Yeah girl, you know what time it is. It’s business time. Know how I know? ‘Cause it’s Wednesday. And I got my new business cards in the mail today. Aww yeah.

Got ‘em from the environmentally conscious Greener Printers.

 Loading ...

This is going to sound stupid, but I had a small epiphany this evening: I am a transition skater. It’s sort of hard to convey just what this means – it’s as if you’ve been trying to draw squares with your weak hand for years, then suddenly switch hands and make perfect circles instead, or maybe you’ve been eating melon and suddenly discovered cantaloupe, or better yet mango, or perhaps you thought PCs were pretty alright until you tried a Mac (not that I have one – yet).

This is how it happened: I went skateboarding at the Glendale Verdugo park, one of the best in southern California, but pretty quiet now that the Santa Clarita megapark is open. I had tried to go on Sunday, but was stymied by the need for a helmet and pads (or long sleeves). So I went back, this time in a hoodie and helmet, and started rolling.

At first, everything looked huge. I’m six feet tall, and the idea of getting on top of six-foot-tall quarterpipes looks enormous. And those are the low ones – the clover pool has an eleven-foot oververt! Also, it was the first time I’d hit a snake run, which is a twisty series of varied quarters and basins designed so that you can work up a flow, like surfing a wave I guess. For the first hour or so I was pretty lame – timid at getting up high on things and not finding any lines.

Then one began to click – drop in on the bank, high backside kickturn on a quarter, low and tight frontside carve on a small pocket to…nothing. Then another line developed – ollie into the bank, backside slash, kickturn on the bank, frontside kickturn to enter the snake run or pop out over the quarterpipe. Flow. Working with the design, not against it.

Then I dropped in on the clover pool. Shallow end shoot into deep end carve low into the pocket and high out and – there it was, right then: a weightless feeling, wheels nearly coming off the concrete, wind in the face and under you – zoom. Can’t stop a huge smile as I fly back towards the big oververt pocket, which I still am a long way from “getting” but still – I felt like a kid again. This is all in contrast to skating street – the repetition, the stop and start, the slammed shins – it feels like work. I still like it, and I want to check out this new little spot downtown in Lafayette park, but I think I rediscovered the skating bug in a big fat concrete clover pool.

It was a good night to be there as a spectator, as well. The locals were ripping and everyone was cool. And then, whaddayaknow, professional skater Chad Fernandez drops by and just starts killing it. All kinds of flip tricks, lip tricks, airs, spins – just having a grand old time while the kids and I stood aside gaping. It made everyone want to go faster, push higher, skate better.

And the thing is, I really needed this tonight. It’s been a weird day, a weird few days – not bad but just kind of shiftless. I have two informational interviews set up with some interesting and connected people, I worked some more on some cover letters and my resume and thought about college a bit. That seems like a million years ago and it may as well be. But look at it this way – I haven’t had a written post in forever, and this made me want to write. I like that realization.

I’m moving to California in ten days. Los Angeles to be more precise. I say “back” in the title because I lived in San Francisco for three months in college and because it’s a classic LL Cool J track. I’m going to drive across the United States of America, stopping in at least nine states on the way there. I’ll see friends in New York, family in New Jersey and Atlanta, friends in D.C., Mississippi, New Orleans (where I’ll catch the last two days of Mardi Gras), Austin and possibly New Mexico; more friends and family-friends in Arizona, and finally out to the city of angels, where I hope to add the next splash of paint in this Pollock-style work-in-progress I call a life.

Since I got back, I knew I’d be moving to either New York City or Los Angeles. Boston is a bit too small for me right now, and anyway, I’m not really in Boston. New York, as the center of the known universe, always exerts a certain gravitational pull, not least because many of my friends now call that city home.

But I’ve decided that I need a cleaner slate, a fresher restart, something completely different than the layered atmosphere of old Europe and the gritty but still distinctly Eastern intensity of New York, and LA is all of that. I also have friends in LA – people from high school and college and acquaintance and random chance – that I don’t really know well but would like to. Even better, I have family – well, the younger side of the family – which will help bring some soul to that reportedly soul-less sprawl. My nephews should have a proper Unkie.

There’s also the weather. Tomorrow it’s going to be 79/26 degrees and sunny. And also the next day.

Living in Hungary helped me appreciate the sun. Now I am a glutton for it. I want to be riding my bike and my skateboard every single day, or in the car with the windows down and the stereo up loud, or sitting shotgun rolling down Rodeo or Sunset or the PCH. I will need more t-shirts with funny things written on them. And I want to work with the sun, become business partners with the ultimate source of all the energy and life on this entire planet. The past is indeed the future.

I’m going to do my best to blog the trip, from preparations (I’ve already bought a GPS and arranged places to stay along the way) to move-in at my presently non-existent first sublet. If anyone has any contacts, friends, suggestions, fun things to do or see, secret bars or used-clothing stores, hella dope slang, job leads having to do with renewable energy, art projects, flash mobs, Californian recipes (vegetarian, fish ok), surf/skate shops, condos at Mammoth/Tahoe (with or without jacuzzi), movies, music or anything else they’d like to share, I would love to hear from you.

