The Brunch Table

So last night we went to celebrate somebody’s birthday at an Italian restaurant. They’ve got a special room that you can reserve for a party, informally known as “the Pope Room.” It’s a round room, with a round table that seats about twenty people. The walls are decorated with pictures of Popes throughout history, and the food is placed on a big lazy-susan in the middle. And in the center of that lazy-susan is a big Pope head. It turns as the lazy-susan turns–it’s really quite an impressive sight.

I wanted to know which Pope it was we were dining with–it was hard to divine his opinion of us all from the poker-faced stare. I asked a couple waiters, but none of ‘em knew. I dimly recalled that there was a “Nazi Pope”, and I hoped it wasn’t him.

So I bided my time, googled, and found out that it wasn’t the Nazi Pope (that was Pius XII–and, strictly speaking, he was an Italian Fascist, not a Nazi). Our Pope-Room Pope was John XXIII. He started the Vatican II council in 1962, which officially acquitted Jews everywhere of the crime of deicide. He didn’t live to see the end of it, but when it was finally wrapped up in 1965, his successor, Paul VI, made history by taking off his crown–symbolically relinquishing his claim to be the temporal emperor of the world. No Pope has worn a crown since. So, a good guy, John XXIII, a pleasant dinner companion.

Then I read on a bit, and found out about the Sedevacantists (from the Latin for “Vacant Seat”)–former Catholics who reject Vatican II and the authority of all Popes after Pius XII. They’ve been accused of being antisemites and Nazi sympathizers, ideologically allied with Evangelical Protestantism. (That’s just one article I read–any Sedevacantists reading this, please correct me.)

And the kicker? Mel Gibson is one of these guys. (Here in Valencia, you can’t even get a ticket for his Passion–it’s been sold out for days.)

(from an New York Times interview with Mel’s dad, Hutton Gibson): On our first night together, he nursed a mug of sassafras tea while leading a four-hour tutorial on so-called sedevacantism, which holds that all the popes going back to John XXIII in the 1950’s have been illegitimate — ”anti-popes,” he called them. As Hutton explained it, the conservative cardinal Giuseppe Siri was probably passed over for pope in 1958 in favor of a more reform-minded candidate. Hutton said Cardinal Siri was duly elected, but was forced to step aside by conspirators inside and outside the church. These shadowy enemies might have threatened ”to atom-bomb the Vatican City,” he said. In another conversation, he told me that the Second Vatican Council was ”a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.”

P.S. Before the comments on this entry came in, I thought that this restaurant was independently owned–one of the only ones in Valencia, besides the 24-hour Saugus Diner (where James Dean allegedly had his last meal). It’s not. Finding out that our pre-fab exurb doesn’t even have a unique Pope Room is somehow more depressing than a morality play from the Dark Ages becoming America’s top-grossing movie of the week….

Here are excerpts from a 31-page travel agency brochure that I found on the floor this morning. They actually seem like a pretty good outfit, if you can afford ‘em…but it struck me that a single thread ran through their writeups of exotic lands:

p. 3 “…linger at your cafe and stroll over to see it when the crowds are gone…”

p.5 “…wandering up and down trails at your own pace to see what–or who–you might discover…”

p.6 “…walking with your family through a magnificent mosaic…”

p.7 “…walking along the Aare River: stone-lined banks lead past shops, homes, and castles…” “…strolling home to your apartment at dusk to the accompaniment of…”

p.8 “…enjoying a tree-lined walk along a rushing river…” “…a long walk through your own neighborhood…”

p.9 “…walking alone at dawn through misty, empty calles…”

p.10 “…people filing into the streets for the Saturday market or sporting their finery for the evening stroll before dinner…”

p.11 “…you actually can’t remember what a traffic jam is like.”

p.12 “…wandering through narrow cobblestone streets lined with flowers…”

p.14 “…your pants are actually a little looser. (Must be all those walks along the…”

p.15 “…a home on the village square, complete with…”

p.16 “…walk pristine trails feeling younger than you have in years.”

p.17 “…the difference between amusement park attractions and the rich experience of ‘the real thing.’”

p.18 “…your home village–comprised of strings of colorful houses nestled together, interspersed with shops and spires–looks like the Christmas miniature on your grandmother’s mantle.” “…beginning to grasp a sense of place so deep it defies your imagination.”

p.19 “…meandering along tiny narrow streets…”

p.21 “…the narrow, traffic-free streets…”

p.22 “…walking around an ordinary city corner into Old Town Square…” “…strolling grand boulevards where coffee shops beckon…”

p.23 “…you take in the action of the skateboarders and shoppers…” “…a stroll through the fine shops, restaurants, and cafes of…”

p.24 “…you rent bikes and set off on a ride along canals…”

I was watching North by Northwest last night; it opens with Cary Grant dictating a memo to his secretary as they walk side-by-side along a corridor. It took me a minute or so into the scene to realize that she was his subordinate, writing down whatever he said. I thought she was a colleague taking notes. Because why on earth would he need another human being’s help just to create and transmit a printed document?

