Archive for the ‘images’ Category
A couple of firsts today: the first real, rainy test of my fenders reveals that they do indeed keep the water off of you, as advertised. They do not, however, appear to magically ward off flats, resulting in my first flat as a Bicycle Commuter. The aforementioned tire event occurred in the middle of the fucking woods, but at least now I live in a place with public transportation, unlike that time in Indiana with the big rusty nail.
Things worked out okay in the end. I made home in no time, thanks to the apathy of the West Hyattsville Metro station employees who, mercifully, didn’t say anything as I slunk through the turnstiles a full hour into the evening rush hour bike-free block. City Bikes, where I went to get a tube and fix my flat (having forgotten my pump at home), was playing an all-The Mountain Goats playlist, and to my immense delight I discovered that there is a Safeway right across the street.
There I purchased the makings of mac ‘n cheese, which I am now eating (yes,right now) accompanied by delicious, delicious Dogfish Head Chicory Stout, which cost fully four dollars less than I anticipated at D’vines. So, all in all, not a bad end to the day.
I think that now, dear reader, you may have some idea of how thoroughly domestic my life has become. I apologize for once again dropping off the face of the blogo-earth, but I suspect that there is a limit to how many times one can be entertained by descriptions of someone else’s bikes, food, and beer du jour. Alas for you, these (along with Important People In My Life and some Big Things that I’m not quite ready to blather on about in so public a forum) are the things that occupy me lately, so that’s what you’re going to get, at least until I man up and talk about science or grad school or stuff.
Oh, one more thing: GHOSTFACE BUDDHA IS ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY READING.
(Link to photo, by The Gelman Library on flickr)
New photos up on flickr as promised, including my wheels and a couple shots of the GQ bowlstravaganza.
(Link: On the truing stand on flickr)
This video was made using nearly 300 hand-cut 10×10 cm linolium block prints for The Art of Lost Words project, inspired by the word dehisce, which we coincidentally learned in Botany a couple of weeks ago. It’s what the anthers of a flower do when they split open and release their pollen. Back when English was still young and hip, it referred more generally to “release of material by splitting open of an organ or tissue; the natural bursting open at maturity of a fruit or other reproductive body to release seeds or spores or the bursting open of a surgically closed wound.”
(Link: Dehisce linomation print, via boing boing)
The first stop on my grand-ish spring break adventure was Atlanta, GA, to visit some (most) of my study abroad program-mates. We ate, we drank, we lived like kings and queens. Notable highlights were a really sweet potluck dinner in honor of Passang-la, our incredible program coordinator of sorts who is in the states for a year on a Fulbright. Said potluck was hosted at the artist commune where one of the older program alumns lives, which was quirky and charming and well-decorated. There is also a recording studio in the basement, and a backyard with a sizable bonfire pit (where the picture above was taken).
A few of us hit up Little Five, a cute little rasta/hipster/scenester/touristy neighborhood, where we perused the offerings of the local independent book seller. We also sat outside and enjoyed the great truly phenomenal people watching at The Porter, where we were waited on by Sebastian’s South African rugby coach who by turns indulged and belittled our various tastes in beer.
We also had our obligatory night on the town, which is remarkable mostly for where it ended. I think the name itself is enough: Gladys Knight and Ron Winan’s Chicken and Waffles. Just take a moment and let the settle in. Even though we got there around 3 am, we still had to wait an hour to get our chicken and waffles, by which time I was nearly comatose with exhaustion and would have fallen asleep on the spot if it were not for the thought of the Midnight Train (four friend chicken wings and a waffle) that would soon be mine.
The best part, was, undoubtedly, getting to see everyone from India, and being able to just pick right up where we left off, as if the year since we’ve last seen each other hadn’t happened at all. As I get ready to graduate from Williams and head out into the big wide world, I worry more and more about being able to form meaningful relationships with people outside the Williams community, and it was really nice to have a reminder that I can still relate to non-Williams folks. Granted, Emory isn’t exactly culturally that far from Williams in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a start.
Coming soon: Boston, Bangor, my bike, and general musings about life and graduating.
(link: photo)
You might be asking yourself, “why does this photo look like it was taken on two different pieces of film taped together?” to which I would respond, because it was. You might also be asking yourself “aero bars? srsly?” to which I would respond, “there is a place for everyone, even aero bars… just don’t go putting them on your fixie.”
Tea shirt via 200 nipples, limited runs 100 t-shirts. (get it? get it?) I got number 8–take that, Ruth and Bonnie!
Yeah, I know it’s been a while, but I’m back. I think I’ve finally emerged from the existential black hole of the last couple of months (knock on wood), and despite a couple of start-of-the-semester road bumps in the last week, I’m feeling pretty good about my prospects for my last semester of college.
