Here's some art car (and related) linkage. One of these eventuallys I'll get the rest of my Houston photos posted.

First up, a couple of things from Youtube (note: Youtube seems to sporadically not like Safari much -- last week it was working fine, over the weekend not at all; yesterday fine, today not so much... ymmv)
Here's a stroll down the lineup at this year's Houston Art Car Parade. If you skip in about 7 min. or so, there's a brief scene of UMJ driving past.
Also, a nice little bit of footage of the Button King, shot by our friend Dave (Aerocar) at last year's Charlotte event.

Finally, there's this -- absolutely the coolest art car accessory evah!!

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 28 may 06) ::

La Cantina :: Lila Downs
Afro Riddim Sessions, vol. 1 :: Ex-Centric Sound System
Son :: Juana Molina
Siete Rayo :: Descemer
Rosa :: Rosa Passos
the Echodelic Sounds of Future Pigeon :: Future Pigeon
Gulag Orkestar :: Beirut
Arriba Suena Marimba: Currulao Marimba Music :: Grupo Naidy
Sigil :: Nuru Kane
Broken English :: Karsh Kale

Probably because the weather's been running about 10 degrees hotter than normal lately, but the vegetables have really started to take off. Did up some temporary tomato cages (using the stakes & string method from last year). We'll see how that holds up. I have one snap-together plastic cage that I'm saving for the Super Sweet 100 but I might buy some more for the other plants if the homemade version doesn't work out.

Slate has a nice series of articles for the beginning gardener: part one, part two, and part three. There are, of course, a lot of places you can go to get this kind of info but I found this to be thorough and concise. Another thing I noticed is that our garden here has a lot of the same plants she recommends, inc. echinacea, rudbeckia, coreopsis.

It seems that today is one of only two days each year when the sun sets dead center on all the crosstown streets in Manhattan. Via Gothamist, here's some photos from flickr of Manhattanhenge.

There's a an ad running now, plugging ESPN/ABC coverage of the upcoming World Cup. It focuses on fans from Scotland. Lots of St. Andrew crosses, face paint, tartan, etc. (awww... lookit all the happy football hooligans). All good, right? Except the background music is the guitar riff from "I Will Follow." Which is a great riff, no mistake. Except, hey ESPN morons! U2 are fookin' Irish ya bastards. Ireland is not Scotland. Would it have been too much trouble to license "Fields of Fire"?!?

it's crap

Woke up this morning feeling sniffly and mostly craptacular. Meaning, alas, that I had to turn down a brunch invite. Given the rare appearance of social engagements in my life, I hate having to say no. But recuperating seemed a better choice. Okay so maybe that didn't need to stretch into an entire day of sitting around doing nothing. On the other hand, I have to work tomorrow and you probably don't so shut the hell up already...
Anti-royalists can just skip this next section. Found this on the BBC site the other day -- some really nice old photos of QE2, from a book recently published to commemorate her 80th birthday. On a related note, I recently saw a show on PBS about Windsor Castle which spent a lot of time w/ Prince Philip. He was pretty much exactly as curmudgeonly as his reputation (well, without the appalling racist quips which I've heard he's prone to). The best scene in the program, though, was a throwaway bit at the end of a segment about a polo match played on the grounds at Windsor which showed HRH getting into a car and driving away. It didn't even click with me at first that that's what was happening. Since I was seeing with my US eyes, it took me a sec to realize that she was getting behind the wheel, not into the passenger seat. You'd think the Queen would have someone to drive her around. (it's all good, tho... as long as she stays away from farmer's markets)

Another day, another playlist. Wrrld music this time. Played some Desmond Dekker and some Cheikha Remitti in honor of their recent passings. Alas, XDU does not have Sidi Mansour, the album Remitti did w/ Fripp in the early 90s (note to self: add that to the next music buy list), but we had a nice selection of Desmond Dekker stuff, inc. a recent cover of "the Israelites" by Apache Indian that he duetted on.

Cool old-timey stuff found on internets, pt 1 (via Gothamist): Macy's Thanksgiving Parade from the 1930s.

Cool old-timey stuff found on internets, pt 2 (via H. Trouser & Sarah): 17th century bloggin' w/ Samuel Pepys

Y'know, I love Bookslut but sometimes Michael Schaub comes across as an utter tool.

Here's the playlist from last night's show. Which was a pretty good one. I, of course, love the symmetry of starting and ending w/ "Caravan" covers. And I was totally thrilled by the Willie Nelson/Lila Downs segue, which only occured to me after "Pancho and Lefty" had started spinning. And any show that includes a French disco set is absolutely a good show.

