Magic Spot Flowing

I can’t resist:

Now consider again Skinner’s sentence:

Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale.

This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of situations in which justice has little to do with a disobedient whale. Equivalently, there are no situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale, in which justice doesn’t have little to do with a disobedient whale.

Earlier today I read one of the weekly emails from my VP and found myself thinking, there are some things that really don’t make a lot of sense without context and sound very strange and funny when presented alone. And I think justice not having anything to do with a disobedient whale is definitely one of them.

I’m not generally a fan of single-purpose gadgets, but when they’re eminently effective and will get a lot of use, I’m down. Garlic press? Oh yeah. Chain scrubber? HELL yeah.

One of my Nashbar purchases was the Park Cyclone Chain Scrubber. Chains are just a bitch to keep clean, in my experience. I’ve done okay with Maia so far because I only ride her in dry conditions, but the commuter bike gets ridden in the wet and I don’t necessarily take care of its every little ding and bit of gunk. The chain was horribly encrusted with gunk that I despaired of getting out, despite regular attempts to clean it.

The scrubber works pretty darn well. I tested it on Maia first to get the hang of it, and got a lot of dirt off there. The chain still benefited from a good wipedown with a cloth after, to get gunk out of little corners and give a general once-over, but it was much easier to deal with.

Then I took it outside to Minerva, along with a ton of degreaser. I had to run it many times over on the chain, vigorously, then wipe off the chain and cogs, then run it many times over again with a clean apparatus and degreaser. Finally the chain appeared from under the gunk and actually began to look truly clean! I’m hoping that regular sessions with the scrubber will keep me from having to deal with so much accumulated gunk again.

I did end up revising my 101 goals, and I’m feeling much better about them. Many of the biggest changes I made were to change “Do all of this” to “Do N of this”, and that had a bigger psychological effect than I realized it might. Knowing that instead of cooking all the rest of recipes from Vegan With a Vengeance I’ve now picked 25 that particularly appeal to me (I plan to do 20 of them) makes me a lot more excited about doing them, because I know they’re the ones I’m excited about. Likewise for Stairway Walks of San Francisco — I know all the stairway walks in that book are nifty, but knowing I can finish that one by just picking a small variety that particularly appeal to me makes things easier, more fun, and more concrete.

In fact, I’ve already got ingredients for two new recipes this week: orange-glazed beets and sweet potato hash with five-spice and watercress. And per Shari’s request I may post pictures, even if it isn’t very photogenic in the end.

My previous experiences with Comcast customer service haven’t been too bad, but I had an annoying one this weekend.

First, I got an online chat representative who wouldn’t really tell me anything useful about my bill changing, and referred me to my local service center. He admitted the bill did not make sense to him and that I had been on a promotion, but would not do anything to tell me whether I was still on the promotion or not, or whether I could get on a new one if not.

When I called the local service center the next day, during their listed business hours, I navigated fully through the phone menu, only to find out they were closed during their listed hours.

I wrote an email to Comcast complaining about this. I received three “responses” from them before I received one that was vaguely helpful. The first two said useless things like, here are more service centers near you (where by near they mean, you could drive to them), and yes, their hours are what you said and they haven’t changed. The last one proffered the lame suggestion that maybe (maybe? why don’t you just call them and find out?) they were having a meeting.

Maybe they were, but their message should be changed to say “We are temporarily closed, please call back in X hours.”

I ended up getting another live chat representative who was a bit more helpful, but the whole experience has lowered them in my eyes from “pretty good customer service” to “on the whole rather annoying to deal with”.

My dad is quoted and pictured in The New York Times today!

He registers a complaint that his first quotation was incorrectly reproduced by the reporter, because he never would have said that someone “inferred that she believed”; rather he said that he “inferred from her comments that she believed”.

I’ve been keeping a list of my 101 with all the completed goals removed on my wall over my desk to remind me of what to try next. Today I put up a picture using the same thumbtack that I wanted to look at for a while, of Candace Wiggins (Stanford star basketball player). It was in the Stanford Daily when I picked it up for some light reading recently. I find the picture compelling in its mixture of human power, triumph, joy, and determination. But it also occurred to me that covering over my 101 acknowledges something I’ve realized in the back of my mind for a while: my 101 is stalled.

A lot of things I’ve been trying to get done are stalled, some for boring reasons like I’ve been working a lot or I forgot. But some seem to be stalled because right now I’m not in a mode where I can deal with things that require a lot of overhead. I’ve had trouble trying to get more organized at home and work, trouble getting excited about meal planning and cooking, and been more borderline on timely completion of house and finance chores. I don’t exactly know why that is, though I have a suspicion it’s because I’m dealing with some personal things that require a lot of internal overhead and so I just don’t have a lot to spare to deal with other things.

I also think it’s worth asking myself if I just don’t want to do some of the 101 anymore, or if I need to clean up the goals that are overwhelming so that they’re more manageable. Or if I even don’t want to do the project at all anymore because I need to focus more and having 101 goals (well, about 75-80 now) is just too overwhelming. I did realize that I put a lot of goals that have to be done repeatedly or completely, instead of picking a smaller number of the same thing to complete. The fact that I still haven’t completed about 75% of the goals even though a whole year has passed indicates that it’s not going to add up easily. It’s not supposed to be easy but it is supposed to be fun, and it doesn’t feel fun right now.

And part of the problem is tracking and blogging it, too. I don’t really plan to 100% blog it, but if I skip too much I have a hard time remembering what I’ve done so far and what I haven’t, and then the posts themselves tend to take a long time and are often, I think, a little bit boring because I go into round-ups instead of detailing the interesting aspects of something.

