Monthly Archives: January 2012

Eccentric Flint

Posted on by Bill Chance

When I go to a local museum – one that I visit on a regular basis – I’ll usually pick out one piece of art, go to it, and study it for as long as I can.

Plus, there are pieces that I always go to and… it feels like checking in – or paying a visit to an old friend. I don’t know why certain works resonate with me… and I try not to think about it. I like ’em, and that is something I want to be good enough.

At the Dallas Museum of Art, one piece that I have always loved, one that I keep going back to ever since I first saw it decades ago, is an eccentric Mayan ceremonial flint knife.

Mayan Flint Knife from the Dallas Museum of Art

From the museum card:

Eccentric flint depicting a crocodile canoe with passengers.

 Mexico or Guatemala: southern Maya lowlands, Maya culture

Late Classic period, c. A.D. 600-900

This sacred blade shows a moment in the Fourth Creation of the world on August 13, 3114 B.C. The blade is shaped as a monstrous crocodile canoe; water flowers decorate its belly as it sinks down into the dark waters of the spirit world. In the canoe is the soul sacrificed First Father accompanied by two attendants, who may be embodiments of his parents. The canoe represents the Milky Way, pivoting in the night sky from east-west to north-south. The Maya saw this pivoting as the sinking of the canoe and the raising of the precious maize tree. When the canoe sank, First Father was miraculously reborn as Maize, the sustenance and flesh of humanity.

Because it represents this mythic act, this blade was probably an especially powerful talisman of a living king, who became the reincarnation of First Father as he held the blade. The blade itself, bundled in textiles, was probably carried by the king into battle as the focus for his spiritual energies and as his tactical inspiration. The flinty stone connoted lighting to the Maya and was called by the same name as the bright but dangerous bolts of light that accompany life-sustaining rain.

There is a brutal beauty about this flint. I can picture the Mayan king going into bloody battle with this ceremonial knife gripped in his fist.

Teaching packet on the Mayan Flint

Wikipedia – Eccentric Flint

What I learned this week, January 20, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

Best if watched in Full Screen mode.

150 Resources to Help You Write Better, Faster, and More Persuasively

As a student, writer, author, journalist, poet, or screenwriter, you know that you probably spend more time on research, editing, and proofreading than you do on the actual writing. Therefore, you might not have time to find resources to help you write better, faster, or more persuasively. This is where our list comes to your rescue, as the following links focus on places where you can conduct research, software that is free and easy to use, and services that will remove that “extra work” monkey from your back.

Best if watched in Full Screen mode.

We can follow the sun until the daylight is gone

Haven’t seen my girlfriend in two weeks. This is how it was when I finally saw her today.

Advice & Inspiration for Writing Short Stories

One of my own favourite quotes is attributed to Mark Twain. The great author and prolific short story writer, in a letter to a friend, wrote that he “would like to have written a shorter letter but didn’t have the time.” For me, that sums up short story writing nicely. – Clem Cairns.

Best if watched in Full Screen mode.

Seth Godin’s Blog – Advice for authors

  1. Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business.
  2. The timeframe for the launch of books has gone from silly to unrealistic.
  3. There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher.
  4. Books cost money and require the user to read them for the idea to spread.
  5. Publishing is like venture capital, not like printing.

So, what’s my best advice?

Build an asset. Large numbers of influential people who read your blog or read your emails or watch your TV show or love your restaurant or or or…

Then, put your idea into a format where it will spread fast. That could be an ebook (a free one) or a pamphlet (a cheap one–the Joy of Jello sold millions and millions of copies at a dollar or less).

Then, if your idea catches on, you can sell the souvenir edition. The book. The thing people keep on their shelf or lend out or get from the library. Books are wonderful (I own too many!) but they’re not necessarily the best vessel for spreading your idea.

And the punchline, of course, is that if you do all these things, you won’t need a publisher. And that’s exactly when a publisher will want you! That’s the sort of author publishers do the best with.

Don’t worry about full screen mode. It doesn’t help this one.

