This is a repeat of a post I saw a while back on a different blog, but I never actually got to listen to the song. I listened today, and I was pretty blown away. This is the Mountain Goats, live at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. Enjoy.

$3600 is a lot of money to pay anyone to show you anything, let alone a 20-year-old kid whose relative owns the building. I can’t really think of anything else that seems so lucrative and yet so easy, and we very well couldn’t justify paying a guy that much money so we can end up paying his uncle rent for the next year. So, the math is: $3600 broker’s fee; $6000 for first, last and security deposit. That’s 9600 bucks. And some yuppie med school schmoe was ready to throw down his father’s hard earned cash to get the effin’ place. I’ll admit, that view is nice, but 9600 nice?

Here’s what we learned about New York: Vacancy rate is somewhere around half of one percent. Craigslist is where you find housing. Brooklyn is undergoing major change in several areas. Brokers are only out there to get paid and it’s a fucking racket. Red Hook is a walk. Carroll Gardens is antique shops with cool old ladies named Linda. Cobble Hill is (see below). Brooklyn Heights is The Cosby Show. Fort Greene is where the Fulton Mall and Long Island U are.

Clinton Hill is Pratt and a lonesome puddle of Powerade that I ineptly tried to soak up with paper towels, but also a live mouse stuck to sticky-paper trap in front of the dorms. Bed-Stuy has a cafe/bakery called Bread-Stuy.

Harlem has a library across the street from Garvey Park and has free wireless, and a guy talking to a white woman who said, “I’m not from here, I’m from California,” and the guy replying either “Whoa, are you lost?” or “Whoa, did you walk?”

Morningside has an old dude (probably many) that know many other old dudes, one of whom is a psychology professor at CUNY. Astoria has blackouts. Long Island City is not a place I’d like to walk through at night, but is a place to catch a bootleg copy of Little Man playing at the gas station.

And Greenpoint is cheap Thai, but everywhere else is probably, too.

We accidently watched Major League Two and Field of Dreams in the hotel room. We ate well and I came back knowing that a northwest summer is better than any other summer I’ve experienced.

Saturday was supposed to be the day we found an apartment, and although we looked at one in Carroll Gardens West, we didn’t get much more done than that. A couple of cafes, a lot of walking and a few dozen peers into realtor’s offices later, we still hadn’t found a place.

Walking through Cobble Hill, we found out that Winston Churchill’s mother was born there, and then immediately thereafter found DB walking into his house. He showed us their great place and we were amazed. Eventually, we got sick of looking, and went back to Pratt. We take the G train, and the housing is a few blocks from our stop. We got drenched in another rain storm, then we fell asleep for a little while.

The thing about the guest-housing at Pratt is that our floor seems deserted, and in the mornings there’s mysterious talk outside of the doors and cigarette smoke seeping into the room.

We also caught Pirates of the Carribean Dead Man’s Chest at the Prospect Park Pavilion in a tiny, tiny theater. I was a little caught off guard by a lot of the stuff in it, meaning I didn’t remember half the crap from the first movie and kept wondering why the hell anyone has any loyalty to anyone else in this movie. I mean, Captain Jack’s great and all, but I don’t really care if he’s dead or not. Oh, wait, yes I do, I’d like to see another movie like this one, just because it was fun.

We got in early Thursday morning at 6 or so, which was 3 PST. The movie on the plane was The Blue Butterfly, which I’ve never heard of and wasn’t all that curious to find out more. Once we got into Brooklyn, we had some breakfast across the street from Pratt campus, which was super-cheap and came with shot-glass sized juices. We were pretty much zombies at that point, so we went to the guest-housing, and luckily the rooms were ready and we could catch up on some sleep.

Into Manhattan for Owl’s first interview, which was subsequently rescheduled. I also had an interview yesterday at Brooklyn Public Library, and that went pretty well, but the positions are very few for a large pool of applicants. We walked through Prospect Park and over to Park Slope for dinner. We ate outside at the 5th Avenue Cafe, I think, where a child walked by us and made faces while we ate. Her mother asked if she “needed help” to not behave. That was just one of the few incidents of many, probably the most either Owl or I have seen in any one situation of ill-behaved children; but specifically the spoiled, under-disciplined type of misbehavior. That’s particularly damning since you all know that Owl is a kindergarten teacher.

