David Gessel
Cold Saw
I got a cold saw (a Brobo Super 300) from a very cool artist. It’s a beautiful old machine, but slightly funkified by years of service. I rebuilt the vice system which was a bit sticky after too many years of water-based coolant. It cuts wonderfully now and the vice is easily adjusted, but eventually I’ll have to cut a new keyway in the vice clamp…
Freeze That Poop.
Wasn’t this a movie? Why could anyone think this is a good idea? Could it really make life all that much easier to freeze dog shit before you pick it up? Is the idea that, once the poop is frozen, that you don’t need a plastic bag for it? You can just pocket the frozen turd and go about your day, as long as it isn’t too hot out? Or is this for people who’s dogs have eaten too much cheese? Or is the idea that you’d freeze the poop and leave it – a frosty poo is more visible and at least for an hour or so while it thaws. This might warrant a test with the LN2 I have at home…
Kensington is excellent
I really love my Kensington 120 Watt Universal Power Adapter. It runs all my computers and charges just about anything everywhere in the world and on planes and in cars too. Work assigned me a new Lenovo T60 which has a wacky new power plug. I couldn’t find one for sale on-line, wrote Kensington, and a few days later had my N29 – even before the laptop arrived.
My grade school
Where I learned to play soccer ride a tricycle and climb
Most of the playground equipment that was there when I was kid is gone now (I graduated in 1979 and started school there in 1969). But a few things I remember from the old days: the geodesic dome, the goal I used to play soccer in, and the little cement track I rode my tricycle on when I was 3.
Philadelphia Pricing
Philadelphia’s paper is the most explicit I’ve ever seen. Prices range from $90-$100 for a 30 minute blowjob or handjob (I’d think the former a better deal) or $150 for sex. Looks like a mid-day bargain is available for $125 for sex. Oh the innocent days of backpage are long gone.
Global Services
I finally seem to have made it to the highest known rung of UAL’s frequent flier program – the semi-secret Global Services rung. It is so semi-secret that I have no idea what it really means as of yet except that I should get first crack at upgrades and am allowed to board the plane while the cleaning crews are still on if I’d like. So far it also seems to come with first dibs on extra nuts and dinner choices.
Unfortunately UAL isn’t flying much of anywhere out of OAK any more – they just cancelled the OAK-ORD flights as well as the OAK-IAD flights leaving only OAK-DEN and OAK-LAX. That bites. OAK is infinitely easier than SFO.
Blacksmith
Over the holidays I visited the blacksmith I was apprenticed to as a child (roughly 1978-1986, though we couldn’t quite figure out the exact years). This is the welder I learned to TIG weld on and the smaller anvil was what I learned to forge steel against.
Greg Leavitt was a great inspiration to me and set me on the path of making things from an early age. It was also a great lesson in the value of hard work swinging a hammer all day in front of a coal forge. In August. In Philadelphia. 100% humidity, 95 degrees outside, 120-140 in front of the forge. Black boogers.
I have my own anvil and TIG now. Just because you can’t ever really get the coal dust out of your nose.
Charlie Huston
Charlie Huston is a new writer who has a real gift for hard-hitting dialog. I ran across his second book, Six Bad Things, in a small bookstore and it reminded me of Very Bad Things, the movie, which I thought was milk-snorkingly-funny. I thought from the cover and title it would be six short stories in the genre of Soft Skull Press, something out of the post-punk hard edge.
Hardcore for sure, the middle story of a trilogy about a high school baseball star who’s bad knee turned him to a life of petty crime and drinking and who ended up with a lot of someone else’s money and of the people who came along to get it and how he kills them.
After reading Six Bad Things I got the others Caught Stealing and A Dangerous Man; they pretty much last a day. The prose isn’t deep or complex, the stories are a little rough in a few spots but the action is non-stop and Huston’s command of dialog and a driving story line is as good as anything I’ve read.
So I ordered his second trilogy, the story of a vampire named Joe Pitt, living in NY (or not). Each of these books is enough to keep you up late until it is done. The stories stand on their own a bit more than the Caught Stealing trilogy, each being effectively a stand alone story about the collection of characters that populate the vampire clans that have divided up Manhattan.
The first, Already Dead, is about rogue vampire Pitt’s encounter with zombies in New York and the way he deals with them and the person who’s infecting them. It introduces us to the different vampire clans of New York–the Coalition, the Brotherhood, the Society, and the Enclave: the leaders of each and each of the drifters and derelicts along the way an exercise in pitch-perfect colloquial dialog.
The next two in the trilogy, No Dominion and Half the Blood of Brooklyn are just as intense. The former is about a new drug making it’s way through the up- and downtown clans the latter about the intercession of off-island clans. Unlike the first series, the vampire series does not end definitively and we can hope that it goes on. Joe Pitt is a great character and you’ll want more. A weeks’ reading would be seven volumes, but that’d make for some long nights and rough days. Apropos.
The Shotgun Rule is a different sort of book from the rest of the series. It is a stand alone novel about kids in the 80’s in northern CA who get into a little more than they bargained for and have a hard time of it. The same raw prose, the same fluid dialog. you find yourself reading quickly, keeping the pace up, unable to stop. I made it through the book on a short-haul flight from cover to cover.
Super tape!
The antenna module on my PHL to IAD flight was held on with masking tape. It must be the best tape ever! I want some.
