Elm City Dad | Elm City Mom



Our New Haven?


Lu and I are scouting places to live this week as we travel around CT, MA and NH. Spent yesterday in New Haven, and it looks pretty darn good. We can live in a Victorian with plenty of space for less than we are paying now, and still be only a few blocks from the center of the city. Lu should have no trouble getting business for Full of Joy Yoga, and I see many possibilities for work, as well.

With Yale at its heart, New Haven has a lot of art, a lot of history and quite a few great restaurants. "Founded in 1638, New Haven could be considered to be the oldest formally planned community in the United States due to the original grid of four streets by four streets." Pretty cool. We're going back today to meet some realtors and check out a few apartments.

What is especially cool, though, is that I'm posting this from our friends' brand new coffee shop in New London, called Bean and Leaf. They built the entire interior, laid the floor and roast their own beans. It's quite impressive, and we're very excited that we'll be living only about 50 minutes away.


"Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig, Does Whatever a Spider-Pig Does..."


Simply put, the Simpson's Movie was totally awesome. Even more telling, I can't wait to see it again. So many great moments. So much hilarity. They absolutely nailed it, and it was so much fun to see it with a cheering, laughing, WooHooing crowd.

It was a magical evening at the movie theaters. Even Duffman was there. I have only one question, though. What the hell happened to Spider-Pig?!?


Sacralicious Thoughts


Lately I've been very much enjoying The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. Many of the short stories are both cryptic and detailed at the same time. Some of them are beautiful and others unsettling. They did evoke in me the need to read another one, and another one. Not particularly good going-to-sleep-stories, but extremely thought-provoking and unique. Quiet. Precise. Compelling. The thing I love most about all of them is that they never quite lead up to the exact ending. He gives you most of it, but the ultimate essence of his stories are the endings you find in your own mind.

The only other things on my mind are the following: going home to visit family and meet my nephew Oren, The Simpsons Movie opening on Friday, and the Beastie Boys at the end of August. I know it's still over a month away, but I can't stop listening to their album. Play it soft and it's great to chill to. Blast it loud and you'll have a spastically funky time.

Alright, time to grab tickets to the Friday 12:01am showing of the Simpsons. I gotta do it. I just wish there were a Kwik-E-Mart nearby! (and thanks Michele for the photo!!)


Associating is Free


Not a huge anime fan. Nor much "Blockhead" guy, either. But this is still cool.

And since it's Thursday, you're going to need something to get you through the last *real* day of the week. Check out Human Brain Cloud, but watch out, you'll get sucked in and keep going back, so make sure you don't start messin' around until most of your work-pile is depleted. The stats on these free-associations are pretty cool.

Lastly, if you want to know who won the WSOP, don't click here. Also don't look at USAToday today, either. You've been warned.


Copy, Cut, Remix, Paste


Okay, now here is some pure interweb gold from our friends in Russia. (via boingboing.)

It's not the actions of the Russian protester throwing leaflets during a Putin news conference. It's not the content of the leaflets or Putin's reaction. Instead, it's the guy with the crazy eyes right behind the protester.

Obviously. What else could it be!? This is what we do on the Web, and we love it.


Right Moments


I want to see Confessions of a Burning Man. It's playing at Slim's tomorrow night. However, I can't go see it then, because Lu can't come with me, because she will be hard at work preparing for the first Full of Joy Yoga teacher training that she is offering. I'm so excited for her. She has created an amazing practice for kids, and her business is doing so well. It's fantastic that she is taking it up another level, and helping other yogis learn how to teach children.

This here is a big step (ha!) for robots. Getting robots to walk naturally has been a challenge for a long time.

And while on the way home from work tonight, (which pretty much sucked by the way), my buddy mentioned Second Life. Been hearing about it a lot more these days, and I finally decided to sign on up and check it out. Figure if I'm going down the online poker route, I might as well just say screw it and check out SL, as well.

Both of those things are sure-fire time wasters for when I'm sitting in front of the monitor, but it just seems like the right moment for both. I feel like I should really only be writing, researching and communicating with friends and family when I'm using the computer, and not messing around with games and distractions. I've never been a computer-game-player, beyond the quick little flash games that are quick and easy. I realize I've missed the whole multi-player aspect of some amazing online games, but to delve into them just requires too much time.

I can't help but be intrigued by Second Life, though. I do hope someday The Metaverse manifests. Seems like Second Life is the closest thing yet.

If any of you want to join up, too, Bones Enoch is my name. Feel free to use me as a referral. Now I'm off to explore.


Blackout!


It's been getting tougher and tougher to keep thrunk updated as often as accoster. The main reason is that I simply have far less time to peruse the internet than I ever have before. And by the time I get home at night, I'm more interested in talking politics or relating the funny/weird parts of my days out on the street, than I am just surfing around to find stuff for thrunk.

I'm not going to stop, but you can definitely expect that this site will be updated slightly less than before. Which was already happening anyway.

But I've got a few things for today, so here goes!

