Punderings

Gratuitous Hyperbole Is Just Kinda Like Metaphorically Nebulous Oratory… and then I lose it. Most of you may agree I lost it a little earlier in the alphabet.

One early morning commute recently I stopped in Belmont center to pickup breakfast on the go: venti latte, and next door a bagel with schmear, excuse me, cream cheese (it was Bruggers, not Einstein). Several items in the shopping trip and afterwards caught my attention.

First, it was crowded – which shouldn’t surprise me, it’s morning commute time. But that gave me time to realize that I didn’t quite belong in that particular Starbucks: I was clearly on the wrong side of the highway. With my half-open and scuffed sandals, shorts, and an interesting yet obviously not stylish enough Hawaiian shirt, it was clear my dress code didn’t match up to Belmontian standards. I was glad to realize that the suburban beautiful people – while far more stylish and scented than I – still had to wait in line for their triple venti soy misto extra hot drinks just like I did.

Brueggers was less crowded and less stylish overall, patrons and store alike. They do feature salmon cream cheese, and chewily tasty if not excellent bagels. I was rushed making a decision, and opted for salmon on a pumpernickel bagel, wanting a savory breakfast. The plain (sliced) rosemary olive oil bagel I got for an afternoon snack was better, and is a rare treat in their bagel line up.

Sadly enough, breakfast was not destined to go well. While the pumpernickel was reasonably satisfying, it completely does not go with salmon cream cheese -even when the cream cheese shcmear is disappointingly small, as it was on that day. It was also rather difficult to eat, doing the splooge thing as chewier bagels are wont to do.

More importantly, before I got to work for breakfast, I spilled my coffee! I’d had part of it on the commute, but somehow – and I really don’t have any idea how, since I’ve never done that before – it popped out of the center cupholder and spilled on one floormat in the back of the car. Thankfully the top stayed on, and it was completely caught on the floormat. It was a doubly disappointing disaster, both in botched breakfast, and in cleanliness: I’d just had my car detailed in preparation for selling it.

Did I mention I’m selling my BMW, and looking for a new E36? Yes, it is clean and very shiny, and no, the floor mat (rear on the left) does not smell like coffee anymore.

Abbot and Costello in typeface. Beautiful. Many versions exist, but I agree they should have explicitly named the last outfielder – Naturally.

Is it just me, or did the most recent ApacheCon get notably less blog coverage than past years? I feel really silly mentioning this, given that I have at least 3 blog ideas from Amsterdam that I still haven’t written up myself, but it seemed a little odd.

Now I have to admit, I haven’t done any significant research, other than reading PlanetApache. Did a lot more people just twitter or use alternative media, or did they just not blog as much as in past years? I don’t see it as being a size thing, since we had great attendance in Amsterdam this year. Could it be a Europe vs. America thing, in terms of who was attending? Or am I just being overly sensitive?

Just curious.

There was quite a string of rather cutting postings on UniversalHub earlier this morning. Glad to see a few more chipper ones coming by. I could chalk this posting up to either adamg turning into Grumpy Web Guy for a day, or just to his cutting-edge local scene commentator, which is what he really is, at least in terms of online persona. Some observations include:

- Art. Yeah, we all know it when we see it. Fairly tasteful; I didn’t mind the design. Mousing over the address etc. in the bottom bar shows something interesting (who’s contributing) too. I find it rather silly that the whole website is only like a third of a browser window tall though – massive waste of the bottom of my screen.

- Do you realize you’ve been had, don’t you? They designed the arthouseboston site – notice the super trendy lowercase fonts – they knew would annoy, and got you to go and link to them, thus driving their traffic up today with hundreds of thousands of new viewers. I think their plan backfired, since the next event doesn’t seem to be until mid-June, which is faaaar too long for web memory to notice.

Damn, now the got me to link to them too. And I try hard not to be a shill, either.

- Great idea. I hope there’s someone still doing it when I want to sell my house, although I’m not sure what kind of art will fit in a 1940’s crafts-style house with smaller rooms and too much furniture. And it’s only a crafts-style house; it doesn’t have quite enough fancy wood and built-ins with filigree to really qualify. But at least the corner breakfront is in good shape and the doors close neatly, something lacking in many Meffa and Summaville double and triple deckers.

In any case, if you’re in Boston, add UH to your feed reader; it’s worth the scattering of local stories – even the turkeys. I sometimes wonder if how many other police departments are as amusingly laconic as BPDNews is.

Well, why not? Just drop that overly commercialized “c” and have your domain names end in “.om”. Why didn’t I think of that before?