Category: suburbs

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What It Is: 3/23/2009

What I’m reading: Zot! 1987-1991 and Clyde Fans, Vol. 1. I never read Zot! when it was coming out back then and, reading it now, I can see just why I didn’t give it a try then, why I wouldn’t have liked it then, and why I’m enjoying the living crap out of it now. That Scott McCloud was a heck of a cartoonist.

What I’m listening to: Bill Simmons’ 2-part podcast with Chuck Klosterman.

What I’m watching: Some NCAA hoops, some of our regular TV — 30 Rock, The Soup, Dollhouse, Eastbound & Down — and, um, The House Bunny.

What I’m drinking: Boy, I drank a lot last week at the conference. I managed to go from gin to Guinness to wine over the course of an evening on Monday, but escaped a hangover. I hate to say it’s hard work, but I do get pretty wiped out walking an exhibit hall all day and being in business-mode. It’s kinda sad that the first drink is really a relief, but there it is. I mean, beyond that, I get into this really weird conference-metabolism, where all my habits are thrown off: eating, sleeping, drinking, bathroom, etc. At least I was able to replace my daily walks with Rufus with a 1.4-mile walk each way from my hotel to the Javits Center. Still, I was all sorts of out of rhythm last week.

What Rufus is up to: Getting used to the house routine again after spending a few days with Ruby & Willow (and Jason & Kristy). No dog-park or greyhound hike for him this week; we were too lazy on Saturday and I had to go down to Philadelphia on Sunday.

Where I’m going: Nodarnwhere!

What I’m happy about: One conference over! Three more (plus our own) to go! Also, my wife & I belatedly celebrated our anniversary this weekend with a fantastic dinner at Cafe Matisse.

What I’m sad about: That Continental failed to log both of the flights I booked for April & May conferences. I rebooked ’em at a net savings of $30, but they’ve never messed up any of my ticketing before this.

What I’m pondering: Whether the addition of a giant, high-end Whole Foods to Bergen “Dark Underworld” Mall was one of the signs of the apocalypse in the book of Revelations. (Whoops! I mean, “Bergen Town Center.”)

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My morning commute

Good thing I got an early start today! It put me on the road with perfect timing, so I could get behind this guy —

— for two miles. At this moment, I was going around 17 mph, or one-third of the speed limit on that sign to the right. We got up to about 25 mph by the time he turned off this road. TWO MILES LATER.

At least I had the new B.S. Report to listen to on my iPod.

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There’s a flapper in my bathroom!

I don’t write about the perils of DIY plumbing on this blog (except for this post, which featured one of my favorite stupid puns), because them’s the breaks of home-sorta-ownership, right?

Anyway, the flapper in the upstairs toilet has been faulty for a few months now. After flushing, I have to take the lid off the cistern, tap the flapper down over the flush valve, or it’ll keep draining for quite a while until the flapper drops down on its own.

Today, I finally decided to pick up a replacement flapper and do the repair. It wasn’t too difficult: shut off the supply valve to the toilet, flush to empty the cistern, and remove the faulty flapper. (Note: my wife was on flashlight duty, ably assisting with light and tool-retrieval.) Since it was apparently a factory-assembled component of the fill valve, I needed to cut through it with an Xacto knife to remove it. It came off fine, and the new one fit just on easily. There was some experimentation with the length of the chain from the flapper to the flush arm, which necessitated turning the supply valve on and off, but we found a correct length, and all was good! Flapper repair: complete!

Then I noticed the leak on the floor.

At first, I thought it was a spillover from the cistern, since I did some of the work while the tank was full. But no: the leak was coming from the supply valve, which does not appear to have been replaced since the house was built. In 1968.

The leak would only stop when the valve itself was shutoff (meaning no water gets to the toilet). I called my dad, a genius of household repair, for his advice, but his tips were for naught. Good thing we have a second bathroom downstairs!

Now it looks like I need to engage in this guy’s strategy, shutting off the water in the house, draining the pipes, removing the valve stem, buying a replacement, and fitting the new one on.