Park Slope is weird. We looked at a place on 7th at 10th, which was a basement apartment with no windows and a landlord that yelled at the brokers right after we left. He was really nice to us, but that shit makes me kind of mad. The two brokers, Spencer and Gabe were really cool, though, they took us down to another place down in South Slope. Unfortunately, not for us. They were pretty hilarious, showing us around the neighborhood:

“You can see water from the place, over there. What’s that water?” Spencer said.
“Oh, I think that’s the East River,” Gabe replied.
“Really?”
“Oh, no, maybe it’s the Hudson.”
“You could have said anything, I wouldn’t have known,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, then that was the Michael Jackson River.”
“Yeah, I went swimming in the Michael Jackson River once,” Gabe laughed.

We had them drop us off in Prime Slope and where we ran into all those crazy kids and some fine, fine gelato for dessert. We got back and I sacked out instantly, I couldn’t even finish watching So You Think You Can Dance.

In this time of panic, Your Heart Breaks helps me chill the fuck out. I really love the chorus of this song, and I can’t say enough about how much that bassline adds to the feel of it. I wish I had a boombox that played this song at a moment’s notice, because it would chill everybody out when things got hot.

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging through notes and my devonthink database trying to archive all my past posts (that’s a huge amount of text) and was working on an essay when I thought, “Hey, maybe archive.org has some of my old designs!” and they do, and some of them suck pretty bad and some of them are okay. Some of them I like better than this one.

I wish I had a unique tagline for each era, but I don’t. In a ridiculous and vain practice in self-reflection, some might call it futility, I’m going to review some of my old designs:

• July 2001 and September 2001 | The embarassing ones first: Those are really ugly. Actually the first one is, the second one is just plain. Heh, “hard drive hotdog”, that’s rich.
• January 2003 | There’s so much text on this page! And boxes!
• October 2003 | This is one of my favorites, and not just because it has Josh and Tinh feeding each other sushi on one of the posts. The leaf gives a real Canadian feel.
• December 2004 | The only thing different about this and the October one is the gray background. Boy, what a lazy redesign.
• May 2004 | Another color change “redesign”, the funny thing is, one of the posts comments about it. I really am just repeating myself, aren’t I?
• November 2004 | Whoa, it just got real serious in here. I like how I steal all my taglines from tv shows and movies, though; sparkle motion being from Donnie Darko (not like you didn’t know). This one’s very white.

You can look at all them here, but I think that’s pretty much everything that still exists. This is actually missing a pretty big portion of designs that I had, but those are lost somewhere in the ether (or that fried hard drive at Neil and Lex’s house).

Since we’re somewhat on the topic of reconstructing websites and archives, here’s a Lazy Preservation Study that includes Warrick, a command line utility for recovering website from search engine caches.

Also, I think the Wayback Machine is pretty cool, but I can’t think of any other sites I used to visit that are now gone. Can you?

EDIT: Right, “win” friends.

The other .mp3 I had set for today wasn’t working, but I think I might like this song better anyway. Enjoy.

During the most recent Seattle CM, two bikers were arrested by plain-clothes King County Sheriffs; stories from Seattlest and the PI, follow-ups a Slog and pictures, too; trolls abound at the Slog.

Every now and then this happens, someone at Critical Mass gets arrested. I know that Seattle isn’t the only place this has happened, and without getting too numbers-oriented, I can’t really say whether or not the likelihood of getting arrested here is more or less. There seems to be some focus on the fact that the King County Sheriffs DID NOT show their badges from the beginning of the scuffle, though I’m not sure why, because from what I can tell, this isn’t a case of entrapment, as this Slate definition indicates, the idea of the assault (which is what one of the riders was charged with, assaulting a police officer) must come from the officer. As I wasn’t there, I can’t rightly say that this didn’t happen, but from several accounts I have read, there were no clear words exchanged. I have my doubts that that’s the case, though. If this is a case of self-defense, though, where one biker was believed to have been under attack by a driver, then there’s some serious issues here - What make the sheriff immune to repurcussions of losing his temper at an intersection?

It goes without saying that I don’t believe the bikers posed a serious enough threat to warrant arrest and what sounds like overzealous treatment by the sheriffs, setting bail at $3000 seems terribly excessive as well, and Eli makes a good point about KC Deputies not contacting SPD about this - I hate to bring it up, but Seattle is not like the rest of King County.

In any case, regardless of the politics of the situation and whether or not you agree with Critical Mass, it’s interesting to note that the founders of CM never intended CM to be an overtly political movement; in Ted White’s We are Traffic, a documentary about Critical Mass, the idea came from the streets in China, where NO ONE stops for bikes at intersections, until there are so many damn bikes waiting that it just floods into the street, and the cars HAVE to stop. You can watch the entire movie on google video, right here.

Interested in helping, or were a witness? Contact info. can be found at the point83 website, a paypal account for legal fees has been set up as well. I’ll be at this month’s Critical Mass almost definitely, to show my support, let me know if you’d like to come along.