Feaverish

From now on, I’m bringing a smock and balaclava (or is it “baclava”? Which one is the desert dessert?) along with my spaghetti lunches. This is just ridiculous.

Have you taken the How Long Will I Live? quiz yet? Go do it now, so we can compare results.

Are you back? Comfortable? Okay good.

My Life Expectancy Results:

Life Expectancy: 86.19
Lower Quartile : 78.51
Median Lifetime: 88.41
Upper Quartile : 96.40
Relative Awesomeness: 94.36

Oh, and don’t forget to check all the little boxes to Analyze Health Risks.

My favorite quotes from the analyzed results:

“Having 2-3 drinks a day has maximized your life expectancy”
“If you do not drive, your life expectancy would be 0.01 years longer”
“If you do not have any sexual partner, your life expectancy would be 0.53 years longer”

Between the quiz and yesterday’s other good news, this week is starting out all right.

Update: the quiz asks which state you live in, which could be confusing to those of you in other countries. Probably you should just pick a state that seems like the equivalent of your country. So, like, if you’re from Ireland, for instance, you might try Washington, maybe, or Connecticut. I don’t know.

Am I the only one who thinks “Oh no he dent!” would be a great name for a dent-repair company?

Anyway, I need a haircut. It’s something I only get every four to six months, and I dread (ah ha!) it every time. The way I see it I have five options, in order of ascending crappiness:

1) Pay out the nose for a haircut at some fancy salon. The only advantage to this option is that I would probably not end up with a crappy haircut. Disadvantages include resulting poverty and the realization that I’m slowly becoming the kind of guy who really doesn’t feel comfortable without his nails manicured and, yeah, maybe wears a little mascara every once in a while. You know, to make the blue in his eyes really pop.

2) Pay out of one nostril for a haircut at some trendy-but-not-too-expensive hair-cutting place, e.g. Bishops. I’ve never gotten a good haircut at Bishops, and as far as I’m concerned they are the ultimate in corporate hipster poserdom. Yes, tattooed and pierced hair-cutting lady, I have heard of Grandaddy and Pavement and Adbusters and Critical Mass and probably everything else your company memos tell you to talk about and no I would not like a Pabst it is truly the worst. The real problem with Bishops, though, is that they refuse to just give me the haircut I want. Me: Just a trim, please. Hipster: A trim? Okay, well, how about I give you a whole new style instead? Me: No, please, for the love of god just a trim. Hipster: Sure thing. (20 minutes later) Hipster: I went ahead and gave you a whole new style. I think it looks great.

3) Supercuts. This is the Russian Roulette of salons. Will I get a good haircut? Will it be the most horrible haircut ever? Who knows? Just pick a chair and pull the (hair) trigger.

4) Vietnamese Hair ‘n’ Nails place down the street. Only one of the three haircuts I’ve gotten here was halfway decent. All three, though, were done entirely with electric clippers. I like that the language barrier prohibits small talk, and that I’m the only one in the place without makeup tattooed on their face, but the pentatonic shouting matches that inevitably break out between the woman cutting my hair and the nail do-er seem to adversely affect my haircut. On one occasion I brought a picture clipped (Keeping the Puns Coming since 1999!) from a magazine and showed it to the hair lady as an example of what I wanted. She looked at the picture, looked at me, and said, “No. No styles.”

5) Cutting my own hair. This seems, to me, a recipe for disaster. As L has frequently noted, what I think looks good and what empirically looks good are rarely the same thing. What’s more, my hands shake pretty much constantly, and I become disorientingly cross-eyed when looking at myself in the mirror.

Obviously I’m gonna need to think about this a bit.

What is up with these once-a-week posts anyway? Really, I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on this, and also on this

and after staring at a screen for fourteen hours sometimes I don’t really have it in me to write about my latest bicycling adventure.

Sometimes I do.

Did I mention that I finally went to a fixed gear? No? Well I did. The only difference between the singlespeed I was riding and the “fixie” I’m riding now is that now I can’t coast. At all. If the bike is moving — forward or backward — the pedals are moving. I was happy with the singlespeed setup, but I got tired of other cyclists making fun of me. “Nice freewheel, jerk,” and “Where you coasting? Your Mommy’s house?” Cyclists are cruel.

It took me pretty much a full week to get used to not being able to coast. On one of my first rides, on a hill I’m accustomed to coasting down, I accidentally stopped pedaling. My feet flew out of the toe clips and off of the furiously spinning pedals, as I shot down the hill spread eagle, face frozen in a grimace of terror, girlish screen echoing off the surrounding buildings. I came to an embarrassed stop in front of a crowd of people waiting for the bus. I got off the bike and performed imaginary repairs to the wheels and pedals, bounced the front wheel a couple of times, like “That’s better,” and continued on my way.

Since then, though, riding fixed has become second nature, and I can’t imagine ever going back to a freewheel or gears. I could go on and on, but others have already said it all better than I could, so…

Anyway, we’ve got another theater road trip lined up next week, so I’ll be sure to take more notes.

I brought a half-eaten burrito to work today. It was “Take Your Leftovers to Work Day” ha ha no it was for lunch. I thought I’d sufficiently insulated the burrito (aluminum foil and a paper sack) but somehow over the course of my ride to work it managed to wedge itself between my lower back and my clean change of clothes, and there must have been some serious natural baking action going on because the bottom line is I now smell like a burrito. Pretty great, right? Well, no, because it means every time I catch a whiff of my salsa-y goodness I am stricken with a craving for nachos.