Food Truck in Richardson

Posted on by Bill Chance

I live in Richardson, Texas – a first-ring suburb of the enormous Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. For the last year or so, I have been enjoying tracking down the various Gourmet Food Trucks that wander the highways and byways. I have been finding them at various locations – mostly in the Dallas Arts District – but have yet to have one show up in my own hometown.

The one struggle for the Food Trucks all over the country is finding locations to park. The owners of brick and mortar restaurants traditionally have a lot of political clout and are always working to enact harassing regulations designed to eliminate the portable competition. I have plenty of sympathy for restaurant owners – that has to be one of the hardest ways to make a living – but I think they are mistaken. The food trucks are mostly a quality replacement for fast food plus they get people used to eating out more. I don’t think the food trucks are a serious threat to quality restaurants.

So I was excited when I left work and checked my social media and found out that the Nammi Food Truck (one of my favorites – First Visit – Second Visit) was going to be setting up for dinner in Richardson. They were going to be at the RunOn! store at Campbell and Coit – not very close to my house – but I wanted to support a truck coming out to my town. The Nammi Truck serves Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwiches, rice bowls, and fusion tacos. I drove home, checked with Candy and decided what to get, and then drove out to RunOn!.

That store brings back a lot of memories. When Lee was younger we used to drive him out there for running lessons. I used to kid him about “lessons” – I’d say, “Left, Right, Left, Right… how hard can it be?” It worked though – the direction and practice Lee received helped him become a good and enthusiastic long-distance runner.

While he would run I would hang out at the Starbucks or wander around the shopping center. There is a lot of interesting stuff around that intersection.

Tonight there was a recreational run going on with a nice little crowd of runners outside the store, stretching, talking, hanging out, and getting ready to head out together. Saucony was there with a truck loaning out test shoes (WTF?) and promoting their products. They had an Xbox Kinect hooked up on the back of their truck and the runners would take turn playing track and field games – running in place, jumping, and throwing a virtual javelin. It looked like a lot of fun… I’m an old fart and had never seen the Xbox Kinect working before.

There was a continuous short line at the Nammi Food Truck. I waited my turn and ordered a BBQ Pork Banh Mi sandwich (these are big sandwiches and Candy and I would share it) plus a lemongrass chicken taco and a beef taco. It didn’t take long and I took the stuff home for dinner.

As always, it was good.

Nammi tacos. They taste better than they look in this picture.

Related WordPress blogs:

People’s Choice Food Truck Winner: Nammi

The Food Truck Dish: Nammi

Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’–Keep those food trucks Rollin’

Eating Out :: DFW Food Trucks, Nammi

into the weekend

The How To Guide for the Texas Swanky Bride -Dallas Food Trucks – The New Wedding Trend

Kansas and Baylor

Posted on by Bill Chance

http://youtu.be/hIa2sPE5cHI

I am an American male – so therefore, I am a sports fan. And I admit it. I like to watch sports on television and live. It’s an entertainment, beauty and skill… it’s a demonstration of man’s abilities to exceed his putative limitations… and it’s something that there is no way to know the outcome ahead of time.

Now, I do believe in cheering for the teams that represent the city that you live in. Here in Dallas, there is an extra lift in the steps of the folks on Monday after the Cowboys win the weekend before – and that is a good thing. Otherwise, though, I try my best to avoid the trap of rabid fandom, of believing that the winner or loser of a sporting event is important beyond the game itself. I try, but I am not always successful.

The one team that I am an admitted fan of is the Kansas Jayhawk Basketball team. I feel that is my right, as I did graduate from there and it is a team with support, future, and history that deserves and rewards this fandom.

http://youtu.be/ZM7pOAxLD_s

I thought of all this Monday night as I wasted too much time watching the Kansas/Baylor game on television. It was a home game for the Jayhawks and Allen Field House was rocking – they said on television that the crown noise was at 114 decibels. Kansas was ranked seventh in the nation and Baylor was third and undefeated.

It was not a very good game for anyone other than Kansas fans – KU pretty much stomped all over the Bears, the game was not in doubt after the half.

Photo by Nick Krug from Kusports.com.

