Spam Hall of Fame

During the five years I’ve had my Gmail account, I have been dumb enough to use that address to sign up for a variety of e-newsletters, online purchases, web groups and so on, and resultingly I get a ton of spam.  Unfortunately, non-spam emails (especially from Russian or Argentine friends) sometimes get sent to my Spam folder as well.  The only solution is to scan through my spam messages occasionally to check for stray actual email.  This is an easy, yet painfully boring, activity.  One way to make it more interesting is to look for the gems of tortured prose and absurd poetry among the spam subject lines.  These are the specimens I’ve gathered over the last year…

The 8th wonder of the world in your pants

That your wife speaks, it is necessary to be better

Love must be supported … it is possible by medications!

Were you drunk? Answer, bastard!

Respects buddy! About 14 Feb

I will deanonimize you

On that heap of stones she mourns

These boobs can melt ice

A Worm Bin Saga

Long, long ago (so long ago that it is almost difficult to say what life was like then, back when I was unsullied by graduate school and the world’s financial system was more or less intact), I decided to build a composting bin.  It was September 2008, and I had just moved to Seattle.  Although that city offers its own composting service for organic waste (“offers” is perhaps not the right word – if compostable waste is found mixed in with your ordinary trash, you will be fined), I was feeling inspired to compost by the fact that I was living in a house (!) with a yard (!!) for the first time since I was 18.  After a few peripatetic years of living in various states of uncertainty here and abroad, I was finally settling down, if staying in one place for two years can be called settling down.  This meant that I could do formerly unthinkable things like buying large, heavy objects (bike, desk, accordion), or opening a local bank account, or getting magazine subscriptions, or starting “projects.”

For whatever reason, building a largish vermicomposting bin out of plywood seemed like the thing to do.  I rejected some other ideas, such as composting yard waste (boring, slow — although our backyard, neglected for years by a string of undergraduate tenants who were for some reason uninterested in landscaping, did end up producing a huge amount of plant clippings), or making a simple worm bin out of a plastic tub (too easy, potentially smelly, “worm juice” collects in the bottom).  So with the help of the internet and King County, I found instructions for the so-called “EZ Worm Bin” – although there was something sinister about that “EZ.”  Anything trying so hard to convince us of its easiness clearly had something to hide.

Housemate Bonnie said she would join me in building the bin, which I was very grateful for, since the last time I built anything was in seventh-grade shop class — a tiny, useless shelf that mostly involved repeated applications of wood glue and sandpaper.  The first step was a trip to the Home Depot on Aurora, that weirdly un-Seattle strip of shady hotels and lube shops.  We walked into the fluorescent-lit maw full of metal, wood, paint, and tools with our little printout of worm bin specs, fulfilling the stereotype of clueless females in a hardware shop, attracting orange-aproned employees and random, well-meaning men who commented that the drill we had selected was lacking in “power.”  Two hours later, we left with a dolly full of 2X4s and plywood sheets, cut “to our specifications,” a few semi-randomly-chosen packets of screws, and an almost-bottom-of-the-line power drill/driver.

Fall classes got into swing, so it was a few weeks before we even plugged in that drill.  But driving the first practice screws (into our neighbor’s picket fence) that Saturday was intoxicating.  In the backyard, under the supervision (and, eventually, intervention) of housemate Julia (who was more comfortable around plywood, due to extensive stagecraft experience), we managed to put the base and two sides of the bin together.  True, it probably took us something like 6 or 7 minutes to drive in each three-inch screw, but by the end of the afternoon we definitely had a bunch of pieces of wood that were attached to each other.  Incredible!  “Glowing with pride” is the most appropriate phrase to describe the way in which we showed these agglomerations of cheap plywood and 2X4s to our other roommates, who really made a great effort to be excited with us about this far-from-finished wooden box.

The months passed.  The days got shorter; a president was elected; we toiled on papers, projects, problem sets – hours and nights of work to be deposited in the void of some professor’s email inbox.  Occasionally Bonnie and I would manage to scrape together a couple of hours on a weekend or afternoon to put a few more pieces of wood together.  Although we became more skillful with the power tools, problems arose in “EZ Worm Bin’s” construction.  It turns out that the nice orange-aproned Home Depot employees might have been a bit careless when cutting our sheets of wood and 2X4s (“those girls won’t notice”) – gaps or overhangs of an inch (or two, or three), began to appear.  Our wooden box, losing its aspirations to plywood perfection, took on a ramshackle aspect.  Housemate Lorraine offered her handsaw, so we jaggedly lopped off some of those extra inches, and the bin became both more structurally sound and more piratical.  A freak snowstorm came to Seattle.  We put away the constructed chunks of the bin in the carport, covering them with a tarp.  Housemate Julia used a few of the loose 2X4s to help her car back out into the icy alleyway, leaving them marked by black tire tracks.

