Is the wait for the 22 too long? “No shit,” you mutter under your breath, steam coming out your ears and veins popping out of your forehead.
Fortunately, some smart local folks have apparently figured out a way to make the 22’s notoriously inconsistent schedule work in their favor: with sangria.
Now on most Muni lines you don’t have time to buy a couple bottles of wine while you’re waiting for the next bus, let alone cut up fruit, allow it to steep, and drink the entire pitcher before the bus arrives. But the 22 isn’t a normal bus line. The wait for the 22 can range from 1 second to 48 minutes; the NextMuni prediction tends to oscillate randomly between those extremes.
Frankly there’s no way to tell when (or if) the next 22 will come. So until then, why not have a sangria party? Aside from your liver, what have you got to lose?
If you attended Obscura Day 2012 in San Francisco, you may have seen my paper airplane. What was it doing there?
It’s a long story, but here’s the short version.
The Elsewhere Philatelic Society (a bunch of odd stamp collectors, it’s a long story) at some point asked everyone to send “talismans.” These objects had to be sent through the mail bare — without box packaging of any kind.
I immediately recalled a book I read as a child: Kid’s Shenanigans from Klutz Books. In the book, they mention that you can send any object through the mail as long as it wouldn’t come apart or endanger anyone. They cite a shoe (sans shoelaces) as something that could be safely mailed.
Around that same time, Origami had become a fad, and by extension paper airplanes. I’d gotten pretty good at folding paper, and after reading the Klutz book I’d started to wonder what would happen if I sent a paper airplane through the mail.
To me it seemed like the basic paper airplane was the best shape for mailing purposes. You could tape it in only one spot and it could not come unfolded. Unfastened folded paper, I posited, had the risk of unfolding during the mailing process and stood the risk of damage or being delivered back to the return address.
For a while, I wondered what would happen if I mailed a paper airplane to a friend. But everyone I knew as a kid had the same dude as their postal carrier. I worried that if I sent a paper airplane, the cool gray haired guy who delivered our mail would just carry my paper airplane directly, skipping USPS. I felt like that was cheating, and I still feel like I was justified. A system is more than the sum of it’s parts and I aimed to test the policies of USPS as a whole rather than the generosity of a single employee.
After a while I forgot about the experiment. Other things came up in my life, like girls, college, etc. But then one day it all came back to me: I had to send a talisman to the Elsewhere Philatelic Society. From their ad, it seemed like they’d notify me in some way if I sent something in. Exactly what I’d wanted! So, why not? I made a paper airplane and sent it on its way.
For a while it seemed like nothing had happened. I worried my poor little airplane had gotten destroyed by USPS’ industrial equipment somewhere along the way.
Then, out of the blue, it happened. My paper airplane appeared on this Flickr page, relatively unscathed by USPS. Thus proving my childhood hypothesis: one can send paper airplanes through the mail!
That was a couple of years ago. Now at the little “exhibit” on Potrero Hill the other day, my airplane seems surprisingly still intact despite both USPS and the Elsewhere Philatelic Society’s storage over the past couple years. Victory!
While it’s by far the least cool talisman in their collection, that little paper airplane is important to me as it satisfies a long-held curiosity with USPS and folded paper objects.
CHEESE CUBES Unspecified number of cows (2011; casein) This dynamic piece helps us recontextualize the disparity between the troubling mouth/non-mouth dichotomy in an ersatz form readily apparent to the non-casual observer (not shown).
On flipping a page in the April 21st issue of The Economist I came across this year’s funniest April Fool’s joke. This ad has a timeline of a fictional 200 year history for Citi, taking credit for various innovations such as the Panama Canal and commercial jetliners.
As I read through it I was laughing out loud. Whoever did this ad had a keen sense of satire. And the text about how money isn’t all that matters to Citi makes a good punchline.
Then I realized it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. The people who created this ad actually think people will believe it.
Let’s clear one thing up first. There is no such thing as “Citi.” There’s Citigroup, and a division called Citibank. The ad copyright says “Citigroup.” And if that’s what they’re talking about, I have bad news. Citigroup is a mere 13 years old.
Their banking division, of course, is older. And sure, you could draw a line back to a bank in New York that is 200 years old.
