Attention Deficit David

Things To Do In Brussels When You're Better Off Dead

Took the ICE high speed swank-train from Cologne to Brussels today. I had a choice for a few days of post-show downtime between Amsterdam (where I've been) and Brussels (where I have not been).

While I'm assured that the country I'm in is great, this city is not terribly inspiring. Even my guide book talks about having to view it with an open mind. Perhaps I should have opted for the variety of "open mind" sold in cafes in the Netherlands.

Regardless of the chamlessness of the city (it's as if someone forgot to tell them that they're the capital of the EU, and should thus somehow reflect the fact that they are in Europe) they have some great food. I've taken it upon myself to take a gastronomical tour of this fair (and I meant that literally) city.

It's a bit however like the scene in Better of Dead where Lane's mother is giving the meal for the french exchange student (he put his, how you say, testicles all over me) and is presenting items for her. "Franch bread, franch dressing, and Peru!". Upon arrival I obeyed the local Tourist Code and consumed a sampling of Belgian mussels with a big Belgium beer and some Belgian frites. The frites were not good, the mussels good, the beer excellent.

This was followed up by a trip to one of the sextillion Belgian chocolate shops, from which I consumed several chocolates I liked less than the ones that I make myself. (I am now a bon-bon snob.)

That was the point at which the large beer plus the lack of sleep combined to drive me back to the hotel for a 1 hour nap. Waking from that slumber, and still inebriated I decided as I tripped over a planter in the lobby and then almost walked in front of a nearby tram I headed to the park for some greenery where I was sort of accosted by a Kosovo resident in Belgium to earn money for his asthmatic child. Uh huh. We had a rather nice conversation in French for a good 15 mins and parted ways to allow me to wander around the city, cursing a bit at its blanditude.

Found a a-la-minute frites shop (owner cut the potatoes while I stood there) and ate them, relishing the tartar sauce accompaniment (get it, relish?)

Back in the hotel I'm waiting for the sun to go down so I can experience Belgium after dark, by which I mean I'm going to find a close bar that doesn't look like it's occupied totally by tourists and drink a selection of fine beers, before returning to my hotel room to pass out yet again.

Technorati Tags: food, Beer, restaurants

Travel With A Grain Of Salt

I'm headed to Brussels tomorrow because (to borrow a phrase) I need to "get the hell out of Dodge".

My guidebook is providing a rather non-prosaic description, including phrases like "Brussels may not have the glamour of Paris or the romance of Rome but, when approached with an open mind and a spirit of adventure, it turns out to be a city full of pleasant surprises."

Uh oh.

I think it's pretty fair to say that it's gotta be up from Cologne. No offense to Cologne, ah hell, with plenty of offense to it. Brussels has to be prettier. And they have beer, moules, chocolate and frites.

Skyping home from the lobby of a hotel in Germany

Skyping home from the lobby of a hotel in Germany, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

The Best Way To Fly

As I boarded the teeny Continental 757 for my trip across the ocean to the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany, I kicked myself in the ass for not calling the airline sooner and getting an upgrade to first class. The seats in coach were every bit as tiny and cramped as the shitacular 737-800s they now fly across the country to California.

After I sat down a beautiful girl took the middle seat next to me, and after a moment asked me if I would mind sitting in business class. She was traveling with a guy who was upgraded and as she passed him in the cabin, he asked her to see if whoever her seatmate was would switch.

I jumped at the chance and was moved up to business first, a luxurious and spacious cabin with reclining seats and a several-course meal. (I abstained from the cheese plate but DID go for the ice cream sundae.

It was a terribly bumpy flight, about eighty-percent of the time it was too turbulent for me to even fall asleep (despite the eye covers and ear plugs given as part of the complimentary travel bag, which by the way included toothpaste and lotion. That's right baby, business class gets some liquids along with our dull metal butter knives.)