We went away for the holidays, came back, studied, went away for spring break, came back.  On scattered weekends, Bonnie and I laboriously went through a few steps of the “EZ Worm Bin” instructions, as the box struggled to make its ends meet.  Screws refused to be driven in, then we simply ran out of screws.  Fed up, I went to Ace Hardware on the Ave and rashly bought nails instead, coming home with a dozen terrifying nails the width and length of golf pencils, good only for coffins, impossible to hammer in.  I tried to push thoughts of the now long-unfinished bin out of my mind.  Not only had this project been in progress for an absurdly long time, but I also had my doubts that the bin, more warped every day, could even be completed.  Best to ignore it.

Bonnie at work. Warning: do not drink and drive.

Spring progressed and late in the academic year, not long before finals, a miraculous row of sunny, beautiful weekends blossomed.  One Saturday, housemate Julia was hard at work on the backyard garden, digging up beds, fertilizing, mulching, planting strawberries, raspberries, radishes, herbs, sunflowers.  “So when is the worm bin going to be done?” she asked.  Bonnie and I would both be gone for the summer, and the garden needed compost asap.  But Bonnie was holed up working on a presentation, and the worm bin was a two-person job.  I asked Julia if she could help for a few hours.  “Let’s finish it,” she said.

I bought a final round of screws.  One of us pressed together the ill-fitting pieces of low-grade plywood as the other bore down on the drill.  One screw, with a quarter inch sticking out, wouldn’t budge further.  One screw broke in half as we drove it in.  We kept going.  When the drill began to smoke, we took a break for a beer.  But the last couple of screws just refused to go in.  I was ready to call it a day.  “Wait, let’s try a nail,” said Julia.  The coffin-nails were a horrifying, unusable joke.  I looked around.  In our house’s old picket fence, once the white of Americana and now a Chekhovian grey, several loose nails waggled.  We pried them out, and hammered them into the last few gaps of the bin.

Note the fine craftsmanship.

There it was: a box with four sides and a bottom.  I was giddy.  Affixing the lid was the icing: we attached the hinges (the “EZ Worm Bin’s” one concession to technology) and the lid opened and closed like a dream.  We even managed (with some wrangling) to get the bin into its predesignated spot under the back stairs, which it miraculously settled into without an inch to spare.  Its wholeness overshadowed its faults.  I was reminded of what a PhD student friend had said in his third or fourth year of writing his dissertation: “I’ve decided that done is better than good.”

Thinking about my time in Seattle, I said to Julia, half-joking, “If nothing else, at least I’ve done this.”

The bin in its right place.

Well, now we had to get the worms, but that’s another story…

A haiku for finals week.

Library windows.

Many hands madly typing.

Many heads on books.

Rambling about me, and food.

[Skip this entry if either of the two things above bore you.]

My last week was marked by a heterogeneous and somewhat unusual selection of activities, including trips to a women’s bathhouse, a dessert party, soul/funk dance night, karaoke feat. Alanis Morrissette and Walt Disney’s Aladdin, a celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Seattle general strike at the Labor Temple, the roller derby, and pinball at Knarr (the Shipwreck Lounge).

I also cooked a lot. Two of the things I made were similar to my week, in that they are marked by a heterogeneous and somewhat unusual selection of ingredients. I include them here because they are also pretty tasty. Try them when you get bored with cookies and pasta:

Blackberry-pear pie from the LA Times. My substitutions: 2 Tbs. flour in place of the tapioca, less sugar in the filling, and no egg or vinegar in the crust. Cardamom is pretty cool by itself, but black pepper too? Wild.

Abstract pie.

Mollie Katzen’s Jeweled Rice Salad. A friend’s favorite, I’d eaten this many times but never made it myself. Easy, healthy, filling and pretty. My substitutions: short grain for long grain brown rice (use wild rice if you’ve got some extra cash, or live in Minnesota) and walnuts for pecans.

Into the salad.

Anyway, now my week is over and I’ve caught a cold from too little sleep and too much fun. Now it’s back to no fun, reading, and pasta.

Question of the day: Knarr = /knar/ or /nar/?

A few notes on colectivos: part two.