2009 update: that site is now offline (as the site owner has apparently died). More info and current Towel Day updates here

Very pleased to find out that the Science Channel (Discovery offshoot) is showing Cosmos. Watching it now, I'm struck by how different Sagan's TV presence was from, oh pretty much anyone on the air now. He's almost wholly lacking the "postmodern" irony and self-awareness that's the dominant style today. And I say that as a big fan of Mythbusters, Colbert, Bourdain, etc, as someone who pretty much lives and breathes snark. Sagan's directness and sincerity, which made him such an easy joke-target back in the day, is one of the things so compelling about Cosmos. That and the fact that it's a show driven by Sagan's desire to know things and to teach in a way that makes it seem like he's learning things along with you. In today's climate of overwhelming willed ignorance, when it all too often feels like everything around us exists to hit us upside the head with a bat until we become stupid, it's refreshing to spend an hour in a place where being smart is good. Even if it's only on a 25 year old TV show.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 21 may 06) ::

Son :: Juana Molina
Arriba Suena Marimba: Currulao Marimba Music :: Grupo Naidy
Sigil :: Nuru Kane
Estudando o Pagode :: Tom Zé
Gulag Orkestar :: Beirut
Lunatico :: Gotan Project
Paris :: various
Echu Mingua :: Anga
Balancê :: Sara Tavares
Mande Wazy :: Wa-Zimba

There's an article in today's NYTimes about last week's art car parade. Nice article -- they talked to several folks we've met at previous parades and it's accompanied by a slide show which includes our friend Tim Klein's Yarn Car among others. I'd love to link to it but the Link Generator is no help this time. Feh!
Instead, here's the BBC's World Cup blog. Just 18 days until the matches start. I'm betting I'll be watching mostly on Univision. I suppose it's unlikely that FSC will be able to show any games; they're probably all locked up by ESPN/ABC.
And, just to achieve maximum diversification (and illustrate that the Link Generator isn't wholly useless), here's an article about migratory bird songs, complete w/ links to sound files. Like fun!

Moving on from reading to viewing, here's a couple of things to look at:
New Apple store opened in NYC yesterday. It's open 24/7 (yes, I'm appropriately envious). Check out these time lapse movies from the first 24 hours.
I've seen this blogged all over so you've probably seen it already. But it's worth another link. Go watch now

I don't know if it rises all the way to the level of a goal, but one of the things I'm trying to do this year is be less of an illiterate slob. I've already mentioned Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail which is still my favorite thing I've read this year. Seriously, you'll have way more fun reading this than you will at any Tom Hanks/Ron Howard movie. Another fun read was Cult Vegas, a look back at the Vegas-that-was. Mobsters, lounge singers, Elvis, the Rat Pack... what's not to love. While traveling last week, I read two books -- very different from each other, but both recommended. On the way out I read Frank Kelly Rich's The Modern Drunkard. Subtitled "A Handbook for Drinking in the 21st Century" it's a smartass celebration of all things alcoholic. On the way back I elevated the tone and read Daniel Boulud's Letters to a Young Chef. A bit slight perhaps and not as in-depth or as much fun as Jacques Pepin's the Apprentice but still an excellent read, esp. if you're an unreconstructed foodie.
On a food related, but non-book, note, Phat Duck is another blog so good it almost makes me lose the will to write. Mostly food-based, in this case pastry. In a way, it's the reverse angle of the Boulud book, the experiences of someone starting out in the restaurant biz. Esp. worth going back in the archives to April and May of last year, when she was doing a stage at Heston Blumenthal's restaurant in the UK. Amazing stuff!

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 14 may 06) ::

Sigil :: Nuru Kane
the SoCalled Seder :: SoCalled
Love Supreme :: Asha Bhosle
Estudando o Pagode :: Tom Zé
Broken English :: Karsh Kale
Mish Maoul :: Natacha Atlas
Echu Mingua; :: Anga
Mande Wazy :: Wa-Zimba
Take It & Drive :: Smadj
Safe :: Badawi

Before I return to civilian life completely, let me complain some about travel. Or at least say that Sunday was one of the less satisfying flight experiences I've ever had. It doesn't quite edge out the marathon day o' travel back from Italy. Mostly cos it wasn't as long, and it actually improved as the day wore on, unlike the return trip from Milan which just got worse and worse. But I gotta say that the Continental Express gate area at Bush Airport in Houston is a pretty unpleasant place to wait for a flight. At least it was last Sunday. Too small/not enough seats. AC couldn't keep up. Restrooms were of a quality usually seen only in gas stations. But the plane shows up. I get on. All good. Taxi out to runway. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Captain gets on the PA and tells us that we've been waiting so long that we'll have to go back and refuel now before we can take off. More waiting ensues. Finally we take off and have one of the roughest, bumpiest flights I've ever flown. At least the landing was smooth. And since I was landing at home (RDU), I wasn't impacted by the fact that RDU was in the middle of some kind of massive ground stop. And my luggage came out maybe 5 min. tops after I got to baggage claim.