Thinking about it, I remembered about another Kansas/Baylor basketball game, in 2007. It is impossible for me to get tickets to home Kansas games, but living in Texas enables me to see an away game every now and then. At that time Nick was a KU fan too and we drove down to Waco. I wrote about it in my blog back then:

February, 2007

Rock Chalk

Hey, over here!
Have your picture taken with a
reclusive author!
Today only, we’ll throw in a
free autograph! But wait,
there’s more!
—-Thomas Pynchon, The Simpsons

When I went from high school to college I knew nothing about basketball. Actually, we played basketball, but at ANS it was played outside, in the tropical heat, on a concrete court with no spectators and no players over six feet tall. Once I arrived at KU I was convinced to buy student tickets to the basketball season, though I couldn’t understand what the big deal was.

It was amazing. The excitement and the sound were something I had never experienced before and have never experienced since.

In those simpler days tickets at KU were twenty dollars a season and, though some hardy souls would hang out to get better seats you could walk up at game time and sit in the rafters of Allen Field House. What I liked the most was the ebb and flow of the games – how one team would eke out a lead and then the other would go on a run. The whole thing was driven by emotion, fear, and confidence. Those were only kids out there, after all, and were obviously susceptible to the foibles of us all.

Several months ago, Nick and I noticed that the KU Jayhawks would be playing a Wednesday evening game in Waco against Baylor and before Christmas I bought a pair of tickets from their web site. Late January seemed a long time in the future, but time flies and here we were. Nick skipped soccer practice to get out of school a bit early and I took a half day of vacation. The trip was easy – I have made that drive to Waco a thousand times but I was worried about parking. I shouldn’t have given it a second thought – the basketball fanaticism in Waco isn’t as strong as I feared (not too surprising, given their sordid recent past) and parking was not only plentiful and close, but free (I’ve lived in the big city too long… free parking is a rare treat).

The game was, as expected, a blowout win for Kansas. The facility was beautiful, though not nearly half full. There seemed to be as many Kansas fans as Baylor fans in the place. With home tickets so difficult to get, KU fans do tend to pack in the visiting arenas. Near the end of the game the “Rock Chalk Jayhawk chant was really obvious, especially around our seating section. A Baylor student behind us shouted, “But what does it mean?”

For Christmas, Candy ordered a KU basketball for Nick. When it arrived, I noticed that half the ball was covered with white leather. “That’s not a ball for playing,” I said, “That’s for getting autographs.” Nick decided to take the ball to Waco and see if he could get someone on the team to autograph it. Now, I know nothing about getting autographs – didn’t even know if it was possible. After the game, we fetched the ball and a black sharpie and walked around the arena. In the back was a steep driveway full of television trucks and littered with thick cables. At the top of the driveway was a couple of long-haul buses, idling, air brakes hissing, their cargo holds open and full of athletic bags. There was another family standing there, two kids, one with a ball like Nick’s, the other a poster.

“This must be the place,” I said, and, sure enough, one by one the players came hiking up the driveway, each carrying a pizza box. They all looked exhausted, most limping, but were very friendly and accommodating to the three kids that wanted autographs. A couple of walk-ons were first and they seemed really happy to have someone ask for an autograph. Then the starters started coming out and signing Nick’s basketball. A center, Sasha Kaun, from Russia, signed and Nick said, “I’m used to tall players, there’s some high school players almost seven feet tall, but his hands were huge. When he took the pen out of my hand I couldn’t believe how big it was.”

We stood out there for almost an hour and collected autographs from all the players on the team, plus Danny Manning, and head coach Self. It had worked out perfectly with the players stringing out over time, in no real hurry to board the bus, and only three kids standing there. They were quiet but all did talk a little; they kept asking the kid with the poster, “Where’s me?” so they could sign in the right place.

After the last signature we hiked back to the parking lot while the bus pulled out. When I was in school I had a Center from the basketball team in my 7AM Analytical Chemistry lab and he would be so worn out during the season – arriving back from west coast games and going immediately to class for the next day.

We had it a little easier and made it home around one in the morning.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any of the pictures I took of Nick getting the ball signed. I wasted most of this evening digging through my backup files… I’m afraid they are lost. I had good pictures of him with both Danny Manning and Coach Self.

This was in 2007, the team won the national championship the next year. The championship team’s signatures are all on the ball except for Cole Aldrich.

