philly

I've seen this simple statement all over Center City in the last week or so. It seems to be a blow up of a smaller piece printed on newspaper. I think it's made on one of those machines that makes upscaled prints from a smaller image. I forget the name of them. I used to use one of them back at my old work study job down in D.C. at American University back in the day.

This pasteup is at South and 11th Sts.

***UPDATE***
Cool. More on the No War posters over at Philly IMC.

Holy fucking shit! Stop the presses! The Citypaper has redesigned their website. That disgusting tired ass lame as fuck website is no longer. It looks so much better. It has a nice wider more contemporary feel to it rather than the old 800px wide monitor assuming design scheme.

And it's got a comments section for each article taking what the Inky/DN have done on Philly.com a step further.

I have no idea when this change occurred. I'm not sure how long it's been since I checked the CP website. The days have blurred together in the last few weeks - by my count, I've worked 203 hours so far this month. And by my calculations, I'll be working another 24 hours or so Thursday through Saturday. But I digress…

Will Philadelphia Weekly get busy on a redesign now? I think the PW site looks nice, just the front page narrow column layout is annoying.

The search function on both sites blow goat balls. The CP search returns results with over 100% relevancy while not being relevant to what I searched. Searching for "Albert Yee" via CP's search returns this result at 180% relevancy instead of say this article or this piece or this article. And I know my name hasn't appeared in PW (except formerly in the masthead), but I do know that the search function for the site is bad. Using the Google Toolbar on top of my FFX browser and using the Site Search function is much better.

And I say this while clearly saying that I know JACK SHIT about coding a proper search functionality. I know PW has a tiny web staff [read: two], I'm assuming CP has just as few. Getting the site to look nice is wonderful. Being able to search the site for specific things would be incredible. One step at a time :)

I saw a commercial on the television a couple nights ago. It was for the new H2 or the H3, I don't keep track of those stupid fucking cars. Let me first say, why the fuck do you need such a stupid shitty car? If anyone who owns a Hummer is reading this - and is not driving one for military purposes - you're a fucking idiot, you stupid fucking schmuck.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way…

So this commercial showed a Hummer and the text or voiceover, I forget which, stated something along the lines of "They said we couldn't do it… A Hummer that gets 20 miles per gallon." [And I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that the 20 mpg number is for highway miles]

I almost threw up in my fucking mouth.

Twenty fucking miles to the fucking gal-fucking-lon? What kind of a fucking stupid fucking claim is that? Is twenty fucking miles to the fucking gal-fucking-on a fucking accomplishment?! Fuck you Hummer. Fuck you GM. It's genious campaigns like this and genious decisions to not go hybrid a decade ago which have lead to -$10B numbers.

And what kind of a completely fucking ridiculous public do we have where the ad wizards over at GM think they can unleash this campaign and we'll all eat it up like HOOOORRRAAAAAYYYY!!!! 20 FUCKING MILES TO THE FUCKING GAL-FUCKING-LON!!!! Let's go start another war! Woo hoo! I'm gonna go plunk $100 over at the gas station filling up my fuel efficient twenty fucking miles to the fucking gal-fucking-lon Hummer. You fuckers.

I'm gonna step over here and get on my liberal elitist high horse and preach how I don't have a car and haven't for about a year and a half now. I use public transportation, walk and bike just about everywhere. On occassion I use a car and when I do, it's through the ingenious PhillyCarShare of which I've been a member of for four months or so. I love it. Not having a car has been great. I don't miss not having one after growing up in the 'burbs and depending on one.

It's one thing to have/need a car. It's another thing to be a fuckwad and drive a Hummer and on top of that extol it's fuel efficiency at 20 fucking miles per fucking gal-fucking-on. Fuckers.

The commercial made me quite angry. Hummers are stupid. Really fucking stupid.

If I ever do meet a Hummer driver and s/he extols to me how it gets twenty fucking miles to the fucking gal-fucking-lon, I may indignantly punch them in the face and walk away without saying a word.

Went out to see one of my co-workers rock out with his band The End of Radio play at L'Etage on Sunday night. It was cool to see him out of the work element and rocking out. It was also cool to get out and see some good live music [yes they were good and I'm not just saying that]. I'd tell him/the world if I didn't like their sound, I won't "be nice" about things like that. Sometimes the truth hurts, but you gotta hear it. I don't sugar coat things.

They were good. I didn't catch the names of all their songs, but my favorite two were the last two of the set which were two new songs. Drums, lead, bass, synth and lead vocals is the make up of the band and it's a very nice mesh. Not too much of anything and no need for a second [rhythm] guitar or anything.

More photos up in aflickr set which are not post processed hence the redness which was due to the lighting inside.

I've been shopping at the Rittenhouse Farmers Market the past two weekends for our produce and good god is it tasty. Pictured above are five honey crisp apples, two heirloom tomatoes, two organic roma tomatoes, two white peaches and two asian pears. All locally grown!

We've already polished off the asian pears and I wolfed down the peaches. I've been working on the apples all week and we have the heirlooms and one roma left for cooking. Such a great selection every weekend at the market which runs from 10a to 3p on the north side of Rittenhouse Square right along the south side of Walnut St.

Go out and support the local farmers - they need all the help they can get - and get some ridiculously delicious produce!

