities. 

In fact, I only really play The Simpsons: Tapped Out.

I don;t have Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook on my phone. I don't use it for work, pulling off deals as I meander the streets from one meeting to another meeting. I barely even use it for map directions and traffic notifications.

Really, just this video game, and a sims-game at that. This is the first sims-type game I ever played (a "sims" game is a "simulation" game, where you build cities or civilizations, or send characters to do gigs, or both), but this is a Simpsons-sims game, and we get to relive many cool scenes or movies and get many spoken lines by many voice actors from the show.

Anyway, I've been playing since March of 2013 and have set up my city as similar to Venice as I could make it, with waterways everywhere.

I use a website to help out with clarifications every once in a while during events, and have it as a usual destination on my Interwebs travels.

Recently, after a mini-event, the fine, hard-working folks who run the website asked for submissions of screen captures of the gear from the mini-event. For the first time, I submitted a collection of screenshots I put together to show off how I set them up.

After the time was up, they put up thumbnails of their submissions. I perused them, knowing that since I'm a novice with Photoshop and needed to use Powerpoint for my tile job, I should be able to quickly find mine if it were chosen.

Which it was:

I circled it above, and the screen capture shows off some of my personal computer's bookmarks. Anyway, after clicking the thumbnail, I was brought to a familiar-to-me sight: a scene from my own Springfield: Rommelwood Island, the Eliminator obstacle and the barracks:

Like I've told other people, this is as close to the Simpsons as I've been in years, and it's as close to a video game as I've been since Ocarina of Time.

A new event has started and this link is buried deep in the scroll, to be long forgotten. Corrie was funny when I mentioned it. She was being honest and earnest, "Wow! Congratulations on being recognized for...something that...has no meaning and is...pretty much useless... Hey, at least it looks cool!"

She is a fan of my Springfield, mostly...

RIP Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry passed away over the weekend at 90(!!!!) years young.

Thanks for the Rock'n'Roll, Chuck!

One of the original inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Chuck started as a singer and moved on to guitar. He learned some fundamentals and got a gig as a house player at a St. Louis club where they played blues, calypso, and "jazzy ballads." After a trip to see the blues scene in Chicago, the synthesis was mostly complete.

A hybrid music style was forming. Once the final touches were added---the incorporation of country riffs---the foundation of "rock music" was birthed. Isn't that an Americanism? Country music riffs blended with blues, calypso and jazz gave the world rock music...stolen from black people? You betcha...

Chuck Berry inspired pretty much all of the rock bands my generation called "classic", and those bands have in-turn created entire industries of sub-genres. Berry was inspired by Muddy Waters, who was subsequently ripped off by many of those same "classic" bands, so it seems like they all were onto something.

When Napster was fresh and new I wasn't on it (truthfully, I never was), but when my brother asked me what songs I would like him to find and burn for me (my first burned CD!!) the two I deemed necessary after searching his files/archives/torrents turned out to both be covers:

Jimi Hendrix playing "Johnny B Goode" and Frank Zappa's all percussion "Stairway to Heaven."

Berry's "Johnny B Goode" is the only rock song to have made it to Voyager's Golden Record, and remains the only hardcopy of rock music to have left our solar system. It was captured eloquently in "Back to the Future" as well, in an ultimately regrettable scene with Michael J. Fox introducing Marvin Berry and his cousin Chuck (over the phone) to the piece. Is Zemeckis trying to take rock and roll away from black people in an even more profound way?

Anyway, Maybelline was his first big hit, and I think all rock fans have grown up with Roll Over Beethoven, Rock and Roll Music, and Riding Along in my Automobile. Maybe it was just me.

I do feel like, though, all of those songs are in the cultural consciousness of both America and Western Society in general.

For good measure, here's Chuck's own Johnny B Goode, and for laughs, here're the Sex Pistols not knowing the lyrics so well.

Also, Frank's percussion Stairway. Okay, so it's not all percussion, and during his last tour in '88 he played Stairway at most venues, but this one is a little different sounding...

That should satisfy some YouTube/old-school music itches...

Also also, check out Berry's first albun of mostly new material in 38 years, set to release in a few months: Chuck.

A Day at the Landfill

In my capacity as a "stable adult/surrogate father" for a hundred-and-fifty teenagers, I am occasionally asked if I'd be interested in going---

---"Yes," is the only correct answer, and given before even hearing where the destination may be. It's been that kind of year.

Recently that destination turned out to be the Whittier Landfill. That sounded like an interesting learning experience for our not-quite-'hood kiddos, and we booked the time and bus. I happened to be one of the chaperones.

We left around 8:40, nearly on-time, and headed north-by-east towards Whittier.

We arrived about eighty-five minutes later, after having to pull over and make calls because---I heard---the entrance was blocked by construction. We headed up a large hill to get to the facility, which itself was nestled behind large wrought-iron fences in the crook of the tiny mountain/large hill.

Once on the property, the bus cruised all over looking for the main office, even busting a three- (seventeen-) point turn. Eventually a lady came out to greet us. Skinny, dressed in a mini-skirt and sporting long blond hair, she got onto the bus with a fifties-era microphone and speaker.

After hearing her speak for ten seconds I knew all about her. I attended a university that had a strong engineering program, and I knew what was going on. She was obviously both the "hot engineer" and "people-person engineer" at this landfill operation. These teenagers would never see that, because she doesn't fit their ideas of "hotness," but worldly folks can tell these things.