First off is Nine Brain Quirks You Didn't Know You Had, (via lifehack)

And here's an image of the East Coast during the big blackout in August of '03. Right before it happened I had gotten a call offering me a temp job in Manhattan. I called Lu to tell her while she was out of town with her Aunt helping with a photo shoot. Seconds after that I jumped on the subway to head back to Brooklyn. About ten minutes later I was on the subway, and just before we pulled into the Downtown Brooklyn station the train went dark and slowed to a halt. Moments later the emergency lights came on, the train moved forward about 10 feet and the doors opened. We sat there for about 5 minutes waiting to see what was going on before someone told us there was no power, and we weren't going anywhere. The mass chaos in the unfamiliar streets of downtown Brooklyn really took me by surprise and it was very freaky to find out that no one had power, for miles around, and that cellphones didn't even work. For a while, I definitely thought it was an attack of some kind.

Lu couldn't get back into Manhattan for hours, and I had to figure out where her apartment was, which I had only just moved into. Spent the night strolling the streets of Park Slope meetin' people over candlelight, sipping beers on the sidewalk before they could get warm.


Up Up and Away


I really hope this story is true. I have my doubts, but it's possible. Scary, but possible.


Dreaming of Skittlebrau in the Shade


From Get It In Writing, I bring you 8 web moneymakers. Some were scams. Some are still generating profits.

Or maybe perhaps you are here looking for a Simpsonian quote made real. "You got any of that beer that has candy floating in it, you know, Skittlebrau?" asked Homer. "Such a product does not exist, sir! You must have dreamed it," Apu replied. Well, Apu was wrong.

You'll also want to see if you're up to the Ninja Challenge. How many do you see?

And let's talk about cats. There are three of them in the apartment right now, and they are beginning to take over. There were recent articles in the NYTimes and Washington Post about the origins of the domestic feline. It seems as though the cats decided to engage with humans for a very specific reason, at a very specific point in the development of civilization. The conclusions ring true, because it's still quite clear the cats are here because they've agreed to it. Mostly. Oh shit. Gotta go feed them. They've taken Lu hostage and are demanding tuna. Later.


Ohhh.. ahhhhh


Fireworks, fireworks and more fireworks. Keep those fingers safe. Happy 4th!


All Hail His Noodly Appendages



And you thought he didn't exist!


People How You Doin There's a New Day Dawnin'


On Friday morning, tickets for the Beastie Boys' Gala Event at the Warfield went on pre-sale. We didn't get any. But then on Sunday at the regular online sale, my amazing, astounding, magical wife Lulu managed to score a single ticket for the show.

The thing is, we already have tickets to a show that night. WILCO is playing at the Greek, and both of us were really excited for this show.

That is, until a few weeks ago when the Beasties announced this additional show.

And now I have a ticket to each. Lu definitely wants to see WILCO, but she's sad to miss the Beastie Boys, too. I, on the other hand, am utterly torn.

This is one of those decisions that I can't really complain about, but the fact is that deciding between two events of extreme fun and awesomeness, quite frankly, sucks.

There's a few ways for me to look at this scenario to decide which show to attend. I think the WILCO show will be superior, musically. I think the Beastie Boys show will be more 'fun'. WILCO will be artful, powerful, beautiful and I really want to hear the news songs live and rockin. The Beastie Boys show will be ridiculous, hilarious, over-the-top and yet at the same time very intimate and special. They play rooms this size pretty much never, anymore. WILCO will probably be back to the Greek and other venues like it many more times over the years. The Beastie Boys might not ever tour again. Their tours are already sporadic at best, and although I hope they'll keep rockin for many more years to come, I learned a serious lesson with Phish.

The fates of bands are unpredictable. I cannot count on another tour sometime in the future.

But when I run it right down the line, numbers to numbers, there's really no choice at all.

I first found the Beasties back in 1986, but it wasn't until college that I really dug in. Since then I've memorized all of their albums, play them repeatedly, and have consistently listed the BBoys as one of my favorite bands since at least 1993 when I finally heard Check Your Head, and it completely blew my mind. (it came out in 1992, but I wasn't ready for it then. Right after finding CYH I started in on Paul's Boutique and was astounded at what I had been missing. PB came out in 1989, but I had missed that, too.)

That's over 20 years of diggin' these guys, but the sad fact is, I've only seen them once, kinda. It was at Lollapalooza in RI, back in like '94. By the time I made it in through those hours of interminable traffic, their set was half-over, and I was very far back. Never in a club. Never in a civic center. Never indoors anywhere at all.

But now I have a ticket to a Special Gala Event at an amazing venue in SF. And even though WILCO is my favorite band out there right now, there's a special place in my musical soul for everything the Beastie Boys have done. There's no way I can pass this up, and I'm so grateful to my wife for both getting this ticket for me, and being okay with me enjoying the show without her. It's always more fun with her at my side, but this time we're going to have to divide and conquer. I'm jealous she's getting WILCO, but as a longtime Beastie fan herself, she feels the same, coming back the other way.



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