ian glazer's tuesdaynight

Sunday was a great day if you were a bookie or a Patriots fan. It was a great Superbowl. It was a refreshing non-blowout of a game. It was actually a game you had to watch all of to see what was going to happen. At times I found myself yelling at the Fox coverage for saying things like, “No team has ever come back from a deficit so large in Superbowl history.” When it comes to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Boston sports teams have a knack for it. Thankfully, our bargain basement backup QB did the job like a pro - that is the way to end a football game. (Now, if the LSFL could only play games so well.) I want to state now for the entire Tuesday Night crowd… I have no ties, neither political, nor financial, to Enron. I was, at no time, a political consultant for them. I have always thought that digital marketplaces were a sham. I think it will be interesting to see where the ropes lead when the government starts pulling on the whole Enron tangled knot. If the GAO and Sen. Waxman have their ways, this spring and summer could be filled with Enrongate, and that is guaranteed good political fun on both sides of the aisle. Meanwhile, Philips is fighting you and I. Yes, that Dutch company that everybody loves is threatening to sue the record labels over their use of copy-protection in their CDs. The beauty is that these new copy-protected CDs that Universal and others are churning out don’t work with computers and some normal cd players as well… but guess what they aren’t really CDs. Philips is going to sue because what Universal is producing isn’t technically a CD; these copy-protected CDs do not meet the standards to be a CD. That standard is owned by Philips and Sony. Philips would force the record labels to print a label on their protected CDs warning the consumer that the CDs won’t work and aren’t really CDs after all. Even better, Philips has stated that they will begin producing CD burners and players that can overcome the copy protection. Eat that RIAA! Well, I am headed to King of Prussia, PA. Yup, it’s time again to play with an unnamed customer near Philadelphia. I have been trying to quickly research what are the largest malls in America. I know that they Mall of America is the largest. But after that, I have no idea. I do know what the KoP mall is very very very big. Here’s their directory. I did get to rent a big FUV for the drive up there. I didn’t realize it until I got into this Explorer that each SUV is sold with a “drive like an asshole” licenses… I’ll put it to good use, I’m sure.

Well it appears that my Mac is back. The Cube suffered a massive drive failure which knocked me back a bit. Thankfully, a) I had a few backup cds laying around and b) I could order parts and pieces 24 hours a day. I had to replace my hard drive. Not a big deal, just kinda annoying. What is a bit shocking is how incredible cheap storage is. I got a 100gig drive for $230… that is 5000x times bigger than the first hard drive I ever had and cost half as much. I remember thinking that drives were cheap when they were $1 per meg. They are slowly approaching $1 per gig! The other aspect of this little affair that has got my attention is how unearthly quite this new drive is. First off, the Cube doesn’t have a fan. It is designed as a cute little chimney and all the heat rises and cools the processor with need of a fan. It is rigged for silent running. However, my old hard drive did produce some noise. Not much. Just enough to know it was doing something. I could tell the difference between the read and the write head being engaged. I was comfortable with the little clicking it made. Not any more. My new drive makes no sound. None. It has stopped breathing and I can’t if it has amazing lung capacity or is, in fact, dead. This is a bit unnerving. More than anything else, I can tell what a machine is doing by its sound. This seems a bit wrong from a computer… a car, okay, but a computer… seems a bit strange.

Now I know what Veruca Salt feels like. Yes, I’ve turned into a bloated blueberry-like bowling ball. For the last three weeks, I have done nothing but eat, sleep, and drink. I have eaten: goose liver, rabbit, lamb, grouse, cookies, cheese (cheddar, sex, brie), cheesecake, cow, and much much much much more. I have drank: red wine, beer, malt liquor, vodka (oh, so much vodka), tequila, sake, champagne, and much much much more. As for sleeping, I have been hibernating. In fact, I knew that I was going to be sleeping so much, I put in curtains in my bedroom to keep it darker. I started to get concerned about my recent behavior when I woke up with my face in a 50 pound sack of U.N. AID rice and a bottle of Old English 800 in my hand. Well, we have made it into 2002. The world is still in one piece, more or less. Hope all your New Year’s Eve plans were fun and exciting. In other news, I have won the My Team game. It is over. I won when I was in Miami. I saw a big (6’ 1", 225 lbs) black transvestite. It was wearing an appropriately large red unitard and carrying a tall walking stick whilst dragging its belongings in some roller luggage. The hair. Did I mention the hair? Bleach blond fro that put mine to shame.