For now I think I’ll try paring it back and see how that goes, but I think won’t be surprised or (ideally) disappointed if I end up needing to focus more energy on a smaller number of things and ultimately not being able to complete it.

Not sure there’s anything to say about this except, what the fucking fuck? This is worse than the Orange County Register article where an SFPD officer described letting other officers (and any other confidential plate holders, some of whom are things like museum staff) run red lights without penalty as a “professional courtesy” — and that one was bad enough to cause me to write a letter to my State Senator (Joe Simitian, totally a “there oughta be a law” guy — my tag on the letter was “There ought not to be a law”).

I got my second order from Bike Nashbar today and most of it looks fine, but I must say I’m extremely disappointed with the capri-length bike pants I ordered and will definitely be returning them. They’re Nashbar brand and were cheaper than I’m used to (my experience is that good tights run $70-90 unless on sale so I guess capri-length should be a bit cheaper), so I was tempted into ordering them. Never again. As soon as I touched them, I could tell they were thin and scratchy. They have seams right up the inner thighs that scratch when you put them on, and the padded seat is made of poor-quality foam and badly stitched.

Crafted from a blended nylon/Spandex/polyester fabric with a soft, textured interior to create a lightweight, yet warm knicker that wicks moisture away from the body to keep you dry and comfortable. The padded chamois prevents chafing and hot spots for increased comfort.

Yeah. Not so much. Soft and textured equals scratchy, and I don’t think that the foam in the seat meets anything but the vaguest of specifications of “padded chamois”.

I haven’t had the greatest of experiences with Nashbar so far, but most of the stuff they’ve sent has been of acceptable quality, if poorly advertised (not explaining that the rack I ordered was not vertical storage even when I asked and inconsistent offering of weight details on locks) but this just irritates me, both literally and figuratively. I’d rather give my business to local bike shops if Nashbar doesn’t have their act together; at least I don’t have to deal with shipping and return shipping.

Update: I wrote a snarky email to Nashbar Customer Service (including the phrases “this description is poetic but totally inaccurate” and “such poor quality as to border on being defective”) and they’ve offered to pay for the return shipping by allowing me to label the item defective, as I requested. I appreciate their willingness to own their error.

The day I would have had to contact Terry to return Meg passed quietly on Saturday without me doing anything of the sort, so I’m now the happy owner of three bikes. And I need to start outfitting Meg appropriately, because today when the trains were late I opted for Maia instead because she has head and tail lights, proper pedals, and comfy bars. Using the Bontrager bars after a few times of using the Salsa’s really cleared that one up for me. They just feel right. I’ll be off to Mike’s Bike’s this weekend to talk to them about remedying those lacks on Meg.

I rode both ways today and as a result got home very tired and have done virtually nothing since. I’d love to be in such great shape that making two 14 mph-average 10-mile trips (true average speed 12 mph but moving speed of 14) didn’t leave me in a mood to do nothing, which probably means I should do it more often!

In other happy news, I’m 99.99% over the flu now. I can still do the hacky-sounding cough, but I’m not coughing regularly or finding gunk in my throat and chest anymore. Woo!

Back at the beginning of this blog’s existence I wrote some about Barry Schwarz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Recently I’ve thought that maybe he should have written a bit more about when more is less. He does devote some space to the subject of how meaningless some of our choices turn out to be, how they are not really different from each other. In those sorts of cases he advises that you spend as much time as the thing’s importance merits (usually not much), pick something, and stick to it. But sometimes you can’t because there are no options that are remotely like what you want. This really came home to me in two cases recently.

In one case, I was at a grocery store near work, looking for pita crisps to eat with lentil dip. This store has about a third of one side of an aisle devoted to crackers, but the vast majority of these crackers, probably 2/3 of the total, are either Wheat Thins or Triscuits. There are also smaller satellite brands like Cheez-Its and Ritz and a small section of more gourmet brands like Kashi, Stoned Wheat Thins (not at all like normal Wheat Thins; also, not drugged), Carr’s water crackers, and other oddities. However, none of the oddities includes pita or bagel crisps. There really is very little variety in the offerings unless what you want in variety is endless types of Wheat Thins and Triscuits. Low Sodium, Low Fat, Herb, Parmesan…any flavor and variant you want, but they’re all hard, square, plain or flavored small crackers. Where is the actual variety, the different kinds of crackers? Confined to a tiny portion of the section, and not even including anything other than standard crackers. I wandered through the store looking to see if they had hidden them somewhere else. No luck.

In the second case we were at Target looking for straps that go on the back of your sunglasses and keep them from falling off. Despite offering three racks of sunglasses and a rack of reading glasses, Target does not stock these things. At all. Not in jewelry & accessories, not in pharmacy, and not in sports. I went all over the store looking for this very simple thing which would take up hardly a foot counter space next to the sunglasses if they would just freaking buy some and put them there. There are three racks of sunglasses that all look basically identical and block 99-100% of UV light. Do we need three racks of sunglasses, or could we maybe add one rack of glasses straps? Why not? Target has practically everything except fresh food and extremely large specialty items. Glasses straps do not fall into either category; they should stock them and offer customers one more actual choice, instead of three dozen more identical sunglasses.

As it turns out, if you want glasses straps for kayaking, you should go to the kayak place and buy them there. And I guess if I want pita crisps I have to go to the giant new Safeway, or buy pita at TJs and make my own! It’s not that there aren’t options, but there sure is poor offering of true options at many large stores.