(Sorry I don’t have a better anecdote to kick things off, but believe me when I say that the above paragraph is a thousand times better than the opening this entry originally had, which concerned a breakfast cereal I’d invented called Burritos-O’s. “Burritos-O’s, from the makers of Tacos-O’s.”)

Remember my nemesis? Since I last wrote about her we’ve been having regular run-ins, to the point where if this were a movie our recent encounters would be prologue to a grand showdown in which legs would be swept and one of us would meet a grisly death. Possibly in a volcano.

It started a couple of weeks ago when L and I had dinner at this little wine bar that makes a ham and cheese sandwich the likes of which you’ve never tasted in all your life. The next day, as I’m riding past the restaurant on my way home from work, who should be sitting at an outdoor table, in full racing regalia, and with her bike propped up against her chair? The very next day!

I stared at her as I rode past (in the movie, this part would be in super slow motion. Or maybe just she and I would be in slow motion but the rest of the world would be going by at normal speed. Also there would be a musical saw), but I can’t say for certain that she saw me since she’s taken to wearing mirrored sunglasses (which, I don’t have to tell you, gave the whole scene a very Cool-Hand-Luke-ian feel).

A couple of days later we almost collided at an intersection. I was trying to time it so I hit the light just as it turned green, while my nemesis, riding perpendicular to me, was trying to get through before her light turned red. Only by slamming on the brake and letting out a high-pitched scream was I able to avoid a collision. I learned that scream from a bike safety pamphlet.

It’s like she’s tracking me. Going where I go, eating what I eat, trying to get a feel for what makes me tick. She’s probably got a photo of me and a hand-written copy of my daily schedule pasted up on her bathroom mirror and one day L will wake up next to a six-foot blonde chick with mirrored sunglasses and pink cycling shorts and . . . well, it probably won’t be too much of a change for L, actually. But for me, you know, I’ll be dead at the bottom of a volcano somewhere.

My trusty 1980 Volvo has been sitting in my driveway — undriven — for over a year and I’m finally getting around to selling it. I got a new battery and checked all the fluids (all the fluids I know about anyway) and started it up, and everything was fine until I tried to put it into gear. Nothing doing. It slid into gear perfectly with the engine off, but with the engine running the stick wouldn’t budge. Fabulous.

So I called a Volvo mechanic this morning and explained the problem.

“Yeah, your clutch plates are probably fused together. It happens if the car sits for too long.”
“So what do I do?”
“Well, you could bring it in and we can take out the clutch and get it unstuck. [Pause] Or…”
“Or?”
“Or you could just put it in gear when the engine’s off, then turn the key and floor it. The clutch should unstick after a while”
“How long’s a while? Like, am I gonna have to drive ten miles in first? Without stopping?”
“Oh no no no. Probably just around the block’ll do it.”
“This sounds treacherous.”
“Ha. Yeah, if you hit anyone this conversation never happened.”
“Ha ha. Yeah.”
“Yeah…”

So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend. Wish me luck…

Update: I lived! And it was easier than I expected to unstick the clutch. I just stuck it in reverse, turned the key and stomped on the gas. The car lurched backward a couple of feet and when I stuck in the clutch it engaged like normal. I’ve been driving it for a week now, with no problems. Not bad for a 25 year old car whose odometer stopped working over 12 years ago at 180,000 miles.

Here’s a neat little trick I read in Macworld this month. If you want to save a Quicktime movie you see online — but you don’t have Quicktime Pro — all you have to do is load the movie directly (not linked) in Safari, open the Activity Window (from the Window menu select “Activity,” or hit Option+Command+A), and Option+Double Click the movie file from the Activity Window’s list and it will save the movie to your hard disk.

So let’s say we want to watch OK Go’s hilarious new video (and we do). We go to their homepage, and the Quicktime video loads automatically. If you have “Quicktime Pro”:, you can just save the movie from there. Without Quicktime Pro, here’s what you do (oh and obviously this’ll only work on a Mac with OS X. There are similar instructions for Windows users, but they involve going to the Apple Store first and purchasing a Mac):

From the View menu, select “View Source” (Option + Command + U). It gives you a bunch of code. Somewhere in there a movie file is hiding. Hit Command + F to bring up the Find Window, and type in “mov” (without the quotes). This should take you to a line that reads:

<param&nbsp;name="src"&nbsp;value="http://boss.streamos.com/ download/xc37dr2/okgo/amillionways/amillionways_v300.mov">

We just want the link to the movie, which is in between that last set of quote marks:
http://boss.streamos.com/download/xc37dr2/okgo/ amillionways/amillionways_v300.mov
Highlight and copy that bit and paste it into Safari’s address bar. Hit “Return” and the movie should start playing without any background or anything.

Now go to the Activity Window (Option + Command + A) again and you’ll see only one item: the movie. Hold down Option and double click on it and it’ll download to your default Downloads folder (probably your Desktop). This part may take a few minutes, depending on your internet connection. All done!

Also, you should watch the video; it’s pretty funny. My favorite part is the fight scene at about 2:30 in — the slow-mo “bullet time” karate chop is priceless.

Today’s my 27th birthday. This morning L walked in on me in the bathroom while I was [ahem] trimming an errant hair from one of my nostrils.

“Ooh, you’re ooooold,” she said.

Seriously, what the hell?

I’ve had another submission posted at This is Broken. It is evidently less controversial than my previous submission.

Two accepted submissions qualifies me for “Consumer Superhero” status, but I’ll need a good superhero name. All I could come up with was “Sir Weighs-A-Lot.”