spasticrobot

Daylight Savings Time

Don't forget to set your clocks 1 hour ahead late Saturday night (or early Sunday morning, depending on how you look at it). That's right, it's almost DST time!

For me, DST is all about after-work bike rides. The first weekly Wednesday evening City Park / Lakefront ride meets up this Wednesday at 5:30pm in front of NOMA. If you want to do a nice 17-20 mile pace ride come out and meetup. It's great, relaxing, mid-week fun!

Help Me Somebody

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an amazing collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne, celebrates its 25th Anniversary this year. To commemerate the occasion Nonesuch is releasing a special remastered version. They've launched a very well designed website to accompany the release. There's a ton of great content on the site including critical essays, samples, and original artwork including a Burce Connor short film. In addition they are also releasing 7 songs not on the original release and they are allowing users to download multitrack versions of the original recordings to cut up, sample and remix.

Bush of Ghosts is one of my all time favorite albums. It reminds me of the wild and heady days of the early 90s, which for me was defined by exhuberant psychedelic exploration. This album typifies that vibe. More importantly its sound is evocative of the emerging globalism and the resulting cultural conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It's an important album on many levels and I'm happy to see it being preserved and celebrated.

Trivia: My favorite track off of the ablum, "Help Me Somebody" features a sampled recording of the Bishop Paul Morton, a wild, shouting preacher and the most powerful man in New Orleans gospel. It's a frenetic recording of Morton screaming about what how you can't escape the Spirit, even in Hell. It was recorded off of an A.M. radio in New Orleans, sometime in 1980.

Talkin' funny and lookin' funny and talkin' 'bout "Nobody loves(?) me" you make yourself look bad.

Help me somebody.

You need to take a good look at yourself and see if you're the kind of person that God wants you to be.

It's no big thing, it's a small thing, what... people... think(?).

Help me somebody.

There's no escape from Him. He's so high you can't get over Him. He's so low you can't get under Him. He's so wide you can't get around Him. If you make your bed in Heaven He's there. If you make your bed in Hell He's there. He's everywhere.

Woo! Help me somebody. Woo! Help me somebody.

Taqueria Sanchez, where are you?

I've been anticipating the arrival of taco trucks since the huge influx of Mexican day laborers began. Recently, Ryan reported that one had finally landed on our shores in the form of Taqueria Sanchez, an outfit out of Houston led by the infamous Doña 'Root'. He ate there twice and sampled Tacos Carnitas and al Pastor, both served with steamed corn tortillas, chopped onion, cilantro, radishes and hot sauce with nary a shred of cheese nor dab of sour cream in sight. In other words Taqueria Sanchez is the real deal!

Well today I drove out to the Daiquiri's & Cream's parking lot on Vets, with fantasies of spicy tacos and refreshing agua fresco running through my head, but alas Taqueria Sanchez has vanished into the humid vapor of Metairie. Keep your eyes peeled. We need to find that truck!

The New Peter Panism

Up With Grups* is an article in this month's New York about the shrinking difference between 40 year olds and 20 year olds and the death of the generation gap. It kind of makes me feel a little weird because I identify deeply with many of the characteristics described in it. I've been thinking about this subject for a while now and am glad to read such a thorough investigation into the phemomena.

A human-resources executive told me recently that there’s a golden rule of HR: To motivate a baby boomer, offer him a bonus. To motivate a Generation-Xer, offer him a day off. The Grup, I think, would go for the day off, too. If the boomer’s icon of success was an empire-building maverick magnate like Ted Turner, the Grup’s model would be Spike Jonze, the 36-year-old Jackass-producing, skateboarding, awesome-indie-movie-directing free agent. Remember, the Grup of today is the slacker from 1990 who, fresh out of college, ran smack into the recession and maybe fiddled around with a riot-grrl band, then got a job at 25 for a Web-development company where she wore jeans to work and played Ping-Pong and stayed late and covered her desk in rare Japanese action figures. Now that woman is 35, a VP at a viral-marketing firm, still dressing down because everyone knows that the youth market is where it’s at, yet is scared to death she’s going to ossify into the same kind of corporate stooge she swore she’d never become. For a Grup, success isn’t about how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk, or boogie-board, away.