NY Times opinon writer Frank Rich will be in town Tuesday evening at the Free Library at 19/Vine Sts. He'll be reading from his new book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina starting at 8pm. There is a $6/$12 entrance fee though. I'm not sure what the extra $6 gets you - a better seat?

More info on the book from the NY Times Book Review and NY Magazine's Fall 2006 Preview Guide.

I'm expecting a solid crowd to hear Rich speak. For those who aren't familiar with Rich's work, an excerpt from his editorial from Sunday's NY Times.

Three and a half years later, have we learned anything? You have to wonder. As the looting of the museum was the first clear warning of disasters soon to come, so the stuff that's happening at the museum today is a grim indicator of where we're headed in Iraq: America is empowering the very Islamic radicals this war was supposed to smite. But even now we seem to be averting our eyes from reality on the ground in Baghdad.

Our blindness back in April 2003 seems ludicrous in retrospect. As the looting flared, an oblivious President Bush told the Iraqi people in a televised address that they were "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity." Our actions — or, more accurately, our inaction as the artifacts of that great civilization were carted away — spoke louder than those pretty words. As Fred Ikle, the Reagan administration Pentagon policy chief, puts it in Thomas Ricks's "Fiasco," "America lost most of its prestige and respect in that episode."

That disaster might have been mitigated if our leaders had not dismissed the whole episode as a triviality. But Donald Rumsfeld likened the chaos to the aftermath of a soccer game and joked that television was exaggerating the story by recycling video of a single looter with a vase. Gen. Richard Myers defended our failure to intervene as "a matter of priorities" (we had protected the oil ministry). Lt. Gen. William Wallace, countering a wildly inflated early claim by a former museum employee that 170,000 artifacts had been destroyed, put the number of objects still unaccounted for at "as few as 17." (The actual number was closer to 14,000.)

The war's many cheerleaders in the press fell into line. In keeping with the mood of the time, administration enforcers like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan damned Mr. Rumsfeld's critics as fatuous aesthetes exploiting a passing incident to denigrate the liberation of Iraq. In a column in Salon titled "Idiocy of the Week" (that idiot would be me), Mr. Sullivan asked rhetorically who was right about "the alleged ransacking" of the museum, Mr. Rumsfeld or his critics? "Rummy, of course. He almost always is."

Dude tells it like it is.

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/NYT

It's September 23rd, there are sumo suits, a pig on a spit and tons of people in bier gartens. What could it be? Oktoberfest put on by Ludwig's Garten and the first annual Fall Fest.

I walked through the craziness for half an hour or so watching the madness. I think every single restaurant/bar located between 13th and 12th Sts and Chestnut and Sansom Sts were out. Tens of kegs were stacked against the outer walls of each establishment which were being emptied into the bellies of the Fest goers.

I passed by this pig on a spit in front of Ludwig's. It was still turning around 9p or so. I know that the party at Ludwig's wasn't supposed to end until 2a, but I have no idea if the pig was ever consumed. I hope so.

I had gotten up early to work an event at 10a so I was too tired to sit around and drink. But it looked like a blast.

I just heard from Chris over at MyDD.com that Russ Feingold will be in town on Monday giving a speech on restoring democracy at the National Constitution Center on 5th and Arch Sts. The speech begins at Noon, doors open at 11a.

The speech is to be broadcast nationally. I'm assuming on the 'SPAN.

I'm not the biggest Feingold rah-raher, but as of now, he's better than the rest of the bunch as far as I can tell. There should be a few bloggers from around the way there so there should be ample first hand coverage. The NCC also has a wireless network, but it's spotty, so we may or may not get liveblogging from whomever is there.

I finally got off my ass to get a PA driver's license on Tuesday. It wasn't too painful. Took a little over an hour around lunchtime over at 11/Market Sts. I'm now an official Pennsylvanian with my address on a photo ID instead of me having to bring my utility bills to prove residence.

They punched a hole in my NY license, but they gave it back to me so I'll have that for awhiles.

And I got carded for the first time with my new PA license today while going into Barristers for the Giants game. Felt funny reaching into my pocket and bringing out this foreign [to me] form of ID to show the bouncer.

Now I have the 215 phone number and a PA driver's license. What's next for me to become more of a Pennsylvanian? I'm not about to give into the accent though. That'll never happen. And I don't think I'm gonna magically start liking water ice either. Rooting for Philly sports team will take a few more years too. I'll still root for my Giants and Knicks for some time to come. I can't imagine not rooting for them.

Fucking Giants. Not showing up to play until well into the 3rd quarter and in the 4th quarter. Mistakes all throughout. Ugh. I caught the game starting late in the 1st quarter when the Gmen were already down three fucking touchdowns. Unacceptable. Plus Alexander was playing with a hurt foot! But Alexander at 75% is still a crazy good 'back.

I happily found my new bar for the rest of the Giants season - Barristers Bar & Grille is where I'll be every Sunday afternoon unless the Giants are on national TV - I'll just watch those at home and save some dough. I was downstairs with a [small] group of Giants fans watching the action on a nice plasma screen via sweet sweet NFL Ticket.

I had me an order of 30 wings which are 35¢ on Sundays. Not good not bad. $3.50 Yards ain't too shabby.