(that may be the most boring post I've ever written... my apologies)

In case you're not completely tired of Houston art car posts, pics and whatnot, here's a copious supply of linkage:
my flickr set, Sarah's photos, an article from Houston Chronicle, the Orange Show's official gallery and many many more great parade photos.

So I is home now. Here's one of my fave cars from this year's parade. You can click on that to see my first batch of pics over on flickr. (more to follow in days ahead).

During the downtime phase yesterday, we were watching Food Network and saw a show on pie that mentioned Goode Company, where we'd been on Friday, and their pecan pie. Hey, we like pecan pie. And we like barbecue. And we had no plans for dinner. We went back. Just as amazing. This time I had the "sweet water duck" (which was 1/2 a duck hacked up into a pile of smoky, meaty goodness). I was able to eat maybe a third of my pecan pie (which alone would have been worth the trip) and got thru most of the rest of it this morning for breakfast.

But I get ahead of myself. After dinner last night we headed over to the Art Car Museum to meet up w/ those participating in the Illuminated Cruise. Way way more people than two years ago. But also way better organized. Even though it's an unofficial, non-permit-enhanced, not-announced-publicly event, people in the neighborhoods we were rolling thru obviously knew we were coming cos they were out there waiting and waving and making some noise. We rolled with the cruise for about 90 min. until the first stop. Which, in another step up in planning, was in a strip mall parking lot, not a field surrounded by apts on all sides. Since I had a flight to catch, and Sarah had a long day of driving, we headed back to the hotel from there. A fine end to a fun (tho chaotic) art car weekend.

The parade, of course, was amazing. No other art car event we've ever done comes close -- the sheer number of people there just to see art cars is staggering. Artscape has big crowds but they're at the event for many reasons, not solely for the cars. Even the occasional raised-by-wolves tween cannot put a damper on the overall awesomeness of the Houston art car parade. (more later... probably tomorrow)

We're back at the hotel for the downtime, air conditioned part of the afternoon. On the one hand, it's excellent that the pre-parade lineup is (probably of necessity, since there are over 250 cars) now so long that there's plenty of time to walk around and take pictures and run into folks met at other events and shmooze with civilians etc. But that does mean you end up standing around in the sun for the better part of three to four hours. That's a long morning. So we decided to bail on the after-parade party. Tonight's the illuminated cruise (in which a bunch of art cars put lights, LEDs or flame jets onboard and ride around town until the cops break it up).

note 1: I'll get today's photos online tomorrow after I'm home. Yesterday's will be delayed slightly since I offloaded them onto Sarah's computer.
note 2: We had dinner last night at Goode Company Barbecue. Wow! Just driving up we could smell the smoke and I knew it was gonna be amazing. I had the combo w/ brisket and sausage. Both worthy reminders that barbecue in Texas means beef. The sauce, while tasty, was more of an afterthought. All the action was in the meat. We might even go back tonight.

So I'm here in Planet Houston and I've been able thusfar to resist the urge to pronounce it "How-ston" in front of a local just to see what'll happen. It's been all go ever since I got in. Had lunch w/ friends Lee and Russ, then off to Penzey's (just like the catalog but bigger, three-dimensional and smelled good), then back to the hotel, then off to the Art Car Ball. Lots of amazing cars, including a couple that actually made my jaw drop. Non art car highlights included Houston's newest B-52s tribute band (implying to me that there's at least one more if not several) (I also determined that I know the words to a lot of B-52s songs by heart) and a guy doing ice sculpture w/ chain saws. And not just a guy doing ice sculpture with chain saws -- he had his own backing band. Sadly no the Aqua Velvas (Houston's newest B-52s tribute band) but a bunch of guys playing angry big pants music. Still, if was quite the thing...

Lowlights included the fact that I crashed like a Cary driver (something to do with jetlag, huge lunch at 3.30, no dinner at all, minimal breakfast, etc etc) and didn't really start to feel recovered until the insanely spicy "firehouse burger" (soaked in hot sauce & topped w/ a mountain of pickled jalapenos) I had for lunch today at Lankford Grocery.

Here's the playlist. Pretty good show, altho there was one godawful dead air moment when the only thing I had cued was on turntable 2 and the settings on the board were messed up and I didn't notice until the single started spinning and nothing played over the air. Had to vamp verbally and slap the Martin Denny CD (which I was using for backsells) back on while I figured out what happened. But other than that, I was pretty pleased with the mix and flow and whatnot.

