Rocky road to Dublin

At this morning’s farmers’ market in Sunnyvale, I wasn’t much surprised to hear Irish tunes emanating from the stall always reserved for some sort of musical group, it being Saint Patrick's Day & all.

I did perk up a bit when I realized that this fella was the source:

(At the time this was shot, he was playing “Down by the Sally Gardens”, rather a favorite of mine.)

I don’t wish to engage in stereotyping, but the musician, Mr. Jiang, did not strike me as being a son of the Ould Sod

Regardless—he’s clearly steeped in the tradition, as he had these CDs for sale:

America, goniff!

Pas de Maru

Okay, I'm just in a goofy mood, & this suits:

Dying to get in

You may have heard about how outrageous the housing market is here in the Bay Area. It really is beyond the beyond—both property ownership & renting.

But here’s something I’ve never seen before, anywhere:

That should really tell you something.

Olive pits

I’m presuming you’ve heard about the contretemps surrounding the Grand Forks, N.D., restaurant review of the new Olive Garden store.

The review was actually about as bland & whitebread as anything you’ll find on the menu of any of the 67,433 OG outlets in the Lower 48. But because it didn’t excoriate the food, it went viral & picked up all kinds of snotograms from bloggers & tweeters.

(This kind of reminded me of the woman who used to “review” restaurants for the Pasadena Star News, where I worked for a while. Possibly because all her food was comped by the establishments she was writing up, or maybe just because she really, really enjoyed her eats, she never met a meal she didn’t like, or a restaurant she didn’t give top marks to.)

But it turns out that when Grand Forks Herald writer Marilyn Hagerty focuses on the ambiance of a place, she’s practicing in print what our mothers used to tell us to do: if you can’t say anything nice about someone, find something you can’t denigrate. As in, “Tuna surprise? Oh, what a lovely dish you have it in!”

So she spent all her time talking about the décor, rather than the chow.

But the thing I get the biggest kick out of, in this whole farrago is a comment that appeared on one of the critical sites, Fark: "Residents of Grand Forks, N.D., are lining up for blocks to enjoy a one-of-a-kind European dining experience that finally puts the city on the culinary map with its unique brand of Tuscany refinery. It's called The Olive Garden."

Here’s my response to the whole thing:

Grand Forks has blocks?

Justice blind & mostly dumb

Following with all due speed upon the take-down of Osama Bin Laden by US Navy Seals ten months ago, the great government of Pakistan is taking steps to show to all the world its zero-tolerance policy against law-breaking evil-doers.

They’re charging Bin Laden’s several widows with entering the country illegally.

The BBC reports that the three women probably won’t be tried in an open court (meaning: no media coverage), possibly because it would be hard for even Pakistani lawyers to frame the questions so carefully as to avoid answers that they don’t want anyone hearing.

The mind boggles here. A country with as many loose cannons as Pakistan, such endemic poverty, repression & corruption thinks, that putting on a show trial for women who—even if they did enter the country without getting their passports stamped (if they have passports)—would never have had any choice in the matter is somehow going to convince the world of their commitment to fighting terrorism—well, you can count the dozens of ways that’s just plain ludicrous for yourself.

& I’m not going to argue if someone wants to point out that the US has glass houses of its own, with all the social ills we have & both the right & left going ape over a motormouth like Rush Limbaugh instead of actually, you know, taking action about crumbling infrastructure, employment, healthcare or education.

Even so—this is just so colossally, gobsmackingly fatheaded, I just couldn’t help myself bringing it up.

Enjoy.

(& a big shout-out to Roo for bringing this to my attention. Still laughing.)

Anti-social media

I’m taking a careers workshop and was pretty much gobsmacked when a participant assured me that the way for me to go is social media. Something to do with either running social networking communities, or managing social networking software products; I’m not sure and she seemed pretty vague, too. More interested in sounding authoritative than in providing actual, you know, substantive information.

(And this was after I’d said that I’m interested in nothing to do with the consumer or social media space.)

See, I’m not sure that this whole social networking phenom is more than a fad. Like, you know, that-there iPhone thing. But, beyond that, I’m completely dumbfounded not only by how much platforms like Twitter or Facebook encourage continuous public displays of self-absorption, but how they seem to imbue their members with seemingly unlimited amounts of utter, mind-freezing stupidity.

People are so enthralled by the concept that, instead of a mere 15 minutes of fame, they can get bleeps and blobs of it round the clock—just keep tweeting or updating your FB status. Those go out to everyone they’ve connected to, with the urgency you’d expect to get from a news-flash announcing that the Israelis and Palestinians have just sealed a peace agreement over a pulled-pork sandwich and a few brewskis. Over and over again.

And I’m not even talking about those god-awful FB games.

People just lose their brains when they log on to those sites, blabbing stuff, posting photos and who knows what with this bizarre schizoid idea that they can at the same time draw the admiring attention of everyone who views yet another pic of them slamming back tequila shooters or leading the pack in a wet tee-shirt contest while not appearing on the radar of current or future employers.

And the environments positively encourage this sort of thing.

But here’s one of the more recent examples of why I can’t get excited about social networking: the Washington state corrections officer who was charged last week with bigamy after FB’s “friending” algorithm suggested that Wife #1 might want to friend Wife #2, since they had Alan L. O’Neill as a common friend.

Now, O’Neill isn’t the first—I Googled “Facebook bigamist” and found others over the past years. So what is it that makes anyone think that anything that can be uploaded from a phone, pad or PC isn’t going to be circulated, processed and entered into evidence somehow?

And why, if I’m not a PI or a blackmailer, would I want to be part of this business?

Besides, my idea of a time suck is putting out a feeder full of Nyjer seed and watching goldfinches squabble with juncos at it for hours.I'm thinking I'll add a hummingbird feeder, too.