The Christian Science Monitor says a new, carbon-free process for extracting hydrogen cuts the (theoretical) consumer cost by a fifth, down to $1.50 per kilogram. According to the article, that would make currently-existing fuel cell technology competitive with coal prices….

Last night I went to see Jaime Lerner, the renowned former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, speak at the Harvard Design School. Lerner is best known for the progressive programs that he instituted during his tenures as mayor. He and his team found creative ways to solve transportation, environmental, and city planning problems given the limited resources that were available to them. (He says, “if you want to get real creativity, drop a zero from your budget and a zero from your schedule”.) Rather build expensive subways, they built a pioneering bus rapid transit system with dedicated lanes and special bus-level platforms for quick boarding. Rather than building new parks, they preserved existing natural areas. They turned quarries into environmental schools and opera houses. To solve the problem of trash collection in slums, they simply paid the slum-dwellers (in food and cash) to bring in their trash. They turned the service vaults of a hydroelectric dam into a sculpture gallery.

Lerner delighted in telling us how quickly they were able to build certain things (An opera house in two months! A pedestrian mall in three days!) In part, he said that the speed was necessary to keep citizen opposition and bureaucratic obstacles from getting in the way. “Sometimes you have to teach by example,” he said. I couldn’t help thinking of the similarities between his attitude and the internet hacker ethic of “rough consensus and running code”. Rather than committing to expensive, grandiose plans, they were trying out smaller, simpler tweaks (”urban acupuncture”) and actually getting things done.

Of course, in many cases the public participation and review processes are in place for a reason; Robert Moses often acted with similar speed and stealth to pave over many parts of New York. (I’m tempted to think of Lerner as the anti-Moses.) I would love to see an in-depth examination and critique of Lerner’s work on the level of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker; so far, most of the criticism that I’ve found has come from light rail activists who view the Curitiba-style BRT model as a competitor for transportation funding.

My full notes from the talk are here.

Funny, Joe’s post on transportation in Melbourne reminded me of an Australian guy that I met last year on a flight from LA to Chicago. When I revealed in conversation that I didn’t have a car, his eyes bugged, and he was stone silent for a second or two. I’m used to that in LA; I assumed he was feeling a little sympathy for my transportation problems. (Hell, even the State Farm clerk here clucked her tongue when I explained why I would be buying renter’s insurance from them, but no car insurance. “It must be hard for you to get a date,” she blurted out. “Oh, I’m sorry.”)

But, instead, the Australian asked, “How old are ya?” “Twenty-four,” I say matter-of-factly. He shakes his head. “Twenty-four, and ya never had a car.” It was clear he was speaking of a developmental milestone that I had yet to reach. There was real pity in his voice, and a bit of suppressed condescension. You could say “woman” in place of “car,” and the tone would fit perfectly.

“Oh, I used to have a car,” I answer too quickly. “I sold it when I went back to school.”

He brightens, shooting me a why-didn’t-you-say-so look. “Oh, yeah,” he says, and laughs, the condescension melting away. We talk about the price of American education; he’s speaking to an equal again.

Nice guy, really.

Lowtech is a UK computer-recycling company. They’ve got an interesting philosophy–if they’re asked to dispose of a machine that they think is still usable, they fix it up with open-source software and resell it. And through their wonderfully-named Redundant Technology Initiative, they distribute healthy, free Linux machines (233mhz and up) to artists and other charity cases.

Best of all, hidden away on their site are some lovely diagrams on the economic effect of obsolescence on computer prices.

If only our Goodwill Computer Stores had this kind of political vision…although they did once let me borrow 30 elderly PCs for an installation.

I stumbled on this today…the grubby web-design firm where I worked from ‘95 to ‘97 ($10/hour and planks on cinder blocks for office furniture) bit the dust in 2002.

After a hiatus of three years, I finally own a working digital camera again (more on that later). As a result, I now have a use for iPhoto.