Anyway, she cracked a few corny jokes as we drove around the remises on a bumpy road and she enlightened us as to the details of the operation of the landfill: at 93% capacity  it's considered "full" and hasn't taken a truck load for the landfill since 2013; the road was so bumpy because the hill is the trash pile and the anaerobic decomposition of the waste causes air pockets which cause depressions in the surface and road above; the plants were all native to the area and the green piping running all over the place was the only marker that we're on a landfill, as it collects the waste gases.

That part was rather ingenious: they collect the waste methane and burn it to boil the waste water that's also collected from the decomposition. That boiling wastewater powers a turbine, an action that results in the landfill being a net-energy plus operation---they add more power to the grid than they need.

This ride lasted about ten minutes as we snaked up a steep part of the hill and back down, bumping all along the way. Much of the information was contained in the poster she gave all of us upon arrival to our bus:

From there we parked and entered the recycling portion of the plant, the material collection department. This is the part of the operation that's still taking truckloads daily. They separate the material for resale to industry, the end-of-the-line in the world of "recycling,"

We were up in a glass-enclosed room high above the floor. To one side you could see masked humans sorting on a conveyor while bulldozers were hard at work. Mist was constantly coming down from the rafters in an ever-losing battle with dust:

The other side of the hangar facility had the big Wall-E type compactors and cubes:

And that was pretty much it.

The blond engineer disappeared and the kids started asking, "What now, mister?"

Forty hungry and restless young people milling about in the lobby of an engineering building, having apparently completed the day's activities in about 25 minutes.

Seriously, it wasn't even a half an hour. It wasn't even 11 am yet.

I guess there was a miscommunication between the plant's liason and our guy: the lady had a meeting and nobody had been chosen as a replacement, and after some awkward phone calls (which I was not a part of), we were off to find a park between Whittier and the South Bay so lunch could be enjoyed and we could try and get some money's worth out of our bus.

The next day we were off to San Luis for Val's memorial. Weird five day stretch, for sure.

The Meme-Sequel

"The Stations of the Beer Baron" 

in the Medium of Meme

The Sequel

I got busy with a gut full of salted beef.

I thought I'd go through and find another fourteen screen captures from The Simpsons Season 8 episode "Homer Versus the Eighteenth Amendment," 

Last year I had a thoughtful dialogue with myself about the medium of meme and how the Simpsons is either the parent of, or built for, the concept of the "meme" (pictures mixed with sentence fragments).

I may like some of these even better than the mandatory ones from last year.

So, with that, I have to say, it's been one of those days:

I thought they had a clearer shot of Nelson's face...the moment everyone sees Bart without green and Lisa's knowing face centering the whole thing:

Marge is so in touch with her emotions. Like "looking:"

More of a meme for a meme's sake:

Quimby and Wiggum are the easiest one-joke characters in the industry (corrupt and stupid/bad respectively), and the diversion is a classic Simpsons joke that they probably took from somewhere else:

The importance of the alcohol itself:

Too easy...

The honesty of the pandering I always loved:

This is one of the best composed scenes in this season:

This is how you come up with ideas, apparently (I should try it...):

I do this kind of thing at the Dollar Bookstore:

Don't tell anyone...

Before...before!

We used to do this kind of thing in the dorms:

Happy St. Paddy's 2017

For some, it may actually be St. Daddy's Day:

It was Cassius' first St. Patricks, and since I never got the chance to corn a brisket, his first corned beef was store-bought.

The travesty!

Happy Day, and happy birthday to the homies Chris Farley and Kelly Bryant.

Naughty Restaurant

Some people like to eat fish, and I'm one of them.

For those of us who like to eat fish, who take great pleasure in the many variations of the meat styles and flavors, I'm confident that we'd be able to pick tilapia between it and cod.

I chose those two for that example for a reason.

If you don't eat fish: tilapia, when uncut, is a rectangular horseshoe with one side two to three times as thick as the other---it tastes like dirt or dirty clay, and it goes down easy; cod is white and flaky, being a large bottom feeder, the "fish" of fish and chips, and has very little flavor or character on its own.

If you do eat fish: really?

At Corrie's birthday I ordered the cioppino. Instantly the tilapia pieces announced themselves once off the spoon.

Of the flaky white meat that makes up the cod/halibut/flounder family of flavors, some are better than others. One of the best of the family is sole. It has a strong sense of the buttery oils and nutty baseline that characterize the family.

Odeum, a restaurant in Morgan Hill---a Santa Clara County city I'd never heard of---was charging guests for Petrale sole ($32) but they were giving them tilapia, the most affordable fish available.

That's naughty, but not naughty enough to get a titled post. Maybe they ran out and in a pinch hoped nobody would notice. Some people may not have noticed. I would have. Corrie too. Norm. You get the picture, but I can see a fancy restaurant trying to cover their ass for a night.

But somebody, I'm imagining in my head, must have not been fooled, and asked to see the manager. Did this manager then head back to the kitchen and try to hash out an explanation with the sous-chef, or did they know the game? The accusation from a knowing client---this is tilapia and not sole---was denied.

Guess what?

Odeum was prosecuted for deliberately ripping off their guests. It wasn't just one party. Enough people complained, saw no change, and must have contacted authorities. There was an investigation and eventual settlement: a thousand thirty-dollar gift cards (one each per guest after filling out a form) and a $90k civil fine.

Getting busted is naughty enough.

Possible warning sign spotted on the menu: the petrale sole was claimed to be wild-caught.

The recommendation is that you stock your sole from one of the Marine Stewardship Council certified fisheries.