The Autographed Ball

Nick was a fan of Kansas Basketball for his whole life up until his senior year in high school. Over time, he built up a nice collection of Kansas Basketball memorabilia with the autographed ball as the most prized item.

Then he applied for early consideration to Duke University. For those of you that don’t know American Basketball, Duke is another of the elite Basketball schools.

I was in Seattle on business and on a plane flying back when the decision would come down on whether Nick would get into Duke or not. When I arrived home, I looked in my office and there was a pile of Kansas stuff that Nick had hauled out of his room and heaped up on the floor. The signed ball was on top.

So I knew he had got into Duke.

Taylor to Robinson for the HUGE slam!! #kubball on Twitpic

Other Blogs:

Baylor needs to hit somebody. Observations from their trip to Lawrence

Jayhawks Get All The Ladies

Baylor’s Undefeated Season Ends in Kansas

Blue Valentine

Posted on by Bill Chance

http://youtu.be/wQ2CqKMrcCM

All my life, movies have been very important to me. I have always enjoyed watching them, going to the theater, sitting there in the dark and waiting for the curtains to rise on a whole ‘nother world.

In this modern digital age, in this best of all possible worlds, we now have such access to film – at any time, in any place, we can watch anything we want. The entire world and history of cinema is available in forms that weren’t even imaginable only a decade ago.

But I don’t ever seem to have the time to sit down and watch anything.

The other evening, I had a lot to do. I had promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. But I was still sick, tired, and worn out… so I decided to go lay down, turn on the cable, and watch whatever came up.

What came up was Blue Valentine.

It was crackerjack.

It’s a character driven story of a young couple, played by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. It jumps in time from the very beginning of their relationship to a point in time six years later when everything is on the rocks. They are both deeply flawed, working class people, who come from disastrously dysfunctional backgrounds and you can feel the fear and effort as they fight to raise themselves out of the doom that they have forseen.

Michelle Williams won a golden globe the other night… but I always think of her as the teenager in The Station Agent. She is a revelation in this movie – when she says she wants to be a doctor you wan to believe that is a possibility. Ryan Gosling is a wiry drunk with bad tattoos and a heart of gold. The transformation of the two from the scenes that represent the early stages of their relationship to the end is amazing – they seem to age a century in six years. Her face gets puffy and his gaunt, as the hope is slowly drained from their lives.

The movie was initially rated NC-17 – and there is a lot of rawness to the film, including the sex scenes. These have to be in the movie, though, the story is told through the sex as much as through the dialog.

After I watched it I wandered the web for a bit reading what other folks thought. The funny thing was how many people took sides – with one of the couple or the other. They couldn’t understand why the couple was having so much trouble making it work and were fishing around for someone to blame. Neither character had any idea how to behave and would, at any moment, make the wrong decision. They had no way to learn… other than to plow ahead as best as they could. There is a lot left unseen in the film, a lot must have gone down in the six years between… and the film treats us to the wreckage crashing down around the couple’s heads.

Both were decent people, inside. They are just like us.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers. The two timelines of the movie scream toward each other until we are witness to the final epiphany. Will the two lovers conquer all and march into the sunset arm and arm – damaged but hopeful? Or is all hope lost?

The characters are fatally flawed, but aren’t we all?

http://youtu.be/pIH6xzL0QBI

WordPress Blogs with entries tagged Blue Valentine:

Why So Blue?

Blue Valentine {My Thoughts}

Blue Valentine Review

Things the Chin Likes or maybe loves – this movie

Film: Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine

Scene: Blue Valentine – Motel Dance

My Very Own Blue Valentine 

Shopping Spree

Posted on by Bill Chance

Candy is in New Orleans helping Lee get all his crap back for the spring semester at Tulane so I’m holding the fort down alone (except for the dogs). I was in the shower when the doorbell went off (as it always does). There is a bunch of stuff (video games, clothes) that various kids have left in our house over break and they need to pick their crap up before they leave for school so I scurried out, threw on some dirty clothes and went to the door.

There was nobody in person, but a Fedex envelope was leaning up against the door, addressed to me. I wasn’t too happy because I rarely get good news Fedexed to me. This time I was wrong.