Happy Post-Thanksgiving, Pre-Christmas! I’m sorry, but I simply can’t get into the festive mood when it is 70 degrees out and there has even been rain, let alone snow, in a long time. I mean, we just cooked lobster… outside… that is not winter behavior, not at all. I remember when I was younger and the news would report from this or that mall, talking about the holiday crowds. Seems kinda silly now… sure the economy is of great concern, but really, we have bigger things to worry about than mall crowds. George Harrison is dead. This is truly a sad thing. It think it is touching that Apple has for the last few days had his picture on their main page. It amazes me that he was a little older than my dad. It can’t imagine my dad hanging out with Ravi Shankar, taking acid, or writing Something… So, apparently, the last thing I wrote to inflict upon you was a flop. Yeah, I agree it started well but ended poorly… ah well, they can’t all be Pulitzer Prize material.

So, Tuesday morning I learned to bow. I thought I knew before, but I was wrong. I found myself kneeling in front of a vaguely lit pyre, hastily constructed in a warehouse on the south side of the river. The smell of leaky petrol tanks, muddy cement, and illegally imported products permeated the air. “Sorry man, I know he was like a father to you,” said a Joe next to me. People say they have people who were like a father to them. My question is, isn’t your own real father better than someone who is like a father? What does that mean, like a father? I would never call the guy laying on the sawhorse pyre someone who was like a father to me. If I did, he’d’ve boxed me in the ears. Bow three times. That’s what you are taught. Three times, deep and slow. The first bow. When my forehead touched the cement, I let go of all the sense-memories I had with him in it. I let go of his smile. I let go of the smell of his awful aftershave that was mingled with whiskey. I let go of the feel of the cracked leather in the passenger seat of his dark saloon car. I let go of the taste of his omelets. As I rose up I noticed that the sun had started to glint through a cracked window high above the pyre. The Slims and Joes were starting to leave. The second bow. When my forehead touched the cement, I let go of all of his teachings. I let go of his lesson on how to dodge bullets. (It starts with making sure no one is pointing at gun at you.) I let go of his explicit instructions on making an omelet. (Sorry, this is too important to share with just anyone, especially You.) I let go of his endless droning on about how to fight hand to hand. (It starts with a strong mind and a fast waist.) As I righted myself of the second time, I realized that all of his teachings were now mine to reteach. The third bow. The third bow was slower. It was harder to reach the cement. And when my forehead just kissed the cold cement, my whole body when limp and I lay, chest heaving. On the third bow, I let go of my teacher. I listened to my last sob bounce drunkenly around the warehouse and land dead, cold, in a dank corner. I righted myself. Stood. Pressed the button on the remote in my left hand. The back of the warehouse exploded pulling air out of my lungs. I turned and headed out to a waiting rickshaw. So Tuesday I learned to bow. Wednesday I may learn grovel.

