New Link: Crazy P

You want to read some crazy stories? Check out my friend Phil's new blog about life in Madrid. Note: Phil's themes are adult oriented, to put it mildly. If you are easily offended by sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, etc., prepare to be scandalized. I recommended beginning by arching your eyebrows into a concentrated "Well I never!" and pursing your lips into a grim "I am NOT amused." I'm not kidding, this stuff is mature. For the rest of you, click the link and laugh.

Gmail - Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

Yo Mark D: I have your Trim discount coupon but your mailbox is full, so my reply keeps bouncing. Please let me know where to send the coupon.

Ready to Crawl!

Guess who learned to get up on his knees?


Did you guess Noah?


Time to baby-proof!

Memorial Day

It was a pretty relaxed Memorial Day. We went to Lauren's parents for dinner. Here I am with Noah on the swing.


Here's Noah in his office. I like how he can work from anywhere. He'd fit in at my old employer, PricewaterhouseCoopers. They're all about hoteling.


Nature Boy loves the lawn.

At The Caribou Kid's Corner

Here's Noah sitting a a tiny table at Caribou Coffee, my new favorite coffee shop around here. Jon, Noah and I stopped by last week. It was sad though, oddly empty because there was no Sarah or Joshua to sit with in our usual seats by the fireplace. Sarah,Joshua, Noah and I seem to end up here a bit to often at times. Try the "Mint Condition" it's really good.

By the way, if you want to see one of my very favorite coffee shops (all in SF), check out The Canvas next to Golden Gate Park. It wasn't bad to sip a coffee out on the back patio of Le Zinc either. Then again, we had a lot more wine and stinky cheese there than coffee in the long run. Cafe Flore, ok coffee, great people watching. Now Cafe Trieste was cool. This cafe in the North Beach neighborhood is best know as the hang out for such beat generation greats as Lawerence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Ahhh.......come to think of it, now THOSE were coffee shops. Oh well....

Going for a Ride

I've been racking my brain to figure out why Noah is so much more restless than most babies. He's always "on," wanting to move, talk, grab, and bounce. This can make for lots of fun, but at other times, frustration and exhaustion. This week, I realized that he is what many pediatricians call a "spirited baby." "Spirited babies and children," as they put it, are just "more." More energy, more movement, more noise..... but oh yeah, less sleep. The leading expert in raising a "spirited child" is Dr. Sears. I borrowed his book from Sarah. (Thanks) Dr. Sears believes in "babywearing". He thinks that parents, especially those of "spirited babies" should wear their babies around, everywhere they go. So, I have taken to plopping Noah in his backpack or Baby Bjorn or on my hip. I even made my own baby wrap/baby sling after I saw the "Ella Roo" on this site: Peppermint. It's great! I made the wrap for only $6 and it took about 5 minutes. Noah loves ride around. It's quite hard to carry 20lbs. around for a long time but as long as I do, Noah seems very happy and becomes a more relaxed baby just happy to watch the world go by.

Naheed and Danny's Wedding

We went to a wonderful weddding reception yesterday. My friend Naheed married her fiancee Danny. Lauren and I have both known Naheed since we were freshpeople at MSU. She is one of the most wonderful people I know, and Danny is an extremely nice guy. They'll be very happy.


This is Naheed's father holding Noah. He said babies loved him, and he's right. Look at how happy this kid is!











This is Naheed's grandfather


Naheed's grandfather, Danny's mother


Wedding Cake, with Naheed's mother in green. There were five of these cakes, and they were fabulous. Lauren and I tried chocolate with berry filling. There was also a nice sweet table with coconut balls, honey balls, and pistachio candy.


Dinner. Everything was good. I had lamb (two ground in to patties and also cubed in sauce), chicken, rice, spinach....it was just so great.


Noah was a great sport, he didn't cry even though he didn't have a nap. He did throw up on my suit, but that's just an occupational hazard.


I just like this picture.


L to R: Naheed's grandpa, Mr. Khan, Noah, and Me.

Leica M3

My friend and colleague Roger and I are auctioning this beautiful Leica M3 on eBay. Many people consider this one of the finest cameras ever made. I would like to own it myself, but I have no need for an expensive antique rangefinder camera - and we are hoping to use the proceeds to finance HDTVs. When he has the auction up I'll post links. Bid early, and bid often.