I remember a couple of weeks ago at work I received a junk email from some Industrial Trade Magazine. I usually ignore the hundreds of emails like that I get every day, but there was a link to a survey along with the usual “You Might Win” teaser. I had a few minutes to kill before a meeting so I went to the survey and filled that sucker out. I assume you all have done that – bland questions on what kind of equipment you specify and what sort of software services you outsource. I realize that this will generate even more junk emails going forward… but once you get to a certain point it doesn’t make any difference.

So I was pretty happy when I realized that the envelope had a hundred dollar gift card to Target. It said, “Congratulations! Your name has been randomly chosen as 1 of our 3 winners of a $100 gift card from Target in ***** ********’s recent “EAM/ERP” survey.”

Cool!

That did leave me with a minor moral dilemma. I firmly believe that money is money – so that I should add this card to the family fund, like anything else. There is no such thing as “Found Money” and what comes in goes out. There is a Super Target near our house, it has a grocery store, and there is a list of groceries that we need on the refrigerator – eggs, yogurt, cottage cheese, sandwich meat, sliced cheese… plenty of stuff.

I should either give the card to Candy when she gets back or, better yet, go to the store and buy the stuff on the list.

But still…. I’m here by myself. I earned this money by my work and good luck. Why don’t I just go out and spend that motherfucker on stuff I want.

I tried to think about what I wanted that they had at Target. There isn’t much, really. Luckily, this wasn’t a gift card to a pen store. I do need a new bike helmet and I’m always up for a new Moleskine… but there isn’t much else I could think of.

So I grabbed the food list off of the fridge and went to Target. I do not like shopping usually, but going to the store like this, with plenty of time and a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, was sort of fun.

I wandered through the electronics and found nothing much that I could afford. Then on to the office supplies and the Moleskine display. It was picked over and they didn’t have anything I wanted.

On to sporting goods. It’s hard for me to find a bike helmet at a mass-market store that will fit my swollen melon – but they did have one model that fit. I had looked at it before. The problem is that it had this fancy flashing light-thing built in and cost, like fifty bucks, which seemed excessive to me for a hunk of Styrofoam. I found that they only had two of these left and that they had been sitting there for so long the little batteries in the lights had gone dead. Because of this, they marked the helmet down to eighteen bucks. Score!

I picked up the helmet, a water bottle from a clearance endcap, a plastic tote that I want to attach to my bike rack, and all the groceries on the list.

I still have forty bucks left on the card. Hmmm, I wonder if some other Target Store in a little less literate neighborhood might still have a pile of Moleskines? I just might go for a little drive.

Lana Del Rey on Saturday Night Live

Posted on by Bill Chance

I first stumbled across a link to Lana Del Rey’s Video Games video in… I guess June of last year. That’s only a little more than six months – an eon on the hyped up internet world of mass entertainment. I was immediately hooked by the quirky vocals and grungy video. I really couldn’t say it was good… but it was different – and I liked it. I liked it enough to waste a blog entry on it (and now I’m doing it again).

Back then, very few folks had heard of her. I posted a link to my blog on her facebook page, she commented a thank you. But there was an undercurrent building on the internet. My blog entry was getting a steady stream of search engine hits.

A bunch of Nick’s friends were at the house with a laptop hooked up to the 65 inch screen in Club Lee so I had them scoot to YouTube, watch and listen. They hated it. It was way too slow and lugubrious for their youthful taste.

Over the last month, several of them have told me that Lana Del Rey was going to be on Saturday Night Live. The funny thing is, they deny telling me they didn’t like the song.

So for the last few months I’ve watched while Lana Del Rey blew up. She became big in Europe, then signed a record deal with Interscope, and now she has passed the hurdles, was on SNL last night, and will be on the cover of every major music rag/mag as one of the hottest things for 2012.

What I have been enjoying the most has been the (inevitable?) backlash against her apparent inevitable success (I think she is the first artist to appear on SNL without even having a record out). I can understand someone not liking her music (it’s odd and she’s not a very good singer) but that is not even mentioned. It seems the reason that the blogs can’t stand her is:

A – her real name is not Lana Del Rey, and

B – her father is very wealthy, and

C – her looks – she looks good but her lips are too big (injections?)

