When I turned onto this road during a bike ride this weekend, I remarked to a friend next to me, “And this is where you bring someone to shoot them and dump them in the woods.” A few moments later, we came upon this:
Television. It’s an okay thing to waste.
If you’ve got an open Sunday and have been thinking that you ought to get to know Baltimore better*, you should check out the 2007 edition of the Tour du Port. I and a good number of friends will be hitting the 40 mile route. Say hi to the guy in the Bike New York jersey.
*Stop laughing. B’more’s a cool town. Just took me years to come around to that realization. I should have known, though. Any place that can produce John Waters has to be worth checking out. Plus, new episodes of The Wire don’t start until next year. Get your fix here, hon.
Enjoyed some time at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park this weekend. The festival is entirely free to attend, and is a gift to the public from the pocket of one Warren Hellman. It was so good that I’m thinking of making a trip back for next year’s show.
At the moment of this picture, we were all digging a bluegrass rendition of “That’s Just the Way It Is” with Bruce Hornsby and Ricky Skaggs. The park was filled with pot smokin’ porn watchin’ hippies, singlespeed ridin’ Pabst swillin’ hipsters, and Redman dippin’ truck drivin’ rednecks. And we all loved what we were hearing. Then, just after this picture was taken, the US Navy Blue Angels soared overhead in formation.
And the crowd cheered.
This is my America.
Sorry about that gap – back from a very long weekend in San Francisco. Most places I go manage to generate their own playlists, but I’ve definitely developed a playlist that – while slowly evolving – is native to the aircraft cabin. Some of my favorites from that list:
I’m linking YouTube videos because that’s about the only place where you can reliably find music tracks that are easy to access and directly linkable. Sure would be nice if some place like Last.fm could step up and provide an alternative.
Oh, and while I’m on about music, I happened upon my new favorite artist of the moment at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival – Dan Reeder. His site is here, and you can check out a few tracks of his music here. He links iTunes, but you can get his albums at Amazon’s new MP3 service (which also includes clips of everything – try Three Chords). I bought everything he’s released.
Lucky enough to catch the end of today’s practice for tomorrow’s Blue Angels air show (part of Fleet Week in San Francisco).
This Wednesday, the GAO is slated to release a report on improper Federal employee air travel. I suspect it’ll be held up and waved around as an example of those lazy and greedy government workers scamming the system again.  Which makes me hope that the report does tell us this – how many of these improperly authorized business/first class trips were taken by political appointees (as compared to civil service/SES types)?
I think answering that would help us get a clearer picture on exactly who’s responsible for all that waste, fraud, and abuse Republicans are always going on about . . .
(Personally, I think the rules are a bit ridiculous – no business class unless it’s a 14 hour nonstop flight, and you head straight to a meeting when you land? No, thanks. But the solution is to adjust the rules, not break them.)
A friend sent me a link yesterday, noting the sale of the Lonely Planet company to the BBC. I don’t really have any impression of how the BBC has treated properties it acquires, so I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. 
The BBC says that the deal will “allow Lonely Planet users to access BBC content – such as Michael Palin’s New Europe.” Well, umm, okay – didn’t I have “access” to that before? In any event, my advice to the BBC is twofold – concentrate on improving LP’s online presence. The “Thorntree” – LP’s online forums – is one of the Internet’s great wasted opportunities. LP users are the type that love to share useful info, but the forums are so poorly designed that they are near unusable. The books, on the other hand, are perfect. Don’t touch the guidebooks. Not even a little.
A device that draws power from the in-flight headphone system to charge most anything by USB:
The Inflight USB Power unit plugs into the passenger seat audio jack and outputs regulated power to the attached USB charging cable/connector.
Whether I can charge something via USB has figured significantly into my tech purchasing decisions over the years, and this quite justifies that approach. I suspect that if everyone used one of these things, it wouldn’t be too kind to the in-flight entertainment system, but 1) the airlines should be running power to every seat anyway, and this should spur them to that, and 2) have you *seen* the kind of people that populate coach these days? They couldn’t read this post, nevermind order and use one of these. It’ll be safe to use.
Via BoingBoing, via Lifehacker, etc.
Alexander Bar, Hotel Grande Bretagne
Athens, Greece
~
Situations like this are the only time that I wish I had a decent cameraphone. I go to hotel bars primarily to relax and have a drink. But so many of them present such fantastic picture opportunities that I hate to pass them up. And few things are more conspicuous and disruptive than breaking out a camera in a quiet bar, late at night. Ah well. One day.
Howling Latina brings us up to date on the most recent efforts in Congress to get rid of the absolutely ridiculous prohibitions on American citizens traveling to Cuba.  It sounds like we might actually get somewhere on the matter.
I’ve never understood the point of this specific policy (beyond the Miami pandering and making Jesse Helms feel good). I still remember cluing into the fact that my government actually prohibited me from traveling to another country. It was right after we moved back from West Germany. Where I’d been to East Germany. Which was horrible because it wouldn’t let its people travel.
Yeah.
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