You can write me at info@what-what.com or my other addresses if you know them.

P.S. Those that hollered that I forgot about the Biggie track with the same title, you know why I’m going back to Cali. Strictly. See you when I get there.

Welcome back!

No, you haven’t clicked on the wrong bookmark – this is the one and only What-What.com; I’ve just given it a long-overdue theme update.

[Warning: Geek-out area starts here] After scouring for hours on the WordPress Themes area, trying theme after theme both there and here – even going so far as to tweak various aspects of the html to fit the basic tenets of my visual style for this blog, such as proper width (for fitting photos and videos), sidebar composition, removal/obfuscation of various linklove items, header resizing and so on – I finally (on page 17, of 34) came across this theme, called “Ahimsa”, which struck me as being almost precisely the look I had going with the previous theme (called “Borderline Chaos”, may it rest in bits and peaces), but in a brighter, rounder and way-more web 2.0 friendly package. I think it fits so well that I’m even leaving in the coder’s linklove (see bottom right)! I also kept a few other themes in case this one begins to grate in a few weeks. [Geek-out area ends]

The big thing that this update allows me to do is use Widgets, which are various sidebar items, in a much more flexible way. And if you don’t like that sidebar, you can even hide it by clicking on the label at its top left. Sweetness.

The last thing to know is that the theme is optimized for Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Sorry Explorer, you’re way too square!

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest here.

UPDATE: The masses (well, a measly 22 of you – God this is pointless, isn’t it?) have spoken! The What-What favicon winner is ‘Glasses Stencil’! It should appear in your browser/favorites menu shortly. If not, you may have to clear the browser cache (a.k.a. ‘Delete Temporary Internet Files’).

“Hi, I’m the What-What dot com favicon!”

Previously:

So it’s long past due for me to add a “favicon” to this site. What is a favicon, you ask? A favicon is the little icon that appears next to the web address of a website, as well as on your favorites list. It adds a small visual distinctiveness to an otherwise cluttered mess of text-based links.

See some examples of where favicons go by clicking here and here.

I have gone through a lot of my photographs from over the years and come up with a few ideas, all of which I feel describe myself and/or this website in some way. Vote for your favorite, or if none of them really mean anything to you, suggest a concept in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Here are the candidates:

“He-No” face – a Japanese way of drawing a face using hiragana

“Rebel stencil” – from Kuta Beach, Bali

“Glasses stencil” – from above the tunnel in Budapest

“Lenin Sun” – from Statue park, Budapest

“Lotus” – from somewhere in Japan

“Fish graffiti” – from Padova, Italy

“Peace rap” – from somewhere in Romania

One thing to keep in mind is that a favicon is displayed usually at 16×16 pixels, or one-quarter the size of what you see here. That’s the reason I’ve kept them so small.

 Loading ...

Or at least not like this. Yeah dude!

Sauteed Baby Bok Choy, Garlic and Portobello Mushrooms

I discovered this dish when I lived in San Francisco in the summer of ’69, I mean, ’01, as a student on Trinity’s now-defunct San Francisco program, where I stayed in a historic mansion with a live-in chef named James, learned about sixties counterculture (read into that whatever you like), got addicted to Counter-Strike and wrote my final essay about the evil that is Disneyland, after four grueling days of roller coasters, that is.

As nobody knows, San Francisco has an incredible Chinatown, and the restaurants there are probably some of the best on this side of the Pacifico. I used to cruise on my own in those days (ha, not like now, no sirree) and I popped into the most non-descript basement I could find and ordered up a vegetable I’d never heard of. (This was the summer when my vegetarianism became what it is today, which is to say, lacking.)

Bok Choy is Chinese for “cabbage”, which is exactly what it sounds like. Portobello mushrooms are Whole-Foods speak for “bourgeois”, and they even came pre-sliced. Neither of these items could be found in either Japan or Hungary, which is yet more proof of how Obama has saved us all. Garlic comes from heaven, and it can be found in Hungary, where it is called “fokhagyma”, and Japan, where it is referred to as “ninniku”. I don’t know what “nin” means, but “niku” means meat. See what I said about vegetarianism?

We’ll be pairing this dish with unsalted white rice, which is how the Chinese would do it, and we should all begin learning a lot more about China these days. Anyway, the vegetables themselves will not fill you up, so a carbohydrate is necessary. Remember to eat every last grain, or you will be disrespecting the poor farmers who broke their backs planting, harvesting and de-shelling that rice, not to mention carrying it all the way from China to Fresh Pond Circle. Recipe after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many reasons why Halloween rocks: candy, costumes, leaves, candy, friends, parties, candy, girls in hot costumes, slime, zombies, candy, pumpkins – I could go on. Tonight I won’t be around to hand out the loot to the kiddos, but you know I gotta represent:

Did I mention candy?