I’m sorry, but none of these things means much to me. I don’t care about her “street cred” or anything like that. I don’t even care about her looks. Lana Del Rey is obviously a creation of somebody, maybe Elizabeth Grant, maybe a team of highly-paid publicists… probably both.

What in popular music is not something totally artificial? If she is a little more plastic, a little more out-front with the image, a bit more calculated… so what. I like the songs. They are different. That’s enough for me.

So?

The question is… how did she do on SNL? The answer is terrible. She doesn’t look like she is used to performing in front of a live audience and her two songs were strange and awkward. Actually I knew she would be bad.  Her act is not one that is suited to the SNL format – she is not active and out there enough. Even the Huffington Post thought she bombed.

Of course, if you look through the negative reviews… they keep referring to the same people. I like stuff that is different. I like stuff that isn’t so polished. I like someone that acts as if she just realized she is on live TV in front of millions of people singing songs that they are simply not prepared for. I like something that isn’t Autotuned to death. I like to see someone that is out there knowing that the long knives are all out.

Did you watch it and think she sucked? Good for you.

Video Games was her first song and I still really like it, but it doesn’t come across live like it does on the video. I thought the second song, Blue Jeans went a little better, I thought – it has more life than the monotone mood of Video Games and gave her a bit more to do.

So am I disappointed? Hell no. I thought it was enjoyable… if it wasn’t what everyone expected… so much the better. It was different, and that counts for a lot, in my book.

I remember the first time I saw Saturday Night Live. It was October 25, 1975, the third show, with host Rob Reiner. The new show wasn’t getting any promotion and really, nobody knew anything about it. This was my sophomore year at Kansas University. Back then, a large group of us would get together on Saturday nights, pile onto a friend’s waterbed and watch Monty Python on a tiny black and white television (none of us had any money to go out or do anything more interesting). There were two episodes back to back on two different PBS stations (from Topeka and Kansas City). After Python was done, someone started flipping channels to find something else to watch and I remember yelling, “Hey there’s Joe Cocker… lets watch this,” so we did.

It didn’t take long to realize that this wasn’t Joe Cocker… it was Belushi doing Joe Cocker, and before long he was thrashing around on the floor in an epileptic fit. It was fantastic. So, from then on, we would all pile onto the waterbed and watch Monty Python and Saturday Night Live.

Everyone is familiar with the ups and downs of the show over the decades. I have slowly lost interest… last night was the first time I’ve watched SNL in at least three years.

Even if Lana Del Rey’s performance wasn’t the most polished and dynamic I’ve ever seen, she was better than that weird British teenager that was the host.

WordPress Blogs on her performance:

Takedown of the Day

Lana Del Rey’s SNL Performance Painful To Watch

In defense of Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey on Jools Holland (where she did really well live)

Sunday Ramblings

Bu kızın adını çok duyacağız…

Lana Del Rey Comes To ‘Saturday Night Live’ And Leaves Controversies Behind

A Few Artists to Watch For

Let’s Talk About Last Night’s SNL

Musical Ladies of 2012

3 Female Buzzbands I Don’t “Get”

For the Love of the Genre

Fabulous Cover: Lana del Rey, Intervention Russia

Quote of the day, 1/15

Eight Female Singers Who Caught My Imagination In 2011

Super H Mart

Posted on by Bill Chance

I love the Saigon Market near my house, but I have been hearing the virtues of an even larger Asian Market called Super H Mart. It’s in north Carrollton, which is on the other side of the Metroplex from my humble home, but my car gets good mileage and I had some time today, so off I went.

It looks like a Kmart

Super H Mart is a chain, which started on the East Coast. It’s a huge place, with a massive grocery store surrounded by little stores and a long corridor of a food court. The biggest draw is the produce department with an endless assortment of fruits and vegetables… from normal looking peppers to the strangest looking spiky fruits from the far corners of the globe.

The place was packed with shoppers, noisy and active. It’s not very well organized, so you get to walk around a lot looking for stuff. It’s really clean though, and it’s an odd contrast, with the exotic selection presented like a typical American Megamart.

