entirely safe and fun

He rolls one deep in the club. No posse.

At Gundlach-Bundschu, Sonoma.

I am thirty years old. I have used my time adventurously: whitewater boating, downhill skiing, martial arts, and so on. And through all of these adventures, I have managed to avoid reporting to the emergency room for even a single stitch. This weekend, I managed to slice my hand open on a broken glass while doing the dishes, requiring two stitches. What kind of world do we live in, where a man can spend several years of his life safely engaged in mixed martial arts — no-holds-barred fighting with other full-grown men — but be sent to the hospital while cleaning a water glass? I have jumped off cliffs wearing skis! I have paddled rafts through rapids where people drowned the week before, where rivers break boats over rocks with irresistible force!

And this is where regression to the mean chooses to draw the line — at the sink.

Medallions of pastured pork in a reduction of rosemary- and sage-infused zinfandel with dried cranberries. These are served on a bed of mushrooms and leeks in a sautée, with a side of lemon-braised carrots and beets, and salad of bitter greens.

FTW note - Virtually none of the ingredients have traveled more than fifty miles to be on this plate; some have traveled less than fifty feet.

Not like last time (in general, I avoid believing things said by “fun tribes of ravers” (see also here)). For real this time. The question now becomes “How many DJs in the US will think it’s hilarious to play L.A. Style’s brain-dead 1992 single ‘James Brown is Dead’? And are they right?”

Plastic (link probably doesn’t work), participatory media pioneer and collaborative “my other blog” for hundreds of regular posters, is down again. Distinguished by the generally high quality of discussion compared to community sites such as slashdot, and the low incidence and visibility of trolls, plastic.com is, or maybe was, the cyberspace perch of choice for literate English-language users. But now it’s down with no signs of life. Sigh. I miss you, Plastic. Come back.

During previous downtimes, users gathered on the Plastic IRC server at chat.plastic.com to collectively bemoan the loss of their neighborhood bar/speakers’ corner, but now that’s down too. The most public gathering places left to us are the wikipedia Talk page for plastic.com (not much activity) and the blog “Waiting for Plastic” (not much activity there, either). With two availability lacunae in one month, the regulars seem demoralized. My most cherished hope in this regard is that the site will return soon, with minimal loss of good, regular users, but the site’s operator, Carl Steadman, is better known for top-notch product (the very late, intensely lamented suck.com springs to mind) than for working quickly.

It would be nice if Carl would make some kind of public statement in a Google-able location about the disposition of the site. Please, Carl? If you see this, could you please issue some kind of encyclical to guide the faithful?

In the meantime, I’ll be doing my one-legged Plastic Come Back dance.

update: chat.plastic.com is back up as of 14:00 or so. Dance must have worked.
20 June 2006 update: It appears that many have given up on Plastic in absence of any announcement from its management. The population has begun gathering again, reluctantly in many cases including mine, at www.treesandthings.com.
20 June 2006 update again: the Plastic IRC server is back up, with an announcement claiming that the site will be available again soon - soon enough, I hope.

Right now, over at Achewood, one of the finest story arcs in web comics appears to be wrapping up. Coverage of the Great Outdoor Fight (”Three Days! Three Acres! THREE THOUSAND MEN!”) began on 25 Jan 2006 (link to first strip) and is ongoing. Read it now and you’ll be able to say that you saw it while it was still on the front page. You’re already too late to have been reading it before it was cool. Achewood is the most consistently readable webcomic. Sometimes I’m embarassed to find myself reading a Penny Arcade strip (not often); occasionally The Order of the Stick is clunky. Achewood is not just funny, it’s playful and even revelatory.

Following up on my last post - Sadly, I couldn’t find my picture of the “Saint of the Month Club” reliquary, but among my pictures from a trip to Italy in 2002, I did find a sort of modern equivalent. This stunningly tasteful glass Moses - this stunningly tasteful near-life-sized glass Moses, in fact, about five feet tall - was photographed in Venice (rather than Florence, but sometimes you gotta cast a wider net) at a random glass shoppe near St Mark’s Square. I imagine that if the later Medici could have purchased it, they would have, putting it as a devotional image right in one of Uncle Lorenzo’s stuffy old chapels. It fits right in with some of the religious tchotchkes in the Silver Museum.

On a wholly different, but still Venetian note, the water-bus equivalent of “Mind the gap.” Or maybe…

• “Exercise caution while grooving.”
• “Yield to passengers in clown shoes.”
• “Carry giant triangles on shoulders only while boarding.”