DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Do the planet a favor today and click on over to the UCS’s Earth Day Challenge.

I think Scott Nathanson of the UCS is right — most Americans have no idea Toyota makes a hybrid minivan. I’d probably have bought one instead of the station wagon if I could have.

The toyota.com website has an undated press release about the Estima Hybrid Minivan, but no pictures or specs.

Hello Toyota, could someone take my order please?

parsley
hard-boiled egg
pickle
French fries
slice of tomato
chicken
tuna

…or first names from the personalized souvenirs at Cuxhaven harbor

Bernd
Jorg
Krawumm
Ernst
Krch
Rong
Flupp
Joachim
Wumms

1. The carpets: The 500 West Hotel was built in 1924. I think this is when the carpets were put in. I suspect they may have been listed with the National Register of Historical Artifacts, as that would explain why they haven’t yet been hauled into the desert and summarily burned.
   
2. The bathrooms: The hotel website makes impressive claims about them:

   Every bathroom is lockable, self contained and private. Our professional housekeeping staff restocks and cleans every bathroom around the clock, 24 hours a day. If you think the bathroom at your home is clean, wait until you enjoy one of ours!

   Don’t believe the hype. At one point I hung a dirty towel in one bathroom as a test; it was still there the next morning. Convenient, in one sense, but sort of gross in another.

   Some of the bathrooms are worse than others, not because they’re more soiled, but ironically because they’re more clean — due to the wall-mounted Ecolab dispenser that squirts disinfectant into the room… and its occupants.

3. The irons: burned and sticky. I went for the wrinkled look.
   
4. The broken elevator: Actually, the fact that this one was out of order could be considered a safety feature, considering how badly the other elevator shakes.
5. The nearby train crossing.
   
6. The expired safety permit for the one elevator that still works.
   
7. The flaky wifi connection.
8. The mattress condom.
   
9. The apparent hotel policy of 1 blanket per guest. Requests for extras will be met by front-desk staff with a cheerful smile, a scratch of a pen on a scrap of paper, and … actually, that was the end of the exchange.

   Which brings us to:

10. The indifferent desk clerks: They smile, they nod. They don’t produce clean irons or spare blankets.

    On the other hand, they did promptly call the San Diego police when one of the guests threatened to break down the door of her neighbor.

So, you get what you pay for. At $50/night, the 500 West is one-sixth the cost of some of the other hotels in the area. It’s the most affordable, or even the only affordable hotel downtown. But ultimately the question of whether it’s worth it cannot be easily answered… at least not until my pathology report comes back.

In a conversation about music recommendation services — LivePlasma, Pandora and the Music Genome Project, Last.fm, and the like — Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz.org relayed an idea that I found immensely appealing and maybe a little frightening too. It goes like this:

Invite a few close friends over. Have each bring a few songs that carry some personal significance. Have each friend introduce their songs, telling why each one is important and what to listen for. And then listen.

Impose no restrictions on what qualifies a song as significant. Paraphrasing Mr. Kaye, whether it’s because someone played the song for three days while crying his or her eyes out when a relationship ended, or because s/he just thinks the drum part is really cool… it’s all equally valid.

Robert acknowledged that one of the challenges is getting people to listen. If the group talks through the music, you’ve missed the point.

I find this idea deeply compelling, perhaps because it recalls a related activity that (as Robert observed) nobody does much of after college — namely, sitting down to actively consume music. This is absolutely true in my case. Although I have music playing most of the time, I’m invariably doing something else while it plays, even if that something is analysing the mix. This is a significantly different sort of listening; moreover, it is one which is less enjoyable than the sort of abandonment of consciousness that used to accompany music listening. I guess I’m a bit nostalgaic for the days when I made time for it.