Last week I blogged about my surprise to still see people buying Hummers. My friend Sam just uploaded this photo taken on a California freeway.

This is not Photoshopped - there is actually some sort of super moron driving around California right now.

It’s worse though. This is not a custom job but rather a real product made by International. This particular model is called the CXT. The marketing lingo associated with these eco killers sounds straight from Bush’s mouth (if you can imagine for a moment a President Bush that speaks proper English that you can actually understand).

International sells several models of SUV monstrosity, even one that can apparently be used to climb Mount Everest.

A tractor drives by your home and you don’t live on a farm.

I have a basic litmus test to determine whether a Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant serves good food. Before sitting down or ordering, I look around for a picture or serving of fried rice. If the fried rice includes peas and carrots, then I leave.

I have no idea whether peas and carrots are an authentic part of East Asian food, and I don’t care. I hate peas and carrots (as a cooked pair, thrown into the mix). To me they stand out like flies in soup - they ruin the dish.

For lunch today I went to Noodle House (the local Thai diner) and ordered Phad Thai like I do 90% of the time I eat there. When the dish was delivered I saw them immediately - brightly colored peas and carrots poking out of an otherwise beautiful mound of noodles and chicken. I dug through the mix and quickly realized that saving this meal with fork flicking was too much labor.

I took the dish back to counter and asked for a new dish, without peas and carrots: explaining that I have ordered this dish dozens of times and it has never before contained peas and carrots. I soon found myself eating a new mound of noodles and chicken, made fresh.

Sitting there eating my lunch, I realized that this scenario is why there are hundreds of thousands of places like McDonalds and Chilis (which both suck and should be avoided unless imminent death through starvation is at hand). People want consistency. Serving a meal quickly is not hard to duplicate for a “independent” restaurant, but serving the exact same dish, the exact same way, in any location . . .

On one hand, I expect my phad thai from Noodle House to be sans peas and carrots. If I cannot get it that way, I eat somewhere else. On the other hand, I like that Noodle House serves food cooked by a mom in a kitchen with her own style.  And I want her to have full creative decision in that kitchen - just without the peas and carrots, like my mom did.

My wife Dawn has been visiting and talking about this tree painting she saw a couple months ago at an Art Walk. I didn’t like it the first time she showed it to me. And honestly that may have been partly due to the fact that I have never before been able to get over my own sticker shock to become an art buyer/collector.

After a couple visits the tree painting started growing on me. I came home today to find it in my living room:

After putting our daughter to bed we sat and stared at it for awhile. I finally stopped seeing dollar signs and was able to enjoy it with her. I like the visual balance between the branches and clouds, and the roots and stones.

Hi, my name is Will, I’m 38, and this is my first art purchase . . . the kind you hang on a wall.

I used to see Hummers on a daily basis when I worked in Seattle. Several times I found myself part of a crowd of pedestrians who were booing, showing a thumbs down and flipping off a Hummer as it rolled by (in shame). I mean, on some level, isn’t driving around in a Hummer akin to flipping off everyone in the world?

I’ve spotted two of these SUV abominations in downtown Fairfield - a yellow one and this green one. Unfortunately there isn’t enough critical pedestrian mass on the square to boo them much less flip a bird. So I’ll take it online:

Booooooo!

There’s something wrong with this picture if these things are still an option for personal transportation. The EPA and their mileage standards are a joke.

Moments ago, heading back from lunch, I nearly collided with a BMW. I had pulled up to a stop sign and needed to cross a busy arterial. Already at the stop sign opposite me, was the BMW, with a left turn signal on. I’ve encountered this situation many times, especially in urban driving, and the way it has always worked in the past is, the car turning left must yield (this is not a four way stop).

After nearly hitting this BMW, I realized that since moving to Fairfield I’ve encountered weirdness around this scenario dozens of times. Just last week I was in the BMW driver’s position, trying to turn left, and I was yielding to someone across the street who arrived later but was going straight through. I waited and waited and finally noticed that behind the sun glare on their wind shield, they were anxiously waving at me to go first.

Puzzled that perhaps the rules of the road were different here in Iowa, I laid out the scenario to my co-worker (from Boston) and he said that whoever is first has the right of way. Whaaaaaa?