Rouleur Magazine

Rouleur is a new cycling magazine from Rapha, makers of beautiful and super high quality cycling gear. The layout looks amazing and the content sounds incredible.

The first issue's featured articles include:

• Redoubtable rouleurs - profiles of the rouleurs who have inspired us the most
• Pride and prejudice - a comparison of Record and Dura Ace that focuses on design and emotion rather than practical performance
• Le Tourmalet - an account of the classic climb
• Kraftwerk - a study of the German techno pioneers and their relationship with the ultimate man-machine
• Obsession - photographs from a day of suffering
• Fixed Idea - an essay on the appeal of the fixed gear
• Magnus - an interview with the sinister but likeable Swede

I can't wait for my issue to arrive.

As a sidenote I'd be remiss not to mention just how badass I think the Rapha site is in and of itself. If you are a fan of cycling or web design take a minute out of your hectic day to enjoy the pleasure of their products, features and about pages. They really evoke the drama and beauty of cycling through their simple and lovely design and copy.

9 Roses

Last night I had the pleasure of dining at Hoa Hong 9 Roses. I've been wanting to eat at this restaurant for a few years and with our other favorite Vietnamese restaurants still out of comission our friend Heather made the brilliant suggestion that a bunch of us go.

9 Roses is physically the largest Vietnamese restuarant I've been to in the city. It's huge, nearly banquet hall sized, with giant tables set up with lazy susans and occupied almost entirely by Asian families out for a big dinner. Like the restaurant itself, the menu is enormous. There must be at least 150 items on the menu and choosing what to order is a daunting task.

After much deliberation I finally settled on the Crepe appetizer, a large egg crepe filled with herbs, chicken, and mung bean sprouts, a bowl of some of the best Pho I've ever had and delicious ground pork balls which were grilled and served with pickled carrots, various herbs, lettuce, peanut sauce and spring roll wrappers. The resulting rolls had some of the best flavor contrasts I've enjoyed in a while.

The plates came out in waves and everyone at the table shared. I was able to constantly sample all kinds of different treats including delicious spring rolls, a fantastic sweet and sour catfish soup, chinese broccoli with ginger and grilled lemongrass and sweet onion Bun.

It was so nice to experience authentic Vietnamese flavors again, something that I have come to associate with living in New Orleans but has been lost to me since the storm. 9 Roses is a new favorite and I foresee many pleasant evenings spent there in the near future.

Big Baby!

How bout them Tigers? LSU advanced today to the Final Four for the first time in 20 years. After beating Duke decisively and then wrestling the Longhorns in locked battle until an OT breakout they deserve it. These guys play with big hearts and big defensive moves. I can't wait to pull for them as they compete for a national title.

SPASTICROBOT is 2!

Today is the second anniversary of this site in its current iteration. I've been running personal sites for almost 8 years now and so far running this weblog has been my favorite web publishing experience. I've got some changes planned that I won't talk about because then I probably won't go through with them but one thing is for sure, I'm looking at leaving Typepad and moving on to either Movable Type or Wordpress.

Stats to date:
Total Posts: 498
Total Comments: 612
Site Visits: 49,901
Avg. Per Day: 80
Past Seven Days: 716

Friendster vs. MySpace

Danah Boyd has written a clever essay titled "Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?" that examines the successes and failures of Friendster and MySpace from social and technical perspectives. Lately I've reluctantly started to embrace MySpace due to the fact that it's the first online space where most of my IRL friends have entrenched themselves.

It's interesting to watch the evolution of social networking websites. They keep getting weirder and more "real".

A List of Fine Things

Quality Time with Shanna
Po-Boys and Cheese Fries
V for Vendetta
NCAA Bracketology
Cox DVR
Croissant d'Or
Airport Express
Visionary in Residence
Make Magazine
Whole Foods Market
Cowboy Burgers
Ben & Jerry's Milkshakes
The Sopranos
The new Doctor Who
Entourage
Easter Candy
Molto Mario
Dwell (the television show)