DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I got to the diner at 8am. My normally-punctual friend (well, frankly, he’s abnormally punctual) was not there. I waited for a few minutes, chatted with the cook, and then decided that my friend’s absence could be due only to my failure to understand our plans. So I hopped back into the car and drove to the other diner.

On the way down the street, I saw my friend driving toward me, or rather toward the diner I’d just left. I’d had the right place after all; he was late for the second time in five years. (I don’t consciously keep track of these things… but I think it’s natural to remember the odd events, like when a politician does an honorable thing or a big company acts in the consumer’s favor.) Anyway, I spun around and followed him to the diner.

I know this story isn’t very interesting yet. Bear with me. It will get better, or at least longer. Did you have something else you had to get to?

There was a delay in the parking lot, some kind of confusion with a car stopping and people getting in and out. This cost me a few seconds. My companion was visible through the door, ordering breakfast at the counter. I’d hoped to catch him at the counter so I could put my order in at the same time. But the guy getting out of the car, tying up traffic (such as it is in the mostly-empty parking lot of a tiny diner in a small town), walked inside and formed a line at the counter.

I debated — line up as #3, or walk to the front to join my friend? It could be argued that my friend was holding a place in line for me. It could also be argued that, as I’d been there way before any of these people, I had some residual right to order food early. And finally (and conclusively), it could be argued that I didn’t feel like waiting for the guy who had been causing trouble out in the parking lot, what with his people getting in and out of the car and blocking me from pulling in. So I walked ahead of him and ignored the visual daggers he was shooting at me.

I began to order when “EXCUSE ME DIDN’T YOU SEE ME IN LINE HERE?!” It was the rudest thing I’ve heard around town, ever. Most people here are exceptionally polite. This loudmouth must have been a tourist.

But I felt some guilt; maybe I had unfairly cut in line. There was no huge downside to taking the civil route here. I stepped aside, did my best to smile, and encouraged him to go ahead of me. But I admit I festered a bit, there in the second place in line, because I don’t like being yelled at.

And then a great thing happened… the guy’s wife came in from parking the car, and she cut in front of me to join him at the counter! Clearly, the gracious thing to do would be to allow it without a word. Of course he was holding a place for her. Friends and spouses join one other in longer lines than this in venues all over the world. I bit my lip, struggling not to shout at her, “Excuse me, didn’t you see me in line back here?!” My better nature (don’t laugh) won out; I said nothing. Maybe, in a quiet moment while he’s alone with his thoughts, this lout would see the irony.

The cook brought my food out first anyway.

There was a time when Linux was not just an operating system, but a ticket to Wall Street success. Remember Red Hat, Slashdot, Corel, and the leader of the acquisition-and-IPO pack, VA Linux, whose stock opened with a record-setting gain of 700% and hovers now at NASDAQ’s delisting point, $1/share. (A plot of LNUX share prices so effectively encapsulates the term “dot bomb” that it would send Edward R. Tufte into spasms of joy.) At the time of those acquisitions and IPOs, all sorts of companies were touting Linux, even if it was only peripherally related to their core business, in hopes of pumping up their own image (and share price).

So it seemed like a time warp today to learn of a company called Linux Motor Corp. They look like just-another hosting company (which, from what I can tell by the “pervasive thinning” in the hosting industry over the past two years, has not been a sound business model for a long time either), but dressed up in “open source” robes in hopes of favorable treatment by analysts. But I’m not an authority on these things, so forget my impressions and focus on the issue at hand: linuxmotor.com is run by spammers.

I received an email spam from Marc Gomez of Linux Motor, promoting the company’s web-hosting options. The message was sent to one of my domain-registration addresses. This implies that Linux Motor is harvesting email addresses from “whois” records — a traditional spammer technique for email-address collection.

Now for the irony: if you want to host your website at Linux Motor, you have to agree to their Terms of Service (local mirror), which state in part:

As a provider of Internet network services and management, Linux Motor considers it an obligation to put an end to Spam.

The policy continues with some great stuff: immediate account termination for spammers, to pick one example. They take a strong stand against spam. So I have to wonder, why doesn’t Linux Motor follow this policy themselves?

I’d suspect that some marketing guy acted on his own in launching this spam campaign, except that the name on the spam belongs to the CEO of the company.

