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So it’s Wednesday, and I’m thinking I should write something for my journal, and as in all quests I take my first step: shove the plan aside and read my email instead.
But there’s nothing there, because I checked my email 10 seconds ago. And then I remember that Wednesday is “Cheap Eats” day, and I decide I’ll write about my celebrity neighbor and his irreverent foodie newspaper column, which is published Wednesdays in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Being constantly on guard for your welfare, and maximizing at all times your debris.com entertainment dollar (be a good lad now and click a banner eh?) (that’s a pitiful ad-revenue joke from the depths of 1999 for you) (you can forget, after that display, whatever it was I was trying to claim about providing anything resembling entertainment I guess) I decided to read today’s column before writing about it, although, really, the real reason was because it allowed me to postpone the somewhat arduous task of composing words for this space for a few minutes longer.
And then I got the shock of the week, besides last night at 2:30 AM when I was trying to sleep after having just seen Red Dragon and the noises outside the bedroom sounded like the neighborhood deer and turkeys but might also have been nutballs with buckknives and soft-palate defects sitting in a tree, when I read about myself in the second paragraph.
Honestly, I didn’t plan this. It’s just synchronicity.
Read about me (!) — Cheap Eats 10/9/02
Finally, after a year’s delay, the Triumvirat remasters are shipping. I know you’ve never heard of Triumvirat, but if you own any of these classic concept albums:
or, really, any neo-progressive rock from Yes, Genesis, Camel, Transatlantic, Spock’s Beard, ELP, Porcupine Tree, etc., then you ought to check out these two albums:
Nostalgia is powerful juju. A dozen friends, caught it its diamond-plated and keen-edged grip, were forced to strap drums about their persons and march in formation around a cold asphalt parking lot at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, just a few hours after having closed down area bars the evening before. This was described to me as fun, although that was earlier, before the hangovers and back pain had set in.
Still, the juju reached me up in the stands, and I had moments of regret about my decision to participate in the marching-band reunion only in my traditional capacities, drinking, storytelling, inspiring of embarrassed laughter. (Hey, it’s a knack.)
I have fond and vivid memories of my college years (and, given the types of recreation I pursued at the time, I have a number of other memories that come entirely from secondhand accounts) and none of it seems that long ago. That’s my subjective time. This weekend I got a faceful of perspective, and I realized, deeply and truly, what an old geezer I’ve become. And I don’t believe I’m going to age gracefully. This was proved over the weekend, when instead of pursuing activities suitable for my, err, current level of maturity, e.g. sitting around a warm fireplace with a blanket over my knees waiting for the kind nurse to come collect my teeth, I went carousing, and felt pain. After two such nights, I woke up to find my knuckles raw and bleeding — not because I got into a fight, not at all. I think it’s because I’d regressed so far the night before, my hands were actually dragging on the ground.
(The true explanation is even more pitiful: I’d forgotten to pack hand lotion. Sigh.)
I realized with dismay that the enormous pile of cash recently spent by my alma mater to remodel its stadium did not include sufficient budget for bathrooms. Or perhaps the designers were attempting to match the existing architectural style, and keep with tradition, for in the men’s rooms they’ve installed troughs in lieu of urinals.
There are a number of reasons why troughs might be appropriate, or even preferable. As one friend remarked, if a stadium patron is feeling discomfort and possesses an urgent desire to use this sort of facility, a trough tends to be more accomodating, in the sense that it’s somewhat easier to crowd around it without any of the social pressure that would prohibit the alternative (sharing a urinal).
One might suppose that troughs are more space-efficient than urinals. Looking at a long wall of troughs, it’s easy enough to imagine dozens of men standing elbow to elbow. But this projection is inaccurate. Indeed, I believe that the overall throughput of a trough-equipped restroom is lower than that of a more, or in this case less-traditionally fixtured restroom.
During my long wait in line, I immediately saw two reasons why. The first is that men tend not to want to stand too close to one another in the restroom. Lines had formed at 3' intervals — urinal spacing, I realized — and it was clear that everyone acted as if privacy partitions separated each line.
The other problem is more serious. I stood in line for nearly ten minutes, which is an interminably long time for a person who’d just sucked down two liters of water. There were only a handful of guys ahead of me, but each one took minutes: a few seconds to approach the trough and arrange the necessary interfaces as it were, maybe 15 seconds to actually urinate, and 90 seconds in between to excise whatever demons had taken over the circuitboard, to allow nature to complete its call. In two words, the trough system is crippled by stage fright.
That, or everyone had prostate trouble. Maybe next time I should use the restrooms in the student section.
OK, I’m better now. Feel free to rehash this analysis at your next office lunch gathering or cocktail party.
When I travel, I resist all conscious temptations to touch anything, especially my face. I don’t mean to sound all Howard Hughes, but I do think it’s possible to contract some bad afflictions in public areas, which are basically swimming in other people’s DNA. Judging from my experience of fellow travelers, I could contract grime, body odor, halitosis, poor fashion sense, or an accent.
So I’ve been amused and, as is more frequently the case, irritated by worldwide efforts over the past few years to fully automate public restrooms. For example, many airport sinks can sense when hands are beneath the faucet. The idea of this is brilliant — because if there’s one spot of concentrated filth in a restroom, it’s the faucet handle, as that’s the last thing everyone touches when their hands are dirty. These are so coated with noxious bacteria that there’s just no point washing your hands if you’re going to turn the water back off afterwards.
(Handy travel-safety tip: don’t touch the door handle either.)
The problem with the auto-faucet idea, as you have no doubt experienced, as that is is implemented poorly in almost all cases. Or am I the only person who invariably gets a sink that turns the water on and off randomly, or not at all, no matter how much I’m waving my hands and poking at sensors? Honestly, some of the sensors I’ve encountered are triggered by only one action: moving to the next sink in line.
Besides the auto-faucet, I’ve seen the toilets that flush automatically, and at totally random times, like when I walk past a row of them and they all flush in turn. I’ve seen the hot-air hand dryers that turn on and off automatically. What I like best about these is that they’ve allowed the dryer vendors to finally move to iconographic directions, a real improvement given that every single set of English-language dryer instructions on the planet had been defaced in exactly the same way (“1. Press butt. 2. Rub hands under arm.” etc.).
I’ve seen lights connected to motion sensors (which discourages loitering in the stall, I can tell you). And I’ve seen the latest innovation, the toilet that changes its own seat cover, although I think there may really only be two seatcovers in that machine, and they just switch back and forth. You can try this yourself — trigger the switch seven or eight times. I’ll bet you each one looks exactly the same! You’ve been warned.