I just looked up the Rules of the Road for both Washington and Iowa and their Right of Way sections are identical on this matter:

The operator of a vehicle, streetcar, or trackless trolley intending to turn to the left within an intersection or into an alley, private road, or driveway shall yield the right of way to any vehicle, streetcar, or trackless trolley approaching from the opposite direction, whenever the approaching vehicle, streetcar, or trackless trolley is within the intersection or so close to the intersection, alley, private road, or driveway as to constitute an immediate hazard.

Ok so is a large portion of the driving population of Fairfield wrong, or have I been completely clueless for the past twenty-two years while pissing off countless drivers in a dozen states?

Shortly after my wife suggested Fairfield Iowa as an option for our relocation project, I was Googling. I quickly found myself staring at this photo on Flickr, tagged with fairfield, croquet, laborday, 70s, babascroquet and the ZIP 52556.

I’m not going to say that this photo is the reason I moved to Fairfield. But seeing two guys hamming up a game of croquet and posting to Flickr was something that spoke to me. After all it was I who, before blogging and before Flickr, spent entirely too much time creating a website to show photos of me and my friends hamming up a game of croquet.

[My organizational skills came through just now - in less than a minute I found the disc containing those photos from 1998. Uploading to Flickr . . .]

So here I am, approaching my 5th month in Fairfield and I get an eVite from the same nutbars in the same croquet photo above that I Googled last summer, to join them for this summer’s tournament. I’m pretty stoked.

It get’s even better. Judging by the description of this event, this could be one of the most un-PC events I’ve attended in some time. The theme is FOREIGN IMMIGRANT EXCHANGE. Seeking suggestions. Andrew?

Tally Ho Adventurers’ Croquet

We know all of you have been seeing therapists, attending the “dozing for dollars” program, and having interventions to relieve the stress of no croquet. And obviously nothing’s working. Don’t deny it, we’ve been avoiding you deranged nutjobs as you wander around town aimlessly pretending to have “employment” and “a life”.

It’s time to give your therapist the boot, the pills the flusher, and your yoga teacher should really just be tied up and spanked, but that’s a whole other event that we’ll get to later.

Your ship, to put it bluntly, has come to port, and is sailing to far off distant lands in search of lord know what amazing treasures. Notice that you’re not on board. But fret not, fair ball-bashing mallet-handlers, for we have a more important announcement. You can enter now, yes NOW, for your dream getaway.

The theme this month ….. wait for it …. is FOREIGN IMMIGRANT EXCHANGE! Yes, Gilberto will be accepting applications for Baba’s Exotic Resorts and Spas. But please make sure to BYOT (bring your own towel). Ok, what does this mean? Should you show up in full Mariachi Band regalia and serenade the masses? Can you arrive as an entourage of Swiss Yodelers in lederhosen? Might you come in your Aboriginal nut-hammock and nothing else? To all this we say … yes.

Epic battles and epic crying.

But honestly, I’m ok with that. Man I hope we see the Kingpin in Spidey 4.

Several weeks ago I posted a short rant about Netflix’s Watch Now service being limited to IE and claimed that I would wait until there was support for Firefox before trying the service. I held out for about a week and then fired it up in IE7. I was quickly impressed: lag free, quick to load and sharp resolution on my 17″ monitor running 1440×900.

Brilliant. Under one subscription plan I’ve got HD-DVDs in my XBOX 360 player at work, DVDs stacked on my SD player in the bedroom, and right now I’m watching Night Watch on my pc while writing this post. Way to bring out the movie whore in me Netflix.

Despite the FireFox issue I’d be happy at this point. But wait there’s more.

While sifting through Mix07 coverage of Silverlight, I come across this a post titled “Netflix Uses Silverlight For On Demand Video“. Immediately I started writing my next blog post in my head - a rant about how Silverlight’s claim to be cross platform is bogus since the Silverlight Netflix player doesn’t play nice with Firefox. And then I thought, wait a minute, the Netflix player I’m using now isn’t exactly RIA. And then I clicked on the video of the Netflix presentation at Mix07.

Oh boy.

The current Netflix player is barely four months old and already they’ve got a demo of an RIA player with an amazing set of interactive features that make Apple TV, Joost, Toshiba (HD-DVD) and Sony (Blu Ray Disc) look late to the party. In my mind Netflix just made my $35 membership worth twice that.