Also here’s a confusing sight that tends to cloud Linuxmotor.com’s endorsement of Linux and Open-Source software: not only do they offer Windows 2000 (note: not open-source) as a server OS, they list it under the heading “Linux Hosting.” Elsewhere on the page they list Windows 2000 under “Linux Support.” Err, what? Is this a simple page-design mistake, or evidence of misleading and opportunistic branding?

“A study of affluent Bay Area residents who were seeking health benefits by eating lots of fish found that they were also loading up on toxic mercury.”

It’s unfair, in a cosmic sense, that people who are trying to take responsibility for their health get caught in a trap like this. And it’s a pity that the folks who stuff their snouts in the fast-food slop trough two or three times a day will use this story to justify their dangerous addictions — “These super-size fries may not be very healthy, but at least I won’t die of mercury poisoning…” Feh.

Anyway, if you eat fish, especially swordfish, sea bass, halibut, or tuna (including canned tuna), you need to read this article: Rich folks eating fish feed on mercury too: ‘Healthy diet’ clearly isn’t

The study mentioned in the Chronicle article is supposed to have been published in the November issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, but I’ve been unable to locate it online. There is good background information on the controversy (and, yes, there’s always a controversy) in this AP story on ENN.com: Research of mercury contamination leaves huge gaps in knowledge.

A few weeks ago a friend asked what makes French bread into “country” French bread. It seems to me, from having baked a few hundred loaves of it, that “country French” bread is white bread with a handful of whole grain thrown in. The result is a loaf of white bread with little specs of dark stuff. Depending on the coarseness of the whole grain, the specs can actually look like dirt.

This strikes me as appropriate, because when I think of “country” the main image is of the land — farms, fields, dirt roads. Soil is so central to country living, it seems, the residents even put it into their bread. If you ever see a loaf that advertises itself as providing a “taste of the country,” be aware that this may be more literal a promise than you expect.

Germans have taken this concept to an extreme. They favor heavy breads which reverse the “country” proportion — they contain perhaps a handful of refined flour amid several pounds of whole grain berries and seeds. The result, “Vollkornbrot,” is so dense it must be sliced thinly lest the slab implode from its own mass. Connoisseurs claim they chew the bread slowly to savor the layers of subtle flavor brought on by the wild-yeast starter, the slow fermentation, and the organic grains. But, really, they’re chewing slowly so they don’t bite down hard on an under-hydrated rye berry to end up sending several hundred dollars worth of dental appliances back to the bodyshop for a frame-straightening and a new coat of paint.

Whenever I make Vollkornbrot I am shocked anew at how dense and leaden it is. I call it “brick bread,” based on the assertion that a loaf of it makes a suitable replacement for foundation material, e.g. if you’re building a bomb shelter or, say, town, and you end up short one cinderblock, you could just mortar in a loaf of this stuff and no one would ever know the difference.

Most folks would resent being treated as a stereotype. Me, I sort of enjoy it.

I was cooling off at the gym, breaking one of my New Year’s Resolutions by reading celebrity news (Entertainment Magazine — could have been worse; could have been People), drenched and steaming after finishing my treadmill session, when a diminutive woman approached to ask a favor. “Could you go sweat somewhere else,” I expected her to say, for I was sitting in the only chair in the room.

This single chair is usually covered in clothing because many inconsiderate gym patrons use it to store their jackets and sweatshirts while they work out. There are two locker rooms provided for the express purpose of storing jackets and sweatshirts, but the locker rooms are about 10 steps away, apparently too far to go, and anyway, it isn’t as if any of these people came in to get exercise.

This particular day, the chair was only partially covered in clothes, and so I sat on it (and them), reasoning that if people disliked having sweaty guys dripping on their jackets they could instead stash them safely in a locker. It’s a sort of conditioned-response experiment; if it doesn’t work I’ll have to break out the electrodes.

Anyway, when the woman approached I suspected that I’d sat down on her coat. But in fact she had a different concern; she wanted to borrow my muscles. One of the other patrons had apparently left the 35-lb plates on the Smith press, and this woman was afraid she was not strong enough to remove them. She’s tiny — her biceps are about the same circumference as my wrists.

The best part about being asked to help was realizing that, of the ~33814080 remaining minutes I plan to live, I would otherwise have spent another one reading about Spider-Man. Yikes. She interrupted me just in time.