The funny pages
I read a handful of online comics regularly (and by “regularly” I mean “I read them the day they go up, thank you RSS feed”). My tastes are odd and eclectic, but I share with you anyway:
Hark, A Vagrant – Pop culture! History, sometimes Canadian! Fat ponies!
Meen Comics – Proof that truth is stranger than fiction, from a friend drawing under a pseudonym, which is how I know it’s true.
Oglaf - Gorgeously drawn and deliciously filthy. D&D meets NSFW. Start at the beginning, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
xkcd- Does anyone not know about XKCD by now? So smart that sometimes I don’t get the jokes. So spot-on that you won’t care that it’s stick figures.
What are your favorite online comics? I already know about Achewood and Cat & Girl; tell me more.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (3)Worth the wait
When I first moved to San Francisco in 1999, I received a special housewarming gift: a bottle of 1973 Inglenook Estate Bottled Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. The person who gave it to me had apparently worked at the winery during crush that year and had taken home several cases for his pains. He had no idea how the wine had held up after 26 years. And because I didn’t want to waste what could be an amazing experience, I didn’t open it. If I was alone and it was wonderful, I wouldn’t be able to finish it in a timely fashion, because I’m a lightweight. (And if I had friends over and it was terrible, we wouldn’t be able to drink it at all.) So I tucked it into the cabinet where I keep my wine rack, and I looked at it curiously from time to time, but I never seemed to find the right occasion to uncork it.
Earlier this week, though, my wine-loving friend Jon was in town. When I told him I still had the bottle, now 38 years old, he got the kind of hopeful look in his eye that I ordinarily associate with a black lab facing someone with a pocket full of bacon. With someone on hand to help me appreciate it properly, it was time to open that wine.
This proved to be easier said than done.
After removing the foil, we were relieved to see that the cork was still intact — but while the cork had held together firmly in the neck of the bottle, it was, shall we say, no longer structurally sound. Using the corkscrew merely drew up a core sample and scattered bits of crumbly cork across my countertop.
Stymied, we had to consider alternate ways to get to the wine. Shove the cork into the bottle? It would disintegrate. Try a cork puller? Ditto. We decided our only option was to go through the cork.
So we reapplied the corkscrew in order to bore a hole all the way to the bottom of the cork. Then, using 
a lacquered chopstick with a round point, we slowly wiggled the hole larger, trying to minimize the amount of cork dropping into the liquid. Eventually we had an opening of just under half an inch.
At this point, I put my nose to the bottle. One whiff and my eyes widened: it was still wine, not vinegar. I couldn’t wait to try it — but we still had to get the wine out of the bottle, and bits of cork out of the wine.
Lacking a carafe or a proper strainer to remove the crumbled cork that inevitably got into the bottle as we operated, we made do with my coffee pot and fine-meshed gold filter. It looked ridiculous.
It worked perfectly.
It was delicious. Almost like port. We polished off most of the bottle in an hour.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (5)Who was Grimes Posnik, part 2
A week ago, I bought a battered fountain pen at the Alemany flea market for $3. I can safely say I’ve gotten my money’s worth.
A quick search on Google turned up an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle. A quick email to the reporter who wrote the obit led to an hour with him over coffee. And that led to — well, read for yourself. And now, if you’ll forgive me my brevity, I have to get back to the flea market to return an old fountain pen to its rightful owner.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (3)Travel Tuesdays: fun with frequent flyer miles
In my determination to find ways to travel more often for less money, I just joined this new website called Travel Hacking Cartel. It’s all about earning and leveraging frequent flyer miles. They guarantee that if you spend 30 minutes a month applying their tips, you’ll earn 25,000 miles each quarter — that is, the equivalent of one free domestic round-trip ticket through most frequent flyer programs.
Joining involves subscribing on a monthly basis, but they promise you can cancel at any time with no hassles. I like no hassles, so I signed up last week at the $15/month level and poked around for a bit.
