A Thousand Times No

Unfortunately, the Muxtape website is still out of commission today, several days after they first posted the following message:

Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.

Sigh.  The longer the wait, the less hopeful I become.

And now, the flip side of being a put-upon cyclist…

This morning, on my way to work, I needed to walk across a six-lane street to reach a subway station.  I stepped off the curb into the parking lane and waited for cross traffic to pass; it was far too congested to even dream of jaywalking.

When the cars in oncoming traffic slowed to a halt, and I looked across the street for the walk signal.  As soon as I saw the illuminated white figure, I began walking through the intersection. Then a bicycle messenger who whipped through the cross street sarcastically barked as he shot past my back, “Do you really care about living?”

“HEY!  No crossing on RED!” I roared back at him, loudly enough that he actually turned his head in time to see me flipping him off.

As far as I’m concerned, if a guy on a fixie can’t either:

• pull to a halfway decent stop and chill out while track-standing for a few seconds
• easily negotiate past a slow-moving pedestrian while he’s running a red light

…he’s a poser on pedals, no matter what he’s carrying on his back and how much he’s being paid to do it.

It’s like another guy I saw last night who left his too-shiny red IRO, complete with 4-spoke front wheel and Brooks road saddle, simply leaning against the wall of a fancy high-rise condo while disappeared inside for several minutes to deliver a few pizzas.  No locking, no tag-teaming with the valets, nothing — just awkwardly propping his ride on its padded, chopped handlebars next to a recessed, glassy foyer.

Upon closer inspection, I saw exactly what I expected:  the telltale scrape marks at the back corners of the trusty saddle that bespoke a great deal of tumbling.

Dude, maybe you want to figure out how to actually ride that thing before equipping it with a saddle that costs more than a new iPhone.  (Then again, maybe your notion of how to “break in” an iPhone also calls for dropping it on the pavement.  Repeatedly.)

But don’t let me get in the way of your Caravan of Road Pizza.  After all, what do I know about living?

At two different intersections today I found myself standing next to a newfangled trash receptacle with an enormous solar panel on top.  Like me, you may be wondering: Why does a public garbage can need its own energy source?  To power the compactor it houses inside, of course.

Welcome to the world of Big Belly, which is what you’d get if you crossed WALL•E with an oversized mailbox.  No cute song and dance routines, but it’s still (if you’ll pardon the expression) pretty darn neat.

According to the makers of Big Belly, compacting the trash can reduce the frequency of fuel-gobbling garbage truck forays by up to 80%.  Even here in Philly, where the loose contents of overflowing trash bins make more getaway runs than Bonnie and Clyde, the compactor still probably eliminates 2 out of 3 trash pickups.

At first, dropping items into a Big Belly feels a little strange. Its hatch mouth pulls open toward you like the swinging chute door on a standard blue American mailbox, obstructing you from seeing or touching the Big Belly’s contents in much the same fashion.  You let go of the hatch handle, the door swings shut, and your trash quietly disappears.  Buh-bye!

I’ll wager that the ever-powerful squirrel lobby is working at this very moment to keep these devices from gaining a permanent foothold in the city.

Can someone please explain to me why so many people feel compelled to refill the empty paper tray on an office laser printer with only a few dozen sheets at a time, even when the tray is expressly designed to hold an entire ream?

And why, when they do this, they always leave the remaining 3/4 of a ream sitting there, right next to the printer?

Yes, it’s awkward to move a half-opened ream of paper to another location.  That’s why they made the tray big enough to take the whole thing.

Thanks, NBC and Microsoft Silverlight, for completely blocking my pre-Intel Mac household from watching any Olympics footage online.

It’s sort of like standing right at the spot where an entire stadium’s worth of ceremonial doves have been trained to take a collective flying dump.

Silvery (and light!) indeed.

The human sense of smell is deeply evocative.  A single whiff of a long-forgotten aroma can trigger vivid memories that have been gathering dust for years, or even decades.  Scents can lift our moods or soothe our spirits.

They also have the uncanny ability to open my pocketbook.

You can practically hear the arpeggios rolling off the hunting horns when I walk into any Shoppe of Scented Objects — Heigh-ho, the derry-o, Anointing we will go!  A smidge of this, a daub of that, hour upon hour spent wafting and sniffing.  Fun for me, torture for most anyone else who happens to be along for the ride.

Soaps, shampoos, conditioners, bubble baths, candles, incense, housecleaning products — I’ve brought them all home on the basis of smell alone.  (Oddly enough, my laundry detergent is entirely fragrance-free.)  But my true weakness is the instant gratification provided by unguents: creams, balms, lotions, salves.  Aye, there’s the rub.

This afternoon, I was suddenly very taken with the notion of getting a new tube of a particular hand cream I had bought some time ago, the Honey & Shea formulation made in France by Le Couvent des Minimes.  Talk about sucker-punching me right in the nose: Honey! Convent! Provence!  At $10 for a wee 1.7 oz (50 mL) tube, my brain also screamed, “Indulgence!”  After all, this was a hand cream, not an instrument of world peace or even hope in a jar.

But I was feeling flush, so I resolved to bring home the jumbo tube of Honey & Shea, rationalizing to myself that it would be like receiving a 25% discount for buying in bulk.  I arrived at the store and began perusing the shelves, hunting for my honey.  No luck.  I paused to ask a salesperson where I could find it.

