So, what does a country do when they can’t afford, or can’t obtain, enough petroleum to use as gasoline?
They retrofit their trucks to use wood, is what they do.
Or, hey, what if oil is so precious you can’t make synthetic rubber tires with it any more?
They make bikes out of wood, is what they do.
Anyone who thinks peak-oil-as-a-disaster-scenario means that people won’t develop ad hoc approaches to adjust just ain’t thinkin’ straight.
Six months later (42 years today), he’d be dead. I miss you, Dad.
Long ago, far away, the book Fantastic Dives by Elliott Koretz and Michael Nankin was my roadmap to much great quirky, hole-in-the-wall food in LA. As part of writing a review of The Pantry, I found this video by the authors, who look to have had a segment on KNXT back when.
From a review I just posted on Yelp:
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When you’re a couple for a long time, there are certain stories you tell again and again. There are aspects of each other you always tell people about. This is one she tells about me.
It was Christmas, 1987. I had just started a relationship with a woman whose folks lived in San Jose, while we both lived in LA. She’d gone up to celebrate Christmas with her folks and I, in a buzzy fit of romanticism, followed.
On Christmas Day, we decided to take the drive along Route 9 from Campbell to Santa Cruz. Sure, it was the “long” way, but it’s a cute drive, running through the forest. We talked endlessly in the car, and she pointed out places she’d been to with her parents.
It gets to be dinner time, and she says, “I think I’m getting hungry.” And I say, “Hang on, I think I just saw a place.” I pull a U-turn, and go up the driveway to what was then the Tyrolean Inn & Cottages. Whereupon we find, there among the trees, that the main house was serving a Christmas dinner, which included duck à l’orange and venison.
On Christmas Day.
In the middle of the forest.
We’ve been together 25 years now — married for 21 of them — and have spent a lot of time as a couple finding unexpectedly good food in hidden places throughout the US and Europe.
But that was the first time, and it set the pattern.
“Hang on, I think I just saw a place.”
From “Why is the government cancelling winter?,” by Ken Coates and Carin Holroyd, in The Globe and Mail:
Canada is, by any definition, a northern nation – but we are not a northern people. Most of us live within a short distance of the U.S. border; well over half our population resides south of the 49th parallel. Canadian tourists are many times more likely to visit Florida, California or the Caribbean than they are to take a winter trip. Our cities are devoted to shunning winter, not embracing it.
There is a great irony in this. The federal government has made repeated statements of devotion to the Canadian Arctic. “Use it or lose it,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said. Well, the truth is that Canadians do not use the North very effectively. Japanese tourists come in large numbers to Yellowknife to see the Northern Lights. Not many Vancouverites make the trip. Germans by the planeload – there are direct summer flights from Frankfurt to Whitehorse – travel to the Yukon each year, but precious few Torontonians make the journey. The national approach to the North in Canada is akin to the world’s interest in Mars – a far distant place that holds a certain fascination but is not seen as accessible.
Did you know there are direct summer flights from Frankfurt to Whitehorse? I didn’t.
Fascinating and scary at the same time:
I’ve outlined in red three areas that jump out at me for having no flights at all that were in the air at the moment of this snapshot. And since this is a Mercator projection, and much of those areas are close to the Equator, that means they’re much bigger than they look.
Somewhat reminiscent of the nighttime lights of the world montage, and the dark spot in North Korea.
Raymond Chen, the longtime Microsoft programmer who writes such fine posts about the history of practices at MSFT, has a recent post titled, “Some notes on my trip to Beijing disguised as travel tips.”
Some examples:
Single-use tickets purchased from subway vending machines are valid only on the day of purchase for use in that station. Do not buy your return ticket at the same time as your outbound ticket because it will not work. This detail is clearly explained on the ticket that you receive after you have paid for it.
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In general, if you ask for directions but don’t know more than a few dozen words of Mandarin, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. My plan was to hold a map, point at it, and ask, “我在哪裡?” (“Where am I?”), and then calculate what direction to head based on the answer. Do not expect people to answer the question you ask. They will instead ask you other questions like “你去哪兒?” (“Where are you going?”) but since answering that question is beyond your vocabulary, all you can do is repeat your original question, and they will give up, frustrated. Telling them that you’re from the United States doesn’t help, because they don’t speak English.
…
It has been suggested that my profound difficulty in getting directions was exacerbated by the fact that I look like somebody who should know Mandarin. If I were some European-looking person, I wouldn’t have had as much of a problem because, I’m told, Chinese people naturally assume that if they see a Chinese person on the street, that person speaks Mandarin. (The person may speak a regional language as well, but you can count on them speaking at least Mandarin.) If you look Chinese but don’t speak Mandarin, then they will just get frustrated at this Chinese person who refuses to speak Chinese.
This roughly matched my experience. Pretty much everybody assumed that I spoke Mandarin. The exception? The street hustlers and scam artists. They had me pegged for a foreigner.
Absolutely great stuff.
Dowling Duncan, who had my favorite entry in the Dollar ReDe$ign Project, now come through with a set of notecards celebrating San Francisco.
Very nice.
Straddling the fine line between optimism and pessimism:
So, while we’re on the subject of Palm…
A few weeks ago, I bought an unlocked Treo 680 from eBay. I just love the thing. I’ve been a Palm user since the Palm III, and my long-running unit was a Palm Vx. The Treo is such a jump from the Vx that I’m pleased as an alliterative cliché.
At Potlatch, I was talking to davidlevine (he has a 700p), and we both agreed Google Maps for Palm is a killer app.
Well, I think I have an improvement on that: Directory Assistant. What DA does is, it automates lookups against a phone directory web site, YP.com. Why is that particularly cool? Here’s an example:
I was with the guys from work, at a Thai restaurant up the street from us, Phuket on Queen Anne. Jasper, a co-worker, said he liked Phuket OK, but it’s nowhere near as good as this place he knows in Bellevue. “Oh?” sez I, “What place would that be?” …as I get out my Treo. “Chanta-{mumble},” is what I heard.
That was enough.
I put “chanta” and Bellevue, WA into DA, and out pops CHANTANEE FAMILY THAI RESTAURANT, on 105th. Having fetched the entry from YP.com, DA then gives you a Copy button, which allows a number of options — not just copy to the clipboard, but copy to a new Contact in your Treo’s database. Which I did. It then has a Map button which can be set to either Mapquest or, you guessed it, Google Maps.
Did I mention it’s freeware? Or that it does reverse lookups (that is, you give it a phone number, and it replies with a party)? Or that it handles residential listings as easily as business?
If you have a Treo, you never have to make expensive 411 calls to your carrier again. Highly recommended.