Right away, I learned three things that wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise:
1. Domestic US airlines often fall short on service compared to a lot of international airlines, but they’re the most generous with their frequent flyer miles, and they’re almost all in one of three alliances within which miles are interchangeable to some extent once you’ve reached a certain minimum number of miles. Thus you can redeem your miles on Delta for an award on KLM, because they’re both part of the SkyTeam Alliance. Or your miles on American for an award on British Airlines, because they’re both affiliated with OneWorld. Or your miles on United or US Airlines for an award on Lufthansa or SAS, because they’re all in Star Alliance. Why does this matter? Because it increases your options for getting where you want to go, and improves your chances of getting there in a bit more comfort and style.
2. Right now, Southwest is offering a credit card that gives you two free round trip flights as soon as you make your first purchase. Yes, it has a $59 annual fee and 14% APR, two unattractive traits in credit cards. On the other hand, you also earn points toward flights with every purchase, and if you pay it off monthly, you get the points without paying a penny in interest. And if you don’t use it at all, then cancel it when the year is up, you’ve still gotten two free round trips anywhere SWA flies for less than $30 per trip. Not too shabby if SWA flies somewhere you want to go, which (for me) it does.
3. If you use your American frequent flyer account to sign up for the AAdvantage Shopping Mall, you can earn AA frequent flyer miles by clicking through there to various online merchants. This may not be the most efficient way of earning miles at 3 or 4 miles per dollar spent, but it adds up over time — and I already shop with several participating merchants, like 6pm.com and Victoria’s Secret. Hey, I have to buy socks and underwear anyway, so why not pick up 100 miles in the process?
Travel Hacking Cartel is offering a launch deal of a two-week trial membership for $1 through March 14. The wording on the site is confusing; I think it’s just that the trial membership deal ends on March 14, but it seems to suggest that after that date, they’ll be closing enrollment completely for a while. If that’s true, you may as well splash out a buck just to get your foot in the door — I feel like I’ve already gotten my dollar’s worth, and it hasn’t even been a week yet.
<– This badge is an affiliate link. If you click through and decide to sign up, I earn miles, but if you don’t like affiliate links, I’ll be none the wiser if you go ahead and visit the site directly.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (2)Who was Grimes Poznik?
It was a beautiful day in San Francisco — freakishly beautiful, 75 degrees and clear in what’s ordinarily our rainy season — and I needed to be out and about in it. So Audi and I went to the Alemany Flea Market in search of, you know, stuff. They have lots of stuff at flea markets. She got some lovely costume jewelry. Her man Mark snagged a power saw. And I spotted a black Esterbrook fountain pen which the vendor sold me for all of $3.
Now, anyone who knows me knows I like vintage fountain pens. I have a special place in my heart for Esterbrooks because they were the Bics of their era — there are thousands of ‘em out there, readily available for $40 or $50 at most — and because they have little nib assemblies that just screw right out so you can swap in a new one with a different point if you like. I own two Esties myself (one belonged to my grandfather), so I know what little workhorses they are; that’s why whenever I see one, I snag it to sell on eBay to hobbyists more ambitious than I who want to do their own restoration work.
This one’s body was in rough shape, but the nib looked plenty salvageable, and I do love a bold stub nib. So home it came with me. When I got my find home and looked it over, I discovered a name engraved on the side, a very unusual name: Grimes Poznik.
Thanks to Google, I now know who Grimes Poznik was. It seems he died in 2005, a homeless, mentally ill addict. But before that, he was famous in the ’70s and ’80s as a San Francisco street musician called The Automatic Human Jukebox. Before that, he was a Cornell student, class of 1969, who got himself arrested at the infamous Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 for climbing up on a statue in Grant Park and playing “America the Beautiful” on his trumpet to accompany the rioting going on below him.
I learned all of this from an obit on the Cornell College website, which is the only hit Google turned up. (Edited to add: At some point he apparently changed his name to Poznikov, under which name I found his obit in the Chronicle.)
I know the pen I bought today is too battered to be worth much. But it occurs to me that Grimes Poznik has family members somewhere, and that maybe they’d like his pen back. I kind of want to have it restored so I can find them and return it to them properly.
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