In the last post I gave a brief exegesis of the history and significance of the Argentine public transit system’s heart and soul, the colectivo. But who cares about that? Maybe you just want to ride the bus. There are three notable peculiarities to riding colectivos in Buenos Aires. The first is good, the second is bad, and I wish I could say that the third is ugly, but really at the very worst it’s just kind of silly.

Step One: The Guia-T. If you’d like to ride a colectivo, first you have to buy a Guia-T. You can find it at basically any newsstand and you should keep it on your person at all times. It is absolutely essential and looks like this:

A typically-battered Guia-T.

And when you open it:

Guia-T on the inside.

I’d like to tell you that it’s not as complicated as it looks, but it really is just about as complicated as it looks. In essence, the Guia-T is Google Transit without the internet. I could go into detail and explain the nuts and bolts of its workings like this guy did, but I know that all of my readers are very smart and could figure it out on their own. Once you have, you will know which bus to take and where to board it to go where you want to go. But wait just a minute! First you’ll have to deal with…

Step Two: Monedas. The ticket machines on colectivos only accept coins. There is a severe coin shortage in Buenos Aires. Everybody wants to get them and nobody wants to give them up. If you ride the bus, you will soon find these evil little monedas dictating your life. You will find yourself lying baldfacedly to shopkeepers who ask you if you have change. You will find yourself overjoyed if some dimwitted checker at the Coto unthinkingly gives you back five pesos in monedas. You will find yourself wandering helplessly from kiosk to kiosk downtown, trying to pseudo-casually buy a piece of candy or cigarette to break a bill, only to be turned down by heartless kiosk owners who don’t care that it’s 2 a.m. and you really should have gotten to that party like, a half-hour ago.

If you have successfully managed to hoard your monedas you can now pass on to…

Step 3: Hailing the bus. Perhaps as a holdover from the colectivo’s heritage as taxi-like transport, in Buenos Aires you must hail your bus. Conveniently, buses of different lineas have different color schemes, making them easy to spot from a distance.

Linea 39 is red and ochre, Linea 41 is yellow.

When you see the bus you want approaching your stop, put your arm into the air at an upward angle, with either a flat palm or a finger or two pointing out. (If, for some reason, you want to hail a taxi, use the same gesture with your arm at a downward angle. This distinction is strictly observed.) You’ll feel a little silly doing this at first, but if you don’t, you risk having the bus pass you by. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. And maybe before long you will start feeling a little twinge of satisfaction at the illusory power of making the great colectivo stop at your feet.

Question of the day: what is the “T” in “Guia-T?”

A few notes on colectivos: part one.

As of last year, the average cab ride in Buenos Aires cost between three and five dollars. So why bother with public transit, then? Many foreigners don’t. But each of us must decide how much we value ease over money, and for a cheapskate like me, it’s hard to justify passing up a 30-cent bus ride.

These city buses, or colectivos, are not only cheap, they’re also considered something of a moving national monument. Argentines put them in the same mental category as the Obelisco, the Avenida 9 de Julio (THE WIDEST AVENUE IN THE WORLD), tango, and their “passion” for football.

Colectivos are less a form of public transportation than, as the name implies, collective transportation. In the 1920s, there were a variety of travel options for the porteño: city buses, trams, taxis, the metro. Soon some five-seat Chevrolet “taxi-buses” appeared, parking near the busiest bus and tram stops, picking up and dropping off passengers by request along a designated route (often the same one the buses and trams ran along). Soon enough, city buses died out under the competition from the colectivos, despite the latter’s slightly steeper fare, and the routes they ran were formalized as numbered lineas.

In the 90s the various trucks used as colectivos were replaced by normal-looking, rear engined bus-sized buses manufactured by Mercedes-Benz. But, although the colectivos get subsidized gas from the government, which also sets the price of a ride, they are still essentially private enterprises, with different companies running no more than a few lines.  For example, Lineas 60 and 32 are run by MONSA, Microómnibus Norte Sociedad Anónima (Anonymous North Microbus Society?). This results in significant variation in levels of comfort and quality of service among the lineas, as well as the full range of black-smoke-belching capabilities.

(Interestingly enough, you can see a phenomenon similar to Argentina’s 1920’s-era public transit situation in Eastern Europe today. Marshrutkas (“fixed-route taxis”) began sprouting up around bus stops in Russia in the 90s, due to the proliferation of the GAZelle, a relatively cheap and reliable 12-seat minibus, enabling enterprising victims of the Soviet collapse to make a living as a driver.  Speedier and more comfortable than other ground transport, marshrutkas are a blessing in congested Moscow and sometimes practically the only transit option in smaller provincial cites like Ryazan and Irkutsk.   It would not be terribly surprising, although somewhat ironic, if in ten years Russia, like Argentina, had a wholly privately owned ground transport system.)