You don’t want to go buy a replacement without having the old one on hand, because you will always buy the wrong one. So that means the house’s water has to be turned off from the beginning of the process to the end. And that means I’ll be waiting till tomorrow, because there’s no way I’d be stupid enough to start a job like this at night and risk being without water for another day!

Which is to say, I may skip Monday Morning Montaigne this week.

(Note: Sure, I could call a plumber, but this simply cannot be that complex a job and, with the NFL season over with, I need to do something manly this weekend!)

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Mauled

There are several awesome things about this NYTimes article about shopping malls:

  1. it’s written in the second person;
  2. it turned me on to deadmalls.com;
  3. it is a near-parody of the Times‘ legendary condescension toward “flyover” country, but not near enough;
  4. it is completely blind to the ways in which Manhattan is becoming an imitation of northern New Jersey mall culture.

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Location, Location, Location

Why New Jersey rocks:

New Jersey’s small size has a lot to do with both its much-inflated deficiencies and its virtues. A lot is packed into limited territory. Urban squalor is squeezed up against dairy farms; picturesque villages right out of a New England landscape are a sneeze away from sulfurous factories and malodorous highways. For a lot of people, caricature of the state’s deficiencies is an efficient way to reduce its multifaceted nature to a clear meaning.

The jumble of contrasts is, on the contrary, the source of Jersey’s remarkable harvest of talent. It drives certain people to either build a unified artistic sensibility out of the divisions around them, or to create art unhindered by a narrow identity.

and why Billy Joel sucks:

I decided to make a serious effort to identify the consistent qualities across Joel’s “body of work” (it almost hurts to write that) that make it so meretricious, so fraudulent, so pitifully bad. And so, risking humiliation and embarrassment, I ventured to the Barnes & Noble music section and bought a four-disc set of B.J.’s “Greatest Hits,” one of which was a full disc of his musings about art and music. I must admit that I also bought a copy of an album I already had — Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose “Hickory Wind” is just ravishing—so the cashier might think the B.J. box was merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste. Yes, reader. I couldn’t bear the sneer, even for your benefit.

And I think I’ve done it! I think I’ve identified the qualities in B.J.’s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt’s backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

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Go, Lakers

The weather was really wonderful yesterday morning, so we decided to take Rufus on an extended walk around Skyline Lake. I don’t recall ever walking all the way around the lake when I was growing up here, but I enjoy meandering around with our boy and looking at the environs. I’m sure I won’t in wintertime, but I’ll cut down his food a little so he doesn’t pack on the pounds.

Anyway, in the last third of our walk, we stopped for a few moments at the lakeside and I busted out the iPhone to take some pix. Here’s the best one:

After, we went down to our weekly farmers’ market. It’s the last one till next May, so Rufus made sure to stop by all his regular booths and get lots of affection. In our conversations with other shoppers, we found four different families that have owned greyhounds in the past. Which is freaky, is all.

Anyway, no Wawayanda hike today, as we’ve got tickets for the Cowboys/Giants game, so here’s your cute pic of the week of Rufus Noir, Ace Dogtective:

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Low turnout

We didn’t get as many trick-or-treaters as we did last year, so Rufus had an easier evening than I’d anticipated. He barked like a maniac everytime the doorbell rang, of course. I’d put his leash on him and open the door, at which point he’d invariably wag his tail and try to get all the kids to pet him or put their faces close enough for a good lick.

All in all, he had a better day than Jill Rappaport’s dog:

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Peoples’ waggin’

At a traffic light during my drive home yesterday, I noticed this car in the next lane:

In case you can’t see this iPhone photo too clearly, it’s of a Volkswagen Phaeton with a W 12 engine. According to the Wikipedia page for this car, it looks like the W 12 is the top of the line for a Phaeton. This means that I was on the road with someone who spent more than $100,000 on a Volkswagen.

Or maybe — given the letter-sequence of his license plate — he bought it used for around $55,000.

Either way, I may have found the stupidest driver in New Jersey. It’s a Volkswagen!