A great selection of Ramune

Of course, like any good Asian market, the seafood section is a treat. The back wall is full of tanks with every sea creature you can imagine. What isn’t swimming around is lined up on rows of aisles of ice. I wandered around looking at the stuff, watching some woman probing a case of blue crabs, watching them jump around, trying to decide if they were active enough.

Are your Abalone fresh?

Fan mail from some flounder?

Saigon Market in my neighborhood specializes in Vietnamese Fare, of course. Super H Mart specializes in Korean Food. I have never seen so much Kimchi in my life. Glass jars, plastic tubs, and big bags of a bewildering array of different kinds of fermented goodness – whole head cabbage, napa cabbage, radish, and many more that I didn’t really understand.

Jars of Kimchi, half and full gallons.

I like to buy my kimchi by the bag.

So I picked up a basket and filled it with a six pack of Ramune, some Udon, a big bag of Tobagi Kimchee, a bag of nectarines, and some Jufran hot banana sauce. Just another day at the grocery store.

There is a large section of teas and herbal remedies. Including this one, "Super Colon Sweeper." You have to admire a product with a drawing of the human lower digestive system on the label.

What I learned this week, January 13, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

Holy Triskaidekaphobia, Batman!

I’m trying to find good stuff to watch on Netflix while I ride my recumbent bicycle. Paste Magazine has these daily lists, and two good ones are 20 Great TV Shows to Watch on Netflix Instant, and 20 Great Documentaries to Watch on Netflix Instant.

I have always been a map fanatic. With the advent of the web and GPS and all the cool digital mapping applications available now, paper maps have sort of fallen to the wayside. But still…. man, I want one of these, real bad.

Here’s a Slate article on the map.

And you can buy one here.

How to write a novel using the snowflake method.

http://youtu.be/saqO_ZqX6uY

Two and a half miles

Posted on by Bill Chance

One problem when the kids are home from school is that we do not have enough cars. It’s especially a problem on the days that Candy, Lee, and I are all working – there simply are not enough vehicles to get all of us to our places of gainful employment. That means I end up taking the train and the bus.

The other day was cold and wet. It rained hard most of the day but by the time I was able to leave work it was only a light mist. Then I discovered I had screwed up. I didn’t have any cash. I can buy a train ticket with my credit card but when I arrived at the Arapaho station I didn’t have any change for the bus… plus, when I checked the schedule, it would be over an hour before a bus arrived.

So I decided to hoof it. It’s about two and a half miles from the station to my house… not very far under ideal conditions, but it was dark, cold, muddy, and I was worn out from a day at work. Still, I gathered myself and strode confidently across the parking lot into the darkness.

Most of the distance between the Arapaho station and my neighborhood is made of of light industrial buildings. These are gridded out streets lined with rows of small offices, warehouses, small companies leasing space in industrial parks, and a few larger establishments with parking lots and multi-story buildings.

It’s actually sort of interesting stuff to walk through. Everyone sees these places from their car – but it is rare to take the time to see them slowly and up close.

I’m fascinated by the hundreds of mysterious names of these companies – it’s the poor suburb of the nearby high-tech telecom corridor – Greenfield, Polytronix, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Pizarro, Exteris… along with some more mundane small businesses – The Jalepeno Ketchup Company, Cameron Machine Shop, Granite World. I like to walk along and look at those signs, think about the work that goes on within, imagine what it would be like to start up one of these.

Of course, there are quite a few FOR LEASE signs too. I walked up to a couple of these and peered into the darkness as best as I could, looked at the layout posters taped to the front doors, and imagined what I could do with the space. I couldn’t come up with anything concrete.

There were very few other people out and about in this awful weather and prematurely darkened night. One woman working late scurried by on the way to her car, obviously skittered at seeing me walking along unexpectedly. One odd guy cruised by slowly and unevenly on a bicycle – either drunk or worn out or both.

Before I knew it I was at the park at the end of my block and almost home. It went by very quickly and I wasn’t as tired as I thought I was.

Maybe I should do this walk more often. Maybe when the weather isn’t so nasty.