Hard luck turducken
 The turducken was one of the greatest successes I have ever experienced, despite a rocky start in which FedEx failed to deliver it overnight from Louisiana and I had to go to their facility in downtown L.A. and wait, literally in a cage, while others berated employees about not receiving Canadian medications in time for Christmas.
The birds comprised a Fowly Trinity of Yuletide Tastiness, though I was surprised to see that the 12-lb. hy-bird was supposed to feed 44 people in servings of 5.5 ounces. I seem to recall that people with stomach staples can only accommodate about five ounces of material in their newly svelte guts, so perhaps a lot of people on the bayou have had that surgery.
 Labels: food, holiday
The turducken cannot hear the turduckener
 For Christmas we are eating a turducken, a Cajun dish in which a duck is shoved into a chicken which is shoved into a turkey. Beaks and bones have been removed (though a beak would have come in handy during the shoving).
In between the discrete fowlic elements is slathered a cornbread stuffing. Eating a turducken is like slicing through three-layered Neopolitan ice cream, except with birds.
Because our friend Eric is joining us, and because Eric actually raises falcons, we were hoping to surprise him by adding his falcon to the mix. The integrity of the meter would be maintained if the resulting dish was a turdalcken, and the configuration would be duck -> falcon -> chicken -> turkey. If we can get it together in time, we might be able to surprise Eric with this new tradition.
"This tastes like -- Oh My God!" he will say. "It's my Charlemagne!"
If we had more time, we might have been able to prepare a turdalckenelope, turdalckenelopiraffe, or even a turdalckenelopiraffephant, but Christmas shouldn't be about complexity.
See also: The Second ComingLabels: food, holiday, poetry
I didn't buy an iPhone
 The iPhone is one of the coolest gadgets I have ever seen, and yet the only thing I can imagine it would be good for is displaying baby pictures.
Just today somebody showed me his iPhone picture of a file cabinet he wanted to put in his office, and last week my friend Jenny showed me pictures of what she cooked for Thanksgiving.
(To be fair, the iPhone also has a built-in ringtone that simulates an analog phone. That's pretty cool.)
The iPhone comes with a high resolution screen that is a logical successor to a wallet full of snapshots. Its built-in camera would be great for taking a picture of your car's position in the mall garage in case you forget. Otherwise, for 400 bucks, what does it do better than anything else?
Since long before June 29 I knew I would be wise to resist a first-generation Apple anything, and when launch day of the Jesus Phone arrived I asked all my friends about it. Most had taken their lumps with Verizon's $175 early termination fee to be the first in line at their respective Apple Stores to buy an iPhone.
Then it slowly dawned on them that they were now AT&T customers and would be talking less to their friends and families from now on.
My friend John bought a 4 GB iPhone late on June 29 because he had to have an iPhone, even though he really wanted the 8 GB version. A week later he went back for the 8 gig model because he had to have that. I used to talk with him more often when he had another cellular service provider, but it's different now.
I called him as he was ascending Laurel Canyon from Sunset Blvd.
"I'm going over the Hill," he said.
"I guess I'll talk to you later," I said, just as his phone cut out.
He came by my office.
"How's the iPhone?" I asked (people with iPhones tend to make excuses to brandish them, and he is a friend, so I saved him the trouble).
"I took some pictures of my new TV" he said.
And you know when you're about to be connected to someone on an iPhone because, just as the phone is ringing, you can hear static on the other end.
Sure you can surf the web and synchronize your calendar and contacts with a Mac, but you could do that just as easily with a less expensive device that has a better type pad. And you are also surfing the web with a tiny window that is only an improvement over those of other handheld, web-enabled devices because the iPhone's is slightly bigger.
I get the feeling that people want this device to be wonderful so much that they forget that it isn't. They bend over backwards to overlook its shortcomings.
Why is love unconditional when it comes to technology but not to human beings?
"You're not one of us," said my friend Wayne.
No removable memory, 8 GB of storage space for music and movies (as opposed to ten or more times that on other iPods), and suffering from lousy phone reception, the iPhone is more "i" than "Phone". And the i isn't even a capital.
Every January I go to the CES and AEE conventions in Las Vegas and I write about them for sundry web and print publications. Each year I resolve to get a device that will allow me to leave my computer in my hotel room and do my web-based work from the show floor. That never works. I've tried smartphones like the Treo but the workarounds take as long as getting a shuttle back to the hotel room.
Then I settle for finding accessible areas where WiFi can be had. Usually press rooms are a long walk from the convention area, but CES in particular had excellent amenities for press last year.
Still, what if I wanted to stay on the floor? To stand right in front of the Toshiba display and file my reports from there?
Once I decided - with real reluctance - that the iPhone was useless (the iPhone Touch, on the other hand, is almost a worthwhile toy. It's like a more expensive Palm Pilot without a camera), I looked for Verizon products (they are my cell carrier and I already pay them enough without dumping an additional $175 for the privilege of leaving them - I feel I understand how people can justify being the victims of spousal abuse now) that sweaty, sullen, goateed Verizon store employees were trained to say would be iPhone Killers.
The LG Voyager looked so good in the catalog that I took time off on my birthday to look at it. It has a keyboard with raised keys, it has not one but two tiny screens but, as opposed to the iPhone's nice OSX browser, had a proprietary and restrictive web browsing system. That the Voyager is posed to look like an iPhone in catalog pictures is pretty misleading.
And neither have word processing programs.
I realized that, like Jeff Lebowski's, my thinking had become uptight. What I was trying to do, Reader, was to make a phone work like a computer, and to cut the phone as much slack as possible, which would be made easier by the phone's other qualities.