When we landed at the airport, my bag was the first off the carousel and I grabbed the first cab at the stand. (Since, for some reason, Germany has decided to not have customs agents on hand to do any form of screening.)

I had landed at 8:10 and was checked into my hotel room by 8:40 am, after a short five minute cab ride. By 9:00 I was fast asleep.

In the scheme of things, it was the best travel experience I've had since the Lufthansa flight with WiFi.

I'm expecting a large anvil to fall on me at any time.

German hotel

German hotel, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

Who let all this motherfucking irony on the motherfucking plane?

Who let all this motherfucking irony on the motherfucking plane?, originally uploaded by davidjschloss.

An ad in San Fran's terminal 1 for this beverage, which wasn't ironic

when it was printed, but is now that beverages are not allowed on

planes.

IMG_1045.JPG

How the 2004 Election Was Stolen

Rolling Stones article about how the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Looks like we "didn't elect" Bush in 2004 either.

Full article.

This country makes me utterly and disgustingly sick sometimes.

Here are some fun facts about the fraud in Ohio (the parenthetical numbers are footnotes in the original article)...

The decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic counties to navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose boundaries had been redrawn just prior to the election.(125) To further compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were misidentified on the secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no longer theirs. Some were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that they were entitled to cast a provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead, thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000 provisional votes were tossed out after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the wrong line.(126)

In Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each got in a different line to vote in the gym at St. Elizabeth Seton School. Both of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the city's north side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But when the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt end. Brittany's vote was counted -- but Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building. If she wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to choose the line that led to her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other voters in the same precinct -- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)

and a fun one about the voting machines.

Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)

and this gem about vote counting fraud

They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)
''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)

Total Has Left The Building

I'm not sure exactly when, or exactly why (though I have my suspicions) but Total cereal has changed. This might not be alarming at all to most, it's just a cereal after all. But Total cereal is, or rather was, a cherished part of my life. I loved Total and now it's changed.

I suspect it was when General Mills recently committed to using only whole grains in their cereals. A Wikipedia entry even alludes to this, indicating that "whole grain corn and rice bran have been dropped as ingredients".

The taste is different, flatter, less interesting. The texture of the flake feels more like that of a cheap imitator, the kind you'd find in the no-frills aisle of Pathmark. There used to be a nutty undertone to the flake, a sort of complex flavor that's just replaced with a single taste.

This makes me terribly sad because it's unlikely that General Mills will ever order his food soldiers to change Total back to the way it was, after all part of the switch to whole grains is a cost saving measure disguised as a health-concious change. If everything you make is made from one grain, you get a lot better pricing from your distributors as you buy a higher volume of that one item.

The cereal that's so happily been a part of my healthy breakfast (and sometimes lunch or dinner) is gone, and I'm not sure how to mourn.

Technorati Tags: food

The New iTunes Store

So, Apple today announced a bunch of new features to their iTunes Store (dropping the word "music" as they've added movies to the available media) and I've been playing with it. While the interface elements are tres chic, I'm a bit more impressed with something that His Steve forgot to talk about, which is the new downloading architecture.

While the presentation did mention that one can now change the order of items to download, it did not mention that things now download in parallel instead of in serial. In other words, instead of downloading an album, one track at a time, at about 300k/sec a track, it now downloads as many tracks as it can, at a good clip faster, at the same time until your broadband pipe is filled.

In my case, that's a 30mb/second FIOS pipeline that gives me the equiv cap download speed of 3.2Mb/second.

I just purchased Grosse Point Blank and O Brother, and they both downloaded at 1.2Mb/sec, for a total of about 11 minutes to download two full-length movies.

Incidentally, if you try to play back any movies from the store, you'll need Quicktime 7.1.3, which the program says is available from Software Update. It's not, as of this writing, but it is available from apple.com/quicktime.

Birds do it, bees do it, even copulating flies in the trees do it.

Birds do it, bees do it, even copulating flies in the trees do it., originally uploaded by davidjschloss.