But you can’t draw a straight line. Citi is a poster child for a corporation created by mergers. Drawing its history back to a precursor organization is like if I claimed to be 200 years old because that’s how old my great-grandfather would have been this year.
Here’s a quick summary of their real history: After a series of bank mergers in the mid 20th century, the name “Citibank” was invented in the 70’s to describe the new conglomerate. A parent company named “Citicorp” was established, which was renamed to “Citigroup” in 1998 after they merged with Traveler’s Insurance. That merger didn’t work out and Traveler’s was later spun off. This same process of a corporate marriage and divorce was repeated with an investment company called Smith Barney.
Here in California, Citibank appeared on the west coast practically overnight a mere decade ago. They acquired a regional bank called California Federal (aka CalFed.) Itself the product of a series of corporate mergers, CalFed’s strategy of expansion through acquisition fit well with Citibank, but it makes the bank’s lineage all the more murky.
Look, if this ad was secretly placed by The Onion or something, let me just admit that you got me. I fell for your ruse. But if the folks behind it are just some marketing guys out there who think they’ve convinced people that Citi is 200 years old? The joke is on them.
Don’t tell me I’m the only one who’s noticed the Yelp logo stuck to this painting at Little Star on Valencia. Is this a subtle hint that diners should rate Little Star on Yelp?
Hey kids, ready for Christmas? Too bad, it’s more than eight months away! Ha ha!
Oh, and what’s that? Yeah, Santa already ate the chocolates from your advent calendars, then I stuck them to the ceiling at Four Barrel. Sorry, the big guy was drunk.
Besides it’s not like the chocolate would last until December anyway. What? Stop crying.
16th and Mission’s The Sandwich Place is littered with signs for a new app for your phone that lets you order (and pay) online.
The app is apparently from Omni Consumer Products, best known for Delta City and their robot police force. Before you can say “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” let me point out that the app itself is free. All you gotta do is place your order, drive your 6000 SUX down to the restaurant and pick it up.
Evoluent’s VerticalMouse 4 is one of the better ergonomic computer mice I’ve used. It’s comfortable, it doesn’t take much getting used to, and the price isn’t unreasonable.
While it works great on Windows and Mac, the same can’t be said for Linux. The button mappings cause some truly odd behavior, particularly with the scroll wheel.
Fortunately, there’s a quick fix.
First let’s play with xinput to make sure the settings are what you want. The following command will print out a list of input devices on your system:
xinput list
There should be a line that looks something like this:
Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 id=10
The important thing here is the ID number, which in this case is 10. It will vary from one computer to the next.
Now we can assign a new button mapping. I like to keep it simple, so this will only activate the left and right mouse buttons (on either side of the scroll wheel) and will set the scroll wheel to scroll and act as middle click. If you want a different setup, I recommend reading this and this and playing with these values in xinput until your mouse does what you want.
xinput --set-button-map 10 1 3 0 4 5 0 0 0 2 0 0
Note that I bolded the first parameter: as you may have guessed, that 10 is whatever ID you found above.
Got it working? Good. Thing is, xinput will only temporarily set your mouse buttons. Once you reboot, they’re gone.
To make these changes persist we need to create an Xorg settings file. First we’ll need the USB ID of your mouse. The following command will list all the USB devices on your system:
lsusb
One of them should look kinda like this:
Bus 004 Device 004: ID 1a7c:0191 Evoluent VerticalMouse 4
The funny text I bolded is the device ID. (Again, it will likely be different on your system.) Now you can create a config file for your mouse. Note that this works on Ubuntu, perhaps your distro stores configuration files elsewhere.
San Francisco based Public Bikes is temporarily taking over part of Harrington, that massive (and pricey) used furniture store on the corner of Valencia and 17th.
To make up for the lack of space, Harrington has opened part of their upstairs space to the public; which makes me wonder if I was supposed to be wandering around up there the other day. That would explain why there’s no prices on anything in that part of the store. Hmm…
No word on exactly when the bike shop will open, but Harrington’s website says it’ll be sometime this spring.
Nothing says “look what I made for Burning Man” quite like a mutant bicycle. The Heavy Pedal Crank Art Exhibition last weekend was a tribute to such vehicles.
Above are the crappy iPhone photos I took during my visit; click any image for the full-size.
