This?

The guy across the street is driving me crazy. How he's not driving himSELF crazy I have no idea. Maybe he was already there.

He recently acquired this Mercedes diesel. It's a nice-looking car, body's in great shape. But it is very reluctant to start in the morning. Exceedingly reluctant. Fucker just won't go. So his response is to sit and grind the starter continuously for 15 solid minutes -- just hoping, I guess. Then when the battery's dead, he goes and gets his roommate to give him a jump, and he sits back in that car, and he starts grinding the starter again. Continuously. Forever.

I think what bugs me is that he grinds at this car  for no apparent reason. It's not going to start, but he persists. It's like some rote action with no particular idea that anything should come of it. Like some existential nightmare Kafka might have had after eating too much anchovy pizza for dinner, except that it's shared with the entire neighborhood. Every day. I feel like that starter is sitting there turning my brain over and over.

My boss sprang for the Google Search Appliance, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. Well, that and 2 years so far of good search results on the site, after languishing for years with an embarrassingly bad pretender. But wtf? You pony up your five-figure fee for the 2-year contract, and you get a big carton with the black box hardware and an install CD plus a few odds & ends. And you get a T-shirt. Because that's going to clinch the deal right there.  

So on Thursday I listened in on a webchat that a friend was helping to organize about how users might benefit from some 'curation' of the blurtstream from new-web sources, especially Twitter but also Facebook and wherever else. Considering the shelf-life of information in that little world, I'm sure my musings are woefully out of date and irrelevant 48 hours later. Nevertheless, this stuff is gnawing on my mind, and I'm going to have to blurt about it just to quiet the internal noise.

The Art Deco era was not a time of building boom in Denver, so we have few examples. One of those few is the beautiful sign & marquee for the Mayan Theater at 110 Broadway. The brick work and tile facing on the building also have some Deco detail that shows up only poorly here. I like this view of the sign peeking around the corner, for some reason, though -- shot from a corner table at the Hornet, 1st & Broadway.

So here's the letter I want to send to the governor & mayor. I've been cheesed off for a while about how they're trying to stitch together the budgets for which they're responsible from patches of parking fines, silly fees, and new & significantly increased penalties for all kinds of things. Your basic meter violation has doubled in price in the last couple of years, while the offensive nature of parking overtime has not appreciably changed. That's a clear attempt to cover a shortfall in the city's general budget, and I believe it's a dumb way to do the job. In particular, the penalties are onerous, because people often incur them because they could not afford to pay in the first place, so now they have to pay more, all so the official types don't have to risk an honest discussion of what everyone wants to spend and how much taxes will have to be to pay for that. Seems to me a crappy way to do the people's business, but I'm open to contradictory or contrasting opinions.

Note that the issue gained a higher priority because of my son's bonehead move that landed him in the penalty trap, but that's not really what I'm ranting about here. It's a story that illustrates a general point about how government structures its revenues.

Caption: Oh look, they're bringing back another Holstein. Can't they tell we're longhorns and she's not from around these parts? On the other hand, she's kinda cute . . .

I suddenly got tired of all the grey in the previous page design, then I set out to replace it. That took a while as I was semi-committed to build the page with DIV tags positioned by CSS rather than tables. The browsers interpret CSS positioning in different ways, however, so I had to futz with it for an inordinant period of time to get things to work well enough. I had it handled, I thought, then I logged in, and the skin header conflicted in all kinds of ways with the DNN admin panel at the top of the page. Bummer.

I might find some Charles Olson to read.

I picked the broken stool and sat down. It was far enough away from everyone else, and it felt right in the circumstances. I ordered the least bad beer I could and fumed at the bottles on the bar back, as the car sat cooling and fuming itsowndamndeadself across the street.