“Oh, we discontinued carrying that line a while ago.”  What?!?!

Defeated, I made my way back home.  Fortified by a few spoonfuls of vera Nutella, I began poking around in cyberspace to see if I could locate another importer of what was rapidly morphing into the Holy Grail of Hand Creams.

And lo, there it was, being sold for a bargain basement price on eBay by a vendor who sported a 100% satisfaction rating.  The clouds parted, the heavens sang, and little tiny cherubs ceased their weeping as the land of shea and honey came into view — or something like that.  Intertubes, for the win.

The high point of my day was discovering a local Starbucks with copious amounts of upholstered seating and no overhead music.  I could tell you where it is, but then I’d have to decaffeinate you.

Ah, the Olympics.  Nothing like it to get blood pumping and the heart pounding.

Take this delicious line from Karen Crouse in the New York Times:

Mental barriers were crumbling like almond cookies at the National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube.

Um, yeah.  Still waiting with bated breath for you to work a chow mein reference into your coverage before the closing ceremonies.  (Meanwhile, do you think you could actually bother to check on the pronunciation of people’s names before you record an audio clip?  I’m sure Eamons and Alains the world over will thank you.)

Then there’s this bit of oversharing from Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Frank Fitzpatrick:

As if Mandarin words weren’t baffling enough to an American whose experience with foreign languages ended with “I Am Curious Yellow“…

Wow, soft-core pr0n AND a veiled racial reference.  Nice shot from the three-point line!

Lest you think I’m reading too much into Fitzpatrick’s words, here he is again, just a few paragraphs later:

For example, the two women waiting to take my trash at breakfast appeared to be talking about “catacomb perverts Cinque and Hanoi”…

You don’t exactly need to be a semiotician to catch this guy’s driftwood.  Eeuw.

I’ve already made my feelings about erstwhile Clinton political strategist Mark Penn exceedingly plain.  For the most part, I wish he would just go away.  Unfortunately, he keeps bobbing back up to the surface, as he does this week in “The Front-Runner’s Fall,” Joshua Green’s dissection of the 2008 Clinton campaign for the Atlantic Monthly.

Here’s what Penn wrote in a memo about Obama:

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

2050?  I guess that’s Boomerspeak for “Over my dead body.”

If you do happen to be an American baby boomer, then you’ll almost certainly remember the ubiquitous Metropolitan Life ad jingle from the Nixon era, with its swelling chorus of voices singing about helping more than 40 million people.  Before the advent of the Sony Walkman, the 401(k) plan, and the affordable pocket calculator, those television spots jubilantly proclaimed, “The future is now.”

Knock-knock.  It’s 2008.

If you think this nation needs to wait for 2050 to be ready for “diverse, multicultural” leadership, you’d best go back to your slide rule and run the numbers again.

Because “the future” is now.

In the increasingly pitched debate about sharing the road, I’m of a mind that cyclists belong on the road, with the cars, observing streetlights and signs.  (You know, the school that rolls with — what is it people are calling it these days?  Oh yeah, the LAW.)

It’s never fun to be viscerally reminded that many people are of a different persuasion, whether it’s the cyclists who set my hair flying in their wake as they careen past me on the sidewalk, or the cars that nearly take me out when I commute by bike to work.

This morning, after coming to a stop and waiting to make a turn at a “No Turn On Red” intersection, I rode my bike around a corner and came upon a classic Philadelphia street scene.  On a two-way street, a double-parked UPS delivery van was completely blocking the opposite side of the street.  In order to get past the big brown roadblock, oncoming traffic would be forced to cross the median and drive the wrong way directly up my lane.

And what was oncoming traffic?  An oversized construction truck.  I chose to slow down and gauge how quickly the truck was approaching.  Apparently, this was not to the liking of the driver behind me, who first began tailgating me, then trying to inch past me on the left — where the parked van would have immediately forced him to veer sharply to the right again, directly in front of me.

Exsqueeze me? That’s precisely how cyclists get sent to the pavement (or hospital), and I was having none of it.  With the oncoming truck apparently paused farther up the road, I moved closer to the center of the lane.  The driver behind me kept creeping further to the left, until it became apparent to even him that he would not be able to pass.  That’s when he started honking.  Not a little beep, mind you, but a full-blown horn solo.

And that’s when I came to a stop, turned around, and asked him — loudly — exactly what he way trying to communicate.

“You were swerving all over the road,” he shouted peevishly after he rolled down his window, passive-aggressively adding “I didn’t think you knew I was behind you.”  This went on for several moments, until a bystander on the sidewalk offered to call the police for me.

As I told her not to bother, the driver begin putting on his cell phone headset, proclaiming “I’m going to call the police.”  I eyed him and yelled, “You do that.”  His bluff called, he continued to sputter.  I rode away.

About twenty minutes later, I was striding through the same intersection on my way to a meeting.  Three police officers were gathered around a parked police van.  I walked up and asked them if they were, in fact, standing there because someone had called about my verbal dustup.

“Oh no,” said the officer who has seen me walk and ride past dozens of times, always with a wave.  “But I was around the corner when it happened.  I heard you,” he replied, laughing.  “You gave it right back to him.  You done good, darling.”

Have lungs, will travel.