It’s always annoying to keep track of what files I’ve backed up to CD, but iPhoto can make the job easier using Keywords and Smart Albums. First, choose Photos > Show Keywords from the menu. This will give you a little window with some things like “Family”, “Birthday”, etc. Choose Add from the (horrible) Keywords drop-down menu in the dialog, and create a new keyword called “Archived”. Next, select File > New Smart Album… from the main menu. Give the new album a name like “Not Archived Yet”, and then choose Keyword, is not, Archived from the drop-downs. From now on, every new photo that you import will automagically appear in the “Not Archived Yet”. When that album reaches 650 MB or so (depending on the size of your CD-Rs), highlight it and use Burn (if you want a fancy iPhoto library CD) or File > Export… (if you want a more generic and compatible disc format) to archive the photos to a CD-R. Once you’re done, select all the photos in the “Not Archived Yet” album, select the “Archived” keyword in the Keywords window, and click Assign. This will clear the photos you just saved out of your “Not Archived Yet” album, leaving it open for the next batch.

Bonus Tip iPhoto ‘04 has a new full-screen edit mode that lets you flick through newly-imported photos quickly, fixing rotations and deleting the crappy ones as you go, but it’s rather hidden away by default. To use it, switch to Organize mode, click on the Slideshow icon at the bottom of the window, and then check off Display slideshow controls. Click Save Settings to close the dialog, select the album to view, and then click the “play” triangle at the bottom left of the window. You will get the photos blown up to full screen size, along with translucent controls for rotating, deleting, and rating the photos.

The Age just published a nice history of automobile adoption in Melbourne, Australia. Their development patterns sound a lot like ours. It’s interesting to compare that article to Tim Bray’s recent post about Melbourne. By his account, Melbourne is still very pedestrian-friendly, compared to most North American cities—perhaps they didn’t gut so many of their streetcar lines in the height of the automobile age?

This quote from the first article is interesting:

Soon cars were central to male mating rituals, from the marriage proposal to the Saturday night prowl. Before the ’50s, Davison writes, boys would say of a girl from a remote suburb that she was GI: geographically impossible.

Though I can’t find it now, the Washington Post recently published an article about how many people in the D.C. metro area didn’t want to brave the traffic to date people from distant suburbs. I guess we’ve come full circle.

Overheard today: “You pull into the passing lane, but you do not bring the speed.”

I don’t know if it was meant metaphorically or literally, but I think it’s a wonderful general-purpose put-down:

“Hey, dude, you’re pullin’ into the passing lane, all right, but guess what? You’re not bringin’ the speed.”

That, or a lyric from an early-period-Madonna “inadequate boyfriend” pop song:

(da, ba-da-da-da-dat-da, ba-da-da) You pull into the pass-ing lane (da, ba-da-da-da-dat-da, ba-da-da) But you do not bring the spee-ee-eed (da, ba-da-dat-dat-dat-da) Yeah

It happened that I was thinking of a Western (Red River, with John Wayne, 1948, very gay, and I don’t mean junior-high-lunch-period “that’s so gay”) with a cattle stampede scene in it. And suddenly I realized:

Vash the Stampede.

Vache the Stampede.

Geez. All these years it took me to figure this out.

“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.”

Interesting essay from John Gatto, a retired NYC high-school teacher. The tone is a little Floydian, but he gives a point-by-point breakdown of the 19th-century “Prussian Model” of lower-class education, on which the modern American public school system is modelled:

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project…

I’ve started to think a lot about this after meeting the products of real elite private schools out here. It’s awe-inspiring to talk to 18-year-olds with the vocabulary and breadth of experience of somebody half again as old. But it’s also kind of frightening to realize that they’re indeed being groomed to rule us all.

Well, not these kids particularly, ’cause we’re all in art school. But you know what I mean.

Check out this unintentionally funny/horrifying article by a pampered motivational speaker. He manages to spew 1000 words of free-flowing hostility (disguised as “Service Lessons”) about how poorly he was treated by the airline personnel while trying to change a first-class booking at the last minute. By his own account, it all starts when he snaps at an employee rather than simply answering a question, and he only gets more belligerent each time he opens his mouth. He concludes, perversely, that “I have to act like a jerk to get basic friendly service”.

If you ever find yourself wondering how to pronounce a tricky word or name, try searching for “(the word) pronounced” in Google. For example:

• Maciej pronounced
• Pilates pronounced
• Rijndael pronounced
• WYSIWYG pronounced

If you look at those results, you can see why it works—when people are writing about odd words, they tend to add “(pronounced _________ )”.