This is all kind of interesting (maybe), but not so much as to make a city bus a national point of pride.  That can be explained by this:

1960's era bondi with fileteado.

Which is what the colectivo looked like before the 1970s.  The psychedelic art nouveau painting is fileteado, the porteño folk art form.  Its specific origins are unclear, but it started showing up in the early 20th century on horse carriages, then on the trucks of working class immigrant men, putting it in the venerable tradition of racing stripes, fins, rims and other ways guys show off their cars.  The symbols of fileteado imitate luxury (the spirals are reminiscent of the decorative reliefs of Italian and Spanish architecture), convey pride of place or origin (the Spanish flag, the Argentine flag, or the more diplomatic Spanish-flag-merged-with-Argentine-flag), or are intended to offer protection (dragons, La Virgin).  Flowers and birds are also popular themes, although nobody can really explain why.

Then in the 1970s, fileteado and other decoration on buses was outlawed, with the justification that it was “distracting.”  I’ve heard two interpretations of this: that a) the fileteado was distracting to other drivers or that b), as venerable fileteado master Leon Untroib explained:

“There was a custom to decorate the colectivos with ornamentations, especially around the big mirror [in the interior of old colectivos above the windshield], but later the ornamentations were eliminated because, as they said, the driver got distracted. And really, it was too much decoration, and some of the colectivos looked like circus cars.”

Both of these reasons seem ridiculous in today’s Argentina, given that a) buses are regularly plastered with advertisements for things like “Por Amor a Vos!” and High School Musical, and the streets have been colonized by billboards and neon, and b) colectivo drivers, in my experience, regularly do rather distracting things, like talk on cell phones or read the newspaper while driving. But, aside from the occasional inconspicuous flag or curlicue, fileteado on buses is probably not coming back any time soon.

Next time: How to ride a colectivo.

Question of the day: What, if anything, would you want painted on your car?

What I think of bowling.

In theory, I like bowling a lot. It’s one of the world’s great social games. Here’s why: depending on the number of players, anywhere between 50% and 85% of the game is spent waiting for your turn. (If you count as waiting the time from when you release your ball to when your ball (hopefully) hits the pins, it’s even more.) What do you do while you’re waiting? Doodle on the scorecard, drink beer, put songs on the jukebox – but mostly, talk to the other players (or taunt your opponents). For a lot of people, bowling’s just an excuse to hang out – not so different from going to watch a game at the ballpark. Whatever you think of the merits (or boredom-inducingness) of bowling or baseball, the social aura of these sports is arguably as important as the sports themselves.

In practice, I hate bowling. This is because I’m a very bad bowler. Although I’ve become less sensitive about seeing, say, five straight balls make abrupt left turns into the gutter, it’s still not that fun to play a game when your score is 50 points below everyone else’s. My approach to avoiding the humiliations of bowling while participating in the fun parts is designating myself scorekeeper. (Although the rise of automated scorekeeping is gradually robbing me of this tactic.)

At least I can now console myself with the fact that our newly inaugurated President is also a terrible bowler.

Question of the day: are there any other famous bad bowlers?

What I’m doing here.

I’ve never had a blog before, but I recently was advised to start one.  It seemed like a good opportunity to a) set down some things in writing before they disappear into the black hole of my very bad memory, b) ramble about these things to a very limited readership, c) contribute to cluttering up the internet and d) waste time while in grad school.

To that end, I’ll be addressing the following twenty topics (none of which are in question form, actually), suggested to me by the above-mentioned suggester:

1. bowling (my opinion of the sport)

2. fermented foods/beverages

3. earrings as a fashion accessory

4. trail building in Russia

5. public transit in Argentina

6. the dive bars of Eau Claire

7. lap swimming

8. intro to the accordion

9. Boo Boo (the cat)

10. how to make young children draw portraits of Barack Obama

11. learning Georgian from someone who speaks no English

12. CSAs

13. running the Seattle half-marathon — a primer

14. the saga of worm bin construction

15. Worms Eat My Garbage — a critical examination

16. meeting boys on Love Lab — advice for those who are interested in doing such a thing

17. ask Julia — the column

18. Wisconsin weather

19. the animal I’d most like to domesticate

20. my roommate reviews

That should keep me busy for a while.  If there are any of these topics you’d like to see addressed sooner rather than later, let me know.