So I thought I’d kick off another period of productive blogging by saying that I had a pretty good day today, all told. This has been something of a rarity of late, since the specter of the most momentous transition of my young life has been looming quite large over just about everything I’ve done since coming back from India.
I think one of the only exceptions has been my newest hobby of bicycles. Notice that I do not say “my newest hobby of riding bicycles”, since I am not, in fact, riding bicycles very much, but instead running up large credit card balances ordering parts from my LBS (that stands for Local Bike Shop, which, I’m told, is a good thing that I should support) that have not arrived after a full month of waiting, and pouring over my copy of The Bicycle Wheel, by mechanical engineer Jobst Brandt. Yes it is as awesome as you think. As soon as I possibly can I will kick off my grand fixie project by actually lacing up the electric red Deep-Vs (which I received as a christmas gift) to a set of black Formula track hubs (which are somewhere between a warehouse in Florida and my anxious hands), which I will lovingly fasten onto my (apparently rather rare?) vintage French road frame, rebuild the bottom bracket and possibly the headset, slap on a no-name stem and some flopped-and-chopped bullhorns (or maybe some track drops mmmm) and probably fall a lot as I try to learn how to ride with one gear, no coasting, and no brakes.
But I digress.
I also lie. I did not have a pretty good day. Now that I think about it, I had a great day, an awesome day. I went to my field botany lecture, had the first meeting for my Great Debates in Cognition tutorial, and spent nearly five hours geeking out hardcore and setting up a subversion server on one of the lab machines to finally put an end to the infuriating drudgery of having to manually sync experiment code between five computers and collect data files from the same computers. Thanks to the miracle of SVNServe and TortoiseSVN all that (and more!) can be accomplished by a click of the mouse. Then, to the coffee shop to drink pretentious coffee, have pretentious conversations with my senior friends about our theses (rhymes with feces), enthusiastically solve math problems and talk about nigh-incomprehensibly pretentious things with my Math-Philosophy double major former tutorial partner.
Bottom line is, while I’ve still got a lot to do before I graduate, it no longer feels overwhelming. I’m pretty sure I’m on top of all the really important stuff, and it feels like things are moving along. Most notably I am no longer bitter about getting dropped from beer brewing and drawing II. No, really, I swear! I think in the near future I will have a real life update, complete with tentative plans to make plans for next year.
This photo essay depicts the scrappy, entrepreneurial side of the slums of Mumbai. Cobbled together homes sit side-by-side with cottage industries in Dharavi, including some very industrial ones like recycling outfits which together reclaim eighty percent of Mumbai’s plastic, people that grind down paint chips into a powder than can be re-constituted into usable paint, and places that pound the dents out of big oil cans and sell them back to oil companies and consumers. Dharavi challenges a lot of easy generalizations about slum living: 85% of Dharavi homes have television, and it is a sort of microcosm for the unflagging entrepreneurial spirit of India as a whole, producing an annual economic output estimated to be between $650 million and $1 billion.
Prince Charles recently called Dharavi (the setting for Slumdog Millionaire) a “model for sustainable living,” and as BoingBoing-er Cory Doctorow points out,
I visited Dharavi with an NGO back in September, and I’m inclined to agree with Charles — the poverty in Dharavi seems to be of a different character to the poverty elsewhere in Mumbai. Here you see poor children who nevertheless are shod, are playing, attending school, and not begging. Not to say that Dharavi is a paradise or even pleasant to live in — the toxic fumes from the plastics recycling plants are reason enough to want to raise your children elsewhere — but that, as compared to government schemes to cram poor people into tower-blocks, Dhravi has a lot going for it.
Unfortunately, since it occupies some extraordinarily valuable real estate in the heart of Mumbai, it is set to be razed to make way for shiny skyscrapers, a plan which is, needless to say, bitterly opposed by the residents of Dharavi.
EDIT: I forgot to mention this originally, but I thought these photos make a good counterpoint to the slums depicted in Millionaire (et al.), which some have criticized as a “stylishly shot collection of clichés”.
EDITx2: Fellow wordpress.com-er Marcus Fornell has posted a bunch of photos of Dharavi on flickr.
And the weather today was so bone-chillingly nice! Life update: it’s finals, and I have two papers due tomorrow night (tonight?) at midnight, and two exams left after that. BUT the GQ concert went off pretty well, I did tolerably well on my computer science project I turned in last friday night (things come back quick when your grade is calculated!), and we collected, analyzed, and presented our psych data. Considering that I’ve practically written half my psych paper already, that means I’m more than half way there! Woohoo!
Something substantial soon, I promise.
my name is dave
and this is my blog.
Flickr
More PhotosRecent Comments