Lauren and Noah at 6 months

Fast&Furious, 1993Supra Movie car, 2Fast2Furious

This was one of the sweetest cars in the movie, better still because they wrecked it at the end. I watched The Fast and the Furious with my friend Zerner at the dollar theater while I was recuperating from my own wreck. A Detroit city bus had wrecked my own Civic Si and broken my knee, and I didn't realize that I had left my copy of the Weezer green album in the CD player until it had already gone to the scrapyard.




Crazy accident fact: When I went to take pictures of the car for my lawsuit against the city of Detroit, the cajun fries from the Cass Cafe I had taken after dinner were scattered over the top of the engine. Somehow the force the impact had thrown them there. I'll try to scan some pictures, because I couldn't believe it either.

Dessert

I can't remember the name of the place we went to, someone will need to comment. But wait until you see dessert! Here are pictures from Izzy's Bistro in New Baltimore. The city is much more charming than those pictures I took earlier of Sneakers.


Look at this cannoli!


Huge cake.


Logan and giant coconut cream pie.


Bumpy cake, true Detroit regional cuisine.


This is probably straight Crisco and sugar, but it's pretty good.

Lunch

Before lunch, the kids got to know each other.


Then we ate! Adam has the good fortune to own a quarter of a cow, which has been subdivided into tasty, manageable cow segments. These were excellent, I think this is something I need to look into. Anyone want to go in on 160 pounds of beef?

When Blogs Collide, 2 (or, Life on the North Side)

Last Saturday, we were invited to Meagan and Adam and Kylinn's house for lunch, and then we drove to New Baltimore for dessert.


Meagan claims that they live on the North side, but they are close enough to Lake Saint Clair to be making plans to attend the Bay-Rama Fish Fly Festival.


Subsequent posts will cover our itinerary.

I'm behind on the pictures.

But I'm about to fix that. Check out all that hair!

Two Toledos Production Blog

Read this blog! I have talked before about this project, which now has official support from the city of Toledo. I had not realized that the relationship between Toledo and Toledo, Spain was the oldest sister city partnership in the country.

We're Strong for Toledo

In the previous post I mentioned that I would always be strong for Toledo. For those of you not in the know, here is the history of the song, according to toledosattic.org. Because it is such a great summary, I am re-publishing it verbatim:

The first song describing Toledo, "We’re Strong for Toledo", was written by Joe Murphy in 1906. Murphy was the founder of the Citizen’s Ice Company and wrote the song for his barbershop singers, the Ice House Quartette. Murphy penned the original stanzas in a few evenings in the only key he knew. "We’re Strong for Toledo" reflected the vague optimistic spirit of Murphy’s age:

We’re strong for Toledo

We’re strong for Toledo
T-O-L-E-D-O
The girls are the fairest
The boys are the squarest
Of any old town that I know.

We’re strong for Toledo
T-O-L-E-D-O
In any old weather
We’ll all stick together
In T-O-L-E-D-O

Murphy’s lyrics made few claims for the city he was born and raised in besides fair girls and square boys. This is its real strength. Unlike most of the succeeding tunes about Toledo that praise specific features, business opportunities, or institutions of the city, the generality of "We’re Strong" allowed it to suit the changing circumstances of the city.

Still, at the song’s core is a quaint view of the city as a harmonious unified whole. 1906, the year Murphy wrote his song, was perhaps the last that the idea of Toledo’s people all sharing the same interests could have been so boldly proclaimed. Toledo’s civic leaders had long praised its unusual climate of labor peace. Toledo, unlike similar mid-sized manufacturing and transportation centers, had largely escaped the l arge scale strikes and violence of the great railroad strikes of 1877, the eight-hour day strike wave of 1886, and the Pullman Strike of 1894. Relative to other Ohio cities it lost few workdays to strikes in the first six years of the Twentieth century. But less than a year after Murphy finished "We’re Strong for Toledo", one of the city’s largest manufacturing concerns, the Pope Automobile Company, was shuttered by a massive strike. By 1909 the construction trade unions and an employers association were at each other’s throats and a bomb was discovered on the site of a downtown building project. By World War One, Toledo would be an organizing center for the militant I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) union in Ohio.

Murphy’s ice quartette grew from four to forty over the next twenty years. Invited to perform at the 1927 Rotary International World Convention in Belgium, "We’re Strong for Toledo" was