2:59 am Sunday, November 18, 2001 Look up. Look southeast. Look up. Wake up! I’ve been on the road for almost a month. I have come to learn that I have about three weeks of boxers. I have come to learn that flying on Airbuses is scary. I have learned that this is all unimportant. Look up! When I was younger, much younger, I went sea-kayaking. I paddled out to an island between Isle au Haut and Mount Desert called Hell’s Half Acre. This gives you a good idea of the area. At any rate, the island gets its name because it is a half acre big and there really isn’t a reason to be there. But I was. I ended up sleeping on a boulder the size of a small house. The rock happened to get separated from that main part of the island as the tide came in. That night was the darkest night I have ever experienced. It was so dark and clear that we could easily make out the various satellites as they passed. I am connoisseur of this astronomical. I have seen, in no particular order, the moons of Jupiter, a lunar eclipse, a solar eclipse, the Milky Way, a variety of planets, more shooting stars than you can shake a stick at, and a bunch of general strange things in space. I remember a few years ago the Perseid meteor shower was in coming on strong. A few friends and I sat in the midst of a soccer field, chowing down on Ben and Jerry’s, watching what was one of the most incredible meteor showers of our lifetime. And tonight, just an hour away, the Leonid threatens to be an even bigger show. Look up! I have seen two shooting starts already and it is a) early and b) way too light out. I get excited when things like a big meteor shower or a good thunder storm show up. It proves that there are far more important and bigger things in this universe than us. Look up! Well, Thanksgiving Day is fast approaching. I guess it is time to be thankful for some very basic things: life, loved ones, and the freedom to enjoy the previous items.

The following is a letter recently found at Valley Forge: October 29 Dear Tuesday Night - Tonight we have made camp here at Valley Forge. Scenic enough, but I am concerned. General Washington has said this is a temporary camp. I think otherwise. I ate something that was called steak this evening. Steak of what is a better question. General Washington’s horse hasn’t been seen recently. He doesn’t seem the man to eat his own horse, but more the kind to serve it to his men. There is a large shopping complex here. It is enormous. It even has a Brooks Brothers. I am cold. But thankfully, I have no tentmate. I don’t expect this assignment to be very hard, just annoying. But then again, that is a great deal of warfare… doing annoying things, waiting, and then breaking your back to make it to the next day. Until tomorrow, Okay, so they didn’t really find that letter here at Valley Forge. But I am here. Actually, I’m in King of Prussia next to the mall. Joy! I’m here on an emergency trip. I have been cleared to enter a highly restricted installation. Joy! So I get to spend Halloween with spooks near a shopping mall. (Spooks being the affectionate name for people who work in the intelligence arena.) This ought to be fun.

They’re back. Yes, it’s true. I just saw an ad for Shrinky Dinks. There have been two major innovations in shrinky dink technology: downloadable templates and a shrinky dink crucible. Yes, it seems that Shrinky Dinks (http://www.shrinkydinks.com) have found the web. It also appears that Shrinky Dinks are shipping with a Skippy-esque Eaz-e-Bake Oven, some specialize space heater that cooks the shrinky dinks. (If there is a porn censor on your office’s email system, there’s a good chance that this is going to get flagged. Just for good measure: shrinky dinks, shrinky dinks, shrinky dinks.) Now I always thought that Shrink Dinks were just slightly less toxis than a gas cloud of Bhopal, but I could be wrong… In other news, Ken made this dessert recently, http://foodtv.com/foodtv/recipe/0,6255,15186,00.html . It totally rocks and is totally brainless to make. I suggest you scrap that diet for these chocolate lava muffins.