But the fact is I want the interface and superior functionality of my computer and I want it to be online all the time. I don't want to pay for Internet at Starbucks or in a hotel room or in an airport, and don't want to be stuck without it anywhere else. And I don't want to try to convince myself that my phone is my computer.
Some day phones will be our computers, with innovative input systems, mass storage, multiple-input recording capability, wireless access to remote servers, high-res media players and projectors, point-to-point purchasing devices, navigation systems, portable smoke detectors, bar code scanners, laser pointers, flashlights, and - why not? - guidance systems for vehicles. they will be personalized and encrypted. People will say that the time of the Apocalypse has arrived, but it will be pretty cool.
So finally I upgraded my simple phone to a slightly sleaker model that will take a better picture of where in the garage my car is, and with removable memory that will allow me to change ringtones without having to pay for songs I already own.
I also bought a broadband USB modem with a data plan. It allows me to get online at a little faster than dialup speeds (no matter what Verizon tells you) and I've only had to reconnect twice in the three hours I've been using it. But that is a workaround I can live with.Labels: apple, consumer, faulty technology, phones, travel, verizon
Marilyn Manson is still alive
 Recently I went out of a Saturday evening in Hollywood and returned to find my car plastered with show fliers. I wondered: Are people driving Honda products with Red Sox fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror the target demographic for Marilyn Manson's promotions organization?
Yes.
Marilyn Manson is reaching out to Honda drivers in particular. Next he will focus on RV parks, children's burn units, and the AARP. I take some comfort in knowing that Manson is growing older with me and that we are taking this journey together.
Thanks Marilyn Manson!
I wonder how he will address my late life speech defect in his song stylings?Labels: age, los angeles, pop
Bladder control
 Breakfast (the most important meal) comes with something like 20 gallons of Coca Cola at Jack in the Box. No wonder I wet my bed and suffer from childhood obesity. I initially used the soccer ball to provide a comparison, but then i ate that, too.Labels: consumer, food
Closed Encounters
 Encounters, the restaurant at LAX that recently dislodged a half-ton chunk of stucco near some diners, is being renovated. I like it better this way, though; there seems to be so many more ways to get in and out of the building, and today's sophisticated menus are all about variety.Labels: food, los angeles
Ear mites
 I haven't had a Massachusetts accent since I was about 17, but something happened to my speech once I crossed the Colorado River into California; I started pronouncing my "ar"s like long "i"s, and I can neither hear it nor correct it. Maybe I had a stroke.
And that is not the accent I was born with. People from Massachusetts pronounce their Rs like Hs. I don't know why I progressed one letter farther in the alphabet.
I'll make dinner reservations and show up at the restaurant only to find my table taken by someone named Mighty. When I introduce myself to people they rarely comment on my name, but then they will introduce me to others as Mighty.
It makes sense that they would not question what they obviously assume is a stage name capitalizing on my massive frame and powerful mind. About three years ago I met a lesbian who called herself Raige, and I believed it.
Starbucks employees throughout Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada choose this spelling, however, because barristas cannot pronounce silent Gs.Labels: brain damage, personal history
Laptop - now without crusted cheese screen
 My 15" MacBook Pro arrived the other day. It is beautiful. Also, it doesn't have bits of bread in the keyboard.
I haven't noticed the difference in size between it and my 17" PowerBook. In fact, the backlit keyboard and screen are much brighter on my MacBook, and of course the machine is much faster. It will begin slowing down eventually, but I am hoping to get three years out of it. Its smaller size will mean less damage as I carry it around in my Brenthaven bag, which is the most durable thing I own (except for my immortal soul).
I had trouble with the Migration Assistant. Newer Macs greet first-time users with a prompt to transfer files from a variety of sources, including other Macs. There are no warnings about how transfers from PowerPC-based Macs to the new Intel ones will result not only in the failure of most of the PowerPC-compiled applications on the old machine but also native applications of the new computer, too. I had to reinstall the operating system. Luckily, in the last year I've been especially diligent with backups.
Luckily, it was fast, and I could see the keyboard in the dark. It's working fine now, and luckily I have two other fully functional (but much slower) computers to pick up the slack during the transition.
Leopard is a great operating system for machines that can handle it. The cynical part of me (which, according to the latest satellite data, is 78 percent of my body) believes that operating systems are built to choke older computers, forcing users to upgrade their machines.
My recent experiences with Apple products and support have made me less partisan to their cause, and more willing to accept software and hardware solutions from disinterested third parties, like the Unitarians.
Already certain people have begun to turn away. "You're not one of us," one person said when I told him that I thought iPhones were for the weak-minded.Labels: apple, faulty technology
"Something's going to happen. Something wonderful."
I have a racist conversation
 I was touring this high-end (for me, anyway) apartment complex near a golf course and had the following keyword-laden conversation with the rental agent. I mentioned I lived in Glendale.
"I grew up here and Glendale used to be a lot different," she said.
"Oh yeah?"
"A certain population moved in. Really inconsiderate drivers," she said, not mentioning any names. "They wear a lot of cologne."
She said "cologne" and "drivers" with such vehemence that I'm sure a passing Amnesty International observer would have deemed the terms hate speech on the spot.
I'm not going to move there, but not because of that exchange. It's just that, before I leave Los Angeles, I want to live somewhere without beige carpeting.
She asked me what I did for a living and I told her I was the drummer for System of a Down.
"What?"
"Just kidding."Labels: glendale, los angeles, pop
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