Unexpected things that made me happy the last couple of days: walking into the back at work and hearing that someone was playing "Mistadobbalina" on their boombox; discovering that you can get a hot dog topped with pork barbecue at the Durham Bulls ballpark...

Later today I'm flying off to planet Houston for Art Car weekend. Sarah's already there. Go look at some pictures

Vegas Tripping has a nice write-up on the Trop. It's not the nicest or funkiest or anything-est place on the Strip but it is very oldschool. And I think that's pretty cool. We've stayed there 2 of 3 trips to Vegas so I'll be sad when they finally get around to imploding it. (actually, I'm developing a Vegas tradition of only staying in hotels that are later imploded or re-branded -- Paddlewheel became the Debbie Reynolds and is now the Greek Isles; Algiers is gone; Aladdin is being re-branded into Planet Hollywood; Trop will probably be imploded w/in the next few years). But before that we'll have another chance to check out the stained glass casino pit, walk down the hallway of vintage Vegas photos (Dino! Cugat! swim-up blackjack!), get trapped in the crowds watching the parrot show...

Absolutely good times.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 7 may 06) ::

Take It & Drive :: Smadj
Paris :: various
the SoCalled Seder :: SoCalled
Estudando o Pagode :: Tom Zé
Love Supreme :: Asha Bhosle
Safe :: Badawi
Balancê :: Sara Tavares
Mande Wazy :: Wa-Zimba
Broken English :: Karsh Kale
Music for Crocodiles :: Susheela Raman

An early start to the AM resulted in (among other things) large quantities of breakfast being consumed at Elmo's, in the form of sweet potato pancakes. Carbolicious! The other exciting highlight o' the day was the discovery, in the midst of the semi-annual space bagging project, of a shirt-thought-lost and a sweater-thought-long-gone. Happy happy joy joy...

Good article in today's NYTimes about forró, the accordion-driven music of NE Brazil. I've been a fan ever since I heard the Luaka Bop compilation back in the early 90s. Was way too excited to pick it up on CD recently.

After the morning of many errands, we had lunch with Alicia at Weaver Street. Food was consumed. Dogs were discussed. Files were shared. Good times! Then we came home and worked on repairs to UMJ. I was surprised how much we were able to get done in just one afternoon, including patching carpet and replacing many of the more worn-out & beat-down toys. Thought about touching up some of the beads, but that's really time consuming. Plus, Sarah's longterm plans include getting rid of the beads.

All I can say is that this article from Slate is right on the money. Those "Vows" videos on the NYTimes website have to be seen to be believed. (well worth the free registration the Times website demands -- linky link is in the article). There's something about the fierce but unspoken sense of entitlement that pushes them into a whole different class of insanity than the full-on reality TV weirdness of "Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?" Altho one thing both the Times videos and the Style Network TV show do share are odd little moments that are way more revealing (probably) than the parties involved realize. Usually its some kind of verbal hostility that just starts the divorce countdown clock running in your head while you're watching it.

So I got email from Pru this morning, who wanted to let me know that Mr. T was gonna have a talk show. Awesomest news evah! And then this evening, Lady MacTrouser linked to the actual TV Land press release announcing the show.
But enough jibba-jabba. In honor of all that, let's step into the internets wayback machine, for a visit to Mr. T vs. Iron Chef (and yes I'm amazed that page is still active)

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 30 apr 06) ::

Estudando o Pagode :: Tom Ze
Love Supreme :: Asha Bhosle
Living Like A Refugee :: the Refugee All-Stars
En Este Momento :: Cordero
Echu Mingua :: Anga
Lunatico :: Gotan Project
Broken English :: Karsh Kale
Safe :: Badawi
Bigger :: Slavic Soul Party
Traveler 06 :: various

The cliche is that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. So I'm not sure where that leaves writing about food. But I wanted to point you to a few sites that I like to visit. A good place to start is slashfood (linked on the lower left). Or if you're planning on travelling, Roadfood is always worth a look. These other sites are food blogs, so in addition to reading about food you also get that weird frisson that comes from following the life of someone you've never met. I found Needs More Garlic thru Ms. Pants' blog. And via a comment on his blog, I found Porcini Chronicles, which takes the food blogging international. I think I came across Gluten-free Girl doing some web research at work. And I just discovered Looka! while helping Sarah track down info on New Orleans. They've all got the kind of writing that I aspire to, even if I rarely achieve.

Also somewhat food-related, but mostly just a blast from the past, here's an awesome Wacky Packs site.