Dullroar

Today I happened across this NY Times article that explains that what most of us call "cleaning up" merely spreads the bacteria around. The usual ideas are floated: wooden cutting boards and 140 degree water good, plastic cutting boards and ancient sponges bad. For me, the peak of the article is a quote from a microbiology professor: "The cleanest kitchens, he said, were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink." This is obviously meant as a rebuke to mothers and girlfriends everywhere.

In other dirtyness today, Doc Searls has told the world about Naked Loft Party (note: link not safe for work, children, or my parents, who are somewhere in Mexico right now anyway), a blog of the erotic adventures of someone named Aleksander. This must be what it's like to live in New York City.

Posted by Andy at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maltese dog breeders of quality pet and show Maltese puppies is a creepy web site about a kind of tiny, harmless dog. Tonight when I go to sleep, I'm going to see a tiny maltese marching inexorably toward me. (Shudder).

Also, scroll down for such notable quotables as "Many thanks to David Fitzpatrick for his gentle and loving handling."

Posted by Andy at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joi Ito's entry about writing style and blogging contains a link to Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do). As I was reading it, I was thinking of all the times I'd made those mistakes, especially on my blog. Especially mistake #2, "flat writing."

Not that I've been in the blogging game that long (though hey, I'm well past the one month mark), but in my own quest for more engaging blog writing, I've been trying to adopt a more "verbal" style. That's the way I've always written email. It helps me avoid the trap of non-fiction: sounding like a documentary or an article in a research journal (shudder). Is that what most people do?

Posted by Andy at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On the side of a tavern in Pittsburgh's Highland Park neighborhood (at Bryant and N. St. Clair, near the excellent Tazza D'oro coffee shop), there's a mural depicting the way the nearby park (also called Highland Park) looked at the end of the 19th century. I have to admit the mural seems out of place there, given its immediate surroundings (basic neighborhood market, cleaners, etc.), but it's a nice reminder of the neighborhood's roots.

As usual, click on the thumbnail for a larger version of the image.

Posted by Andy at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Christina dropped me a line to tell me that Carol Moseley Braun would be on The Daily Show last night. I managed to tune in just in time to hear the interview, and as usual, Braun was terrific. Not that there was a heavy-duty policy discussion or anything. When talking about Mars, Braun threw out some quotes ("Live long and prosper" and then, I kid thee not, "Fear is the mind killer") that made me think she was either pandering to the crowd or a genuinely geeky person.

Anyway, today I hear that Braun has withdrawn from the race. I expected her to drop out eventually, but couldn't she have stuck it out a while longer? Oh well.

Posted by Andy at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A few years ago, my mother gave me a copy of The Working Stiff Cookbook. At first, I didn't touch it (the graphics were a little too cute). But over the last couple years, I've made a bunch of the recipes from it and every one's turned out really well.

Just last night, we tried the pan-roasted salmon recipe and it was great. The recipe for pancakes is also terrific, and the sausage and escarole soup is not to be missed.

Posted by Andy at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So over the past week or so I tried a stylesheet for this blog from Movable Style called "boxed". It looked great, but then I started noticing problems. The most significant: Internet Explorer greyed out all the text in some of my blog entries. According to W3C's validation service, my html and css were all completely valid, but Internet Explorer just couldn't hack it. I guess you get what you pay for (both in a stylesheet and in a browser).

Anyway, I'm back to a more supported stylesheet now (notice the swanky black/dark grey thing going on here). And I know a whole lot more about stylesheets (enough to stay very far away). Sorry for any inconvenience the previous style might have caused.

Posted by Andy at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Penn Ave., where it meets S. Graham St. (in Pittsburgh's Garfield neighborhood), there's a mural on the side of a building of a bride leaving a house (and crying). What's particularly cool about this mural is that the house in the picture is the house right next to the mural. The mural was painted by Judy Penzer in 1995. Click the thumbnail for a larger version.

Posted by Andy at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The presidentials had yet aonther debate today, this time on NPR. I admit that I haven't had the fortitude to listen to all of the debates (or any debate in its entirety), but I've been consistently impressed with what Carol Moseley Braun has to say. I hope that she doesn't fade away after (she gets trounced in) the primaries.

Posted by Andy at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Gold Way (a tiny back alley on the border of the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Oakland and Polish Hill), there's a pretty decrepit building with an incredible mural on its back. I've passed this building several times a week for 3 years, but until today, I never got a good look at it. It's really beautiful and impressive up close. Unfortunately the wall on which it's painted seems to be in the early stages of disintegrating.

Btw, sorry for the low light conditions. After 4 straight days of clouds and rain, I gave up on waiting for a sunny day.

Here are the pics (click any thumbnail for a larger version):

The whole scene		The low wall in front
Detail from left side of the mural	Detail from center of the mural	Detail from right side of the mural

Posted by Andy at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What's exciting about public murals is that they seem to spontaneously appear out of nowhere. I think people usually find them when they're lucky enough to glance in the right direction at the right place. Just today, I found a mural at an intersection I've passed hundreds of times over the years. Is the mural new? Probably not. I'm going to be documenting the murals I stumble across over the coming months, just because they're there and worth noticing. Here's the first:

At the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, there's a mural on a small shed visible from Shady Ave. For those unfamiliar with Pittsburgh geography, it's a map of the central spot in the region: the north side, downtown, and south side. I don't know much about this mural, but I'm guessing it was designed and created by kids.

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version of this image.

Posted by Andy at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So here we are in the age of social networking, and we're all publishing profiles of ourselves (say, on Friendster or wherever) that give complete strangers a pretty good idea of our likes, dislikes, habits, friends, etc. Talk about stalker-bait. So people use pseudonyms and obfuscation to keep their Internet stalkers and their real-world stalkers separate.

But people still want their friends to be able to recognize them. Some include pictures in their profile that only show a bit of themselves. The pics give enough detail that friends know who it is, but everyone else just sees an almost random image. It's a sort of authentication, but targeted at a very specific set of people: those who know us well in real life.

As we contemplate publishing even more information about ourselves (e.g. location awareness), we're either going to have to give up on keeping our various identities (real and Internet, business and personal) separate, or else social networking services are going to have to provide a more general, effective way of managing our identities than authentication-by-picture.

Posted by Andy at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)