First, the cooking tips. Well, actually, just a tip, singular. Do not deglaze a pan in which something has been cooking with whole pepper corns. Joe and I were cooking dinner on saturday. (Lamb top round… yummy.) Joe was dealing with the sauce (Bordellos) which used red wine to deglaze the pan where the lamb was searing. The lamb had whole pepper corns on it. Lamb is out of the pan. Wine is poured into the pan to deglaze… and then we come under fire. Literally, the pepper corns exploded. Remember when you were a kid a had a bonfire on the beach? Remember burning that cool seaweed, you know, the kind with the little poppers that pop when you burn them. Take that popper popping noise, make it louder, and then pack a bit of explosives in the seaweed and then you begin to approximate what was going on in the kitchen of Hotel Glazer. These little buggers pack quite a punch. To the point that they spread wine all over the kitchen, and I do mean all over. The wall where my phone is, looks like someone was shot. The ceiling (which is 10 feet from the floor and a good 6 feet from the overn) was not spared. The cabinets were not spared. But amazingly, Joe and I walked away spot free. I happen to discover, during the cleanup phase, that most of the walls in my house are painted with flat paint, which doesn’t repel red wine stains well. Second, the paranoid ponderings. There are two pieces of technology on our horizon that are a bit scary. And if they are merged, they are terrifying. Location information. Your cellphone reports your location to the 911 switch board when you call. Well, it is supposed to, according to the FCC. Phase one, the cellphone reports what cell it is from. Phase two, more exact location info… think GPS. In Europe, location information is just beginning to be tapped in major way. Imagine getting an SMS from a friend when they look at their phone and discover you are around the corner. Think, AIM in the real world… people aren’t online, they are near-by. A more important application, besides chat, is commerce. Imagine that all your shopping preferences, your cookies from all your browsers, walked around with you. Now when you walk near a Gap, you get a digital ad for 50% the boxers you really like. You walk in, beam a little data to the cash register, and out you walk with a new pair (why are they always called a pair, even when there is one of them) boxers having just made a micropayment which will show up on your phone bill. There are two major reasons why location information won’t be a major issue for a while. First, because of the telcos backwater technology and competing implementations, ubiquitous location data won?t be readily available for a while. Second, there are people in the government making sure that our privacy is protected… thank you Dean. The second hunk of technology is nothing new. It’s a database. It’s a huge database that stores demographic info about each of us. It is Larry Ellison’s suggested National ID database, used to issue National ID Cards. Your identity in a nice neat row in a database. Your family is linked to you. Your friends are linked to you. This information is extremely valuable. Scared yet… you ought to be. Now I know that databases like this exist already. For example, I just refinanced my mortgage. I was at my banker’s office today. He got a new credit report on me in thirty seconds. Thirty seconds to gather some rather interesting info about me. On a Sunday no less. Will this become a major issue in the future. Maybe, but I definitely bet that Larry and Oracle won’t be building the database. Oh, what a relief, a private company won’t be in charge of this data… it will be the government, and we trust the government… right?! Let’s merge these two little gremlins together. What do we get? My phone, with all my shopping habits, buddy lists, and such is enabled by a National ID. Now my identity and my location start to merge. Identity theft happens all the time… but now the threat is more real that ever. But let’s add a new twist, theft of location. I fool the telco networks into thinking I am someone who I am not and somewhere where I am not. I think I will stick to leaving the phone at home, turned off, encased in a lead box.

Even with my high distrust of organized religion and my disgust at people who practice a religion but cannot explain to you what the religion is about, I still look forward to Yom Kippur. I like fasting. I need atoning, and lots of it. I think that publicly admitting your wrongs is a good thing. “We lie, we cheat, we steal…” However, there are some concerns to Yom Kippur. Hunger and hunger management are primary. From sundown to sundown, you can’t eat or drink. (I believe the deep sniffing is allowed but that only works against you.) So what’s a person to do? 24 hours, no grub. Add to this that you have to eat before sunset of the first night and then get to services, where you stand and stand and stand. (That actually might be the biggest difference between Jews and Catholics. Jews stand; Catholics kneel.) You end up eating at 5 or so… when you are not hungry. I have the solution. It needs a little tuning but the basic idea is sound. Simply, you eat one pound of something the first night. I ate about a pound of pasta. It also helps if you eat it really quickly to hoodwink your stomach. A stomach will realize if you try to force feed it. You have about a seven minute window in which you can eat as much as a whale and after that the stomach catches on to what you are doing and makes you stop eating. But in those precious seven minutes, you must eat a pound of something. The next day… no food. No nothing. It’s best not to do anything other than dwell on the screwy things you did the year before and pledging to do better the next year. Face it, fasting goes hand in hand with atoning. And then, after services on the second night… that’s right, you eat a pound of something else. I ate a pound of pepperoni, black olive, and mushroom pizza. (Nothing like starting out a whole new year in which to sin by breaking the Kosher rules and eating pork at home. But then again, I didn’t use a plate, which was the loophole my dad and I leveraged back home.) Then, after consuming a pound of pizza, I immediately, went to bed. That is the part of the diet that needs a bit of tuning. Moral of the story: If you need to go without food for 24 hours, be sure to eat a pound of something before and after you fast.