Meatmachine.info

Today I fed wonderfully.

Four days a week I have to be in class before 8am, so I’ve readily adopted an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule. Most days I’m out from under the covers by 6am, and out the door by 7:30. This gives me plenty of time to bumble about in the kitchen without having to worry about bumping into my room mates. This morning I had oatmeal mixed with cinnamon, cactus honey, and a sliced pear, two fried eggs, toasted sourdough bread, and a quartered orange. Aside from the soymilk in the oatmeal, it was a locavore’s delight.

Twice a week I have a three hour break for lunch between classes. Today, instead of dropping bills in the downtown for pizza or a “super crazy veggie burrito”, I rode home (through the spitting rain) to again roll the dice and see what I could cook up on my own. Picture this, the ultimate sandwich: fried polenta, thick slices of salted tomato, fried onions, melted farmer’s cheese, spicy brown Sierra Nevada mustard, all pressed between two massive slices of toasted sourdough bread. This sandwich kind of kicked my ass.

Dinner was grazing on cheeses, crackers, sliced melon and utterly flavorless olives at a town-hall styled lecture in the student union. After getting wet riding back to the apartment, I finished the evening with some Mexican hot chocolate, which incidentally I prepared well for the first time. It tasted even sweeter since it was a gift from a friend, is there anything better than sharing good taste?

I’m half-way through Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. So far so good. While the readily available kernal of Pollan’s second treatise on taste may be “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”, there’s another point he makes that I think may be even more important.

Pollan describes how nutritionism studies the qualities of foods in a reductionist manner, by looking at the dietary effects of individual components (ie saturated fat, omega-3’s, calories) instead of at the whole food (ie broccoli, fish, feed-lot beef). Food is studied in this way because nutritional science isn’t capable of explaining the complex ways in which nutrients behave in concert, we just don’t understand it well enough.

Instead, he suggests a study of not just the nutrient parts of food, nor just the food that makes up a diet, but an understanding of the where our food comes from, what it was grown in, or what it was fed and what its food was grown. “Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the entire food web.”

I think the idea that one’s well being is inextricably linked to the state of their environment, and that taking care of one improves the other, has pretty far-reaching applications. This concept is vital to the formation of an environmental ethic. Hell, its the reason for developing one.

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Kate Beaton made a promise to her people. “I asked people to give me the names of historical figures or cultural themes for comics, and I would make the first twenty that were submitted.”

The awesomely funny, 100% historically accurate, and damn good looking results can be found here.

My favorite is, duh, Tesla.

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I can’t say I hate the internet. Not yet.

Without it, how else would I have known that Rrrebecca posted her thoughts and reactions to an article about the misconceptions of multitasking, titled The Autumn of the Multitaskers? Without the internet, how would I be able to share this interesting idea with you (whoever you are)? Without the internet, why, I wouldn’t be able to check the stats for this blog and analyze the ip addresses of visitors in order to try figure to out where and by whom my response to her response to his article was being read. And wouldn’t that make my life less lived? Read the rest of this entry »

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I saw There Will Be Blood tonight, and I saw Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead about a week ago. These are both really good, tragic, captivating movies. I strongly recommend them both because they will make you feel terrible and good at the same time. They will make you cringe and laugh, they will make you cover your eyes as they light up, and I think that’s damn educational.

Tonight I crudely covered Mr. Grieves by The Pixies. It’s alright.

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Having sold my iPod a some months ago (who really needs one anyway?), I’ve found myself burning “a few” CDs of invaluable albums to play on the stereo at the bike shop. These are the choice cuts, the jams, the desert-island albums, the necessary noises.

One of these albums is a copy of Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model (which totally warrants investigation). Specifically the 1993 Rykodisc reissue containing the demo recordings of Running Out Of Angels, Greenshirt, and Big Boys. These are the kinds of songs that worm their way throughout my auditory cortex and are so welcome to do so.

I learned how to play all three of them tonight, but in order to keep this collection of covers balanced, I only recorded one. For your enjoyment here is Big Boys.

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My favorite things about riding my bike home from work in the rain:

My least favorite things about riding my bike home from work in the rain:

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Tonight I’m covering Wisdom Tooth by Wildebeest for Abbey, because it’s her birthday.

Sure, I may not have actually picked the song out the way Wildebeest does in the original version, but I’m just a sloppy guitar playing man, and he’s “a large dark antelope with a long head, a beard and mane, and a sloping back”. How can I compete with that?

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Here’s to delayed disciplines and routines running late. Four covers for your enjoyment: Christmas Lights by Paul Baribeau, Details Of The War by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Chicago by Sufjan Stevens, and Les Os by The Unicorns.

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I’m kind of binging on bike building right now. This is me indulging my bike-loving-self. Read it, you pervert.

I can’t stop futzing with the pathracer. I pulled off the knobby tires as the frame/brake clearance wasn’t so good after all, and slicks work better for commuting anyway (Continental Gatorskins, steel my beating heart!). A longer stem makes those flipped promenade bars a bit less back-breaking, and makes the whole bike look long as sin. The 61cm frame already looked like it had about a yard of top-tube. Also, it turns out the frame (which I got after I kicked the shit out of my old one under warranty) is missing the rear eyelet braze-ons of the original. So long fenders, so long rear rack, so long dreams of comfortable commutes in the rain. Dear Quality Assurance Dept., bite me.

My poor dear Atala is sitting on the wall at the shop, missing its front wheel, seatpost, and saddle. That bike was never meant to bear the beating it’s received over the past few weeks. I had intentions of savoring it as a sunny weekend bike, the kind of jewel you take out to give birds reason to sing. Instead I’ve ridden it every day, rain or shine, made it my commuting mule, like a monster! When I hurriedly built it up, after my fixie frame failed, I only built the rear wheel and stole the front from my other, now-defeated, bike. But now that my fixie is back in action, I have but one wheel to swap between two bikes. It’s a tragedy, oh yes! One of these days I really ought to build up a front wheel for that thing, I’ve got all the bits ready, just not the time.

Honestly though, two bikes isn’t enough for me, I dream of having three. Today at the shop I pulled a seemingly decrepit Centurion Super Le Mans out of the basement. After stripping it of the unfortunately worn and rusted SunTour Sprint components (made back when SunTour stood beside Shimano and Campagnolo at the top of the market) it became clear that the frame was in pretty good shape.

Sure, the paint was chipping off the chromed fork and seat-stays, and there were some spots of light surface rust, but the underlying cromoly steel frame was in pretty good shape. In addition to being my size and as real as steel can feel, the frame (thanks to being designed for now-obsolete 27” wheels) has wicked clearance. I could stick 700x35 tires on there and still be able to fit a finger between the sidewall and chainstay! That might sound kind of gross to someone who doesn’t know much about bikes, ew ew ew.

I’m considering stripping the frame by hand or sandblasting, and then asking Paul if he’ll help me braze some canti studs on there. Throw on a wheel set with those orphaned knobby tires, a crankset, some brakes, and my randonneuring bars and this old steel steed could be the on-the-cheap entry to cyclocross I so desire. Luckily the ‘cross season just ended, so I’ve got about ten months to fitz and fiddle and figure this build out. Until then, I’ll just delight in theses vintage ‘cross photos, taken back when it really was uphill both ways.

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Early to bed, early to rise.

Tomorrow morning I hope to get some time in on this. It’s not quite a ‘cross bike, but it’ll do for now. If I can get up early enough I might be able to make it to Upper Bidwell park, off the pavement and onto the trail.

Until next time, goodnight internets.

p.s. I know I owe you a bunch of cover songs, they are on the way! Promises.

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