Finite Jest

“He was smilin’ through his own personal hell…”

Cheers to Doughty for covering Daniel Johnston — outsider art for the ear.

Un-delux, this was the first CD I owned. Deluxless? Luxfull?

Too cool. Hit up a restaurant a week next year!

I also love this stuff — 7 out of 10 for me.

It leads me to wonder what are the important technologies in the world. What helps humanity the most, what might be most profitable for an individual. What can you create with the most readily available raw materials? What pieces of 21st century knowledge are useful as an individual, what is useful only with widespread acceptance and application?

To illustrate:

Understanding germ theory could keep me healthier, but until it is widely applied the “herd” could still easily make me sick.

I can use a magnet to generate electricity, but what would I do with resultant power? There would be no way to produce anything like solid-state electronics.

A steam engine is interesting but not as useful as a train — which requires steel and a track infrastructure.

It also gets me thinking about how we can create our technology in a way that can survive a retreat of resources — how to have our civilization continue past conflicts and disasters.

I just love thinking about history, humanity and technology on a large timescale.

Whups.

Jazz 28 has been open quite a while in my neighborhood, and I just tried it last night. That is my mistake.

Look, I don’t know how you feel about jazz, jazz clubs, etc., but I can say the food here was exceptional and the service exceptionally friendly. The small spot on the corner of Fulton/28th and Clinton has hosted 4 different restaurants since I have been a west-sider (Tracie’s, Halite, Boulevard Blonde, now Jazz 28), but this one might finally be better than the first.

I had a fish sandwich - it was a delicately (and in-house) breaded orange roughy with some quality fries. The wife had a bowl of Gumbo, apparently made by a bartender with Louisiana roots. It had the deep and complex flavor of a brown/black roux. It seemed a tad pricey, but without drinks the above only set us back $20.

Check it out, don’t let this incarnation of 2800 Clinton Ave. go quietly into this good night.

I just don’t get the high-speed rail initiative. I just don’t see the real advantage to an Ohio corridor — why take a train to a place where you will almost certainly need a car? We might have dreams of our cities being navigable by public transit and/or foot, but we are not there. Imagine a typical business visit — need to get to a hotel, dining/entertainment, and some office building that could be anywhere in a 20 mile radius of downtown. If you want to bounce between any given two or three “cool things” in Cleveland — say, a great Little Italy restaurant, a show in Playhouse Square, and an after-dinner drink at an upscale Tremont bar. Maybe it’s a hip design kid and he wants to see a show in Collinwood, a huge grilled cheese sandwich in Lakewood, and a Gauguin exhibit in a world class art museum. We have a great city but it’s just not highly connected right now.

A second issue with the Ohio high-speed corridor (everything’s a corridor, right? Is that supposed to make prosperity and good times sound as if they’re right down the hall?) — if there is a lot of business travel between the three C’s, doesn’t that just mean we’re pilfering jobs from each other? I see no real win in a Cleveland engineering firm winning business because it’s now so accessible to a Cincinnati company, or a Columbus web shop getting in a major Cleveland corporation. What we need is a link to the coast, to major prosperous cities where we can ply their corporations with domestic outsources, using our India-like cost-of-living to our advantage. Yes, the link should probably be Cleveland-Pittsburgh-Washington, and then the C’town-C’bus-Cincy link makes some sense as a follow-on.

But this then points to the overall problem. When the Ohio-Erie canal was a vital link, then replaced by train, we were moving resources and goods. What are we looking to move now? It’s people. I can only imagine that business travel is at an all-time low, and where do we think it will go when bandwidth and tools makes video-conferencing as ubiquitous as e-mail?

I have this uneasy feeling that we’re trying to dig a canal to compete with the iron horse and are going to look like idiots. The resources we should be looking to move now are ideas and plans and electronic products. Bits. We need infrastructure to move bits — which either exists or is well on the way. Investment there makes sense. Once that is in place, we need investment to help attract the people — permanently, not on visits — to our side of the electronic link. We need a vital culture and community for the singles, and clean and safe spaces for the marrieds (to over-simplify). I don’t see this “green” rail helping either, and frankly what is even greener than moving people with high-speed rail is letting them stay put and do their jobs.

Am I wrong?

Can’t… stop… listening… to this track. Aside from the overall aesthetic of a large band and the infectious energy of the performance, I can’t get over the female vocalist’s voice. It’s deep and rich and homey. It appears her name is Jade Castrino, and I must hear more of her.

What the internet is for.

The 09-10 lecture series kicks off with a bang with Neil Gaiman this Sunday.

Yeah, you read correctly — Symon’s upcoming cookbook has a chapter on pork belly.

This is awesome, and happens just a few blocks from my place… why was I not there?

Wow — this is nifty. Most of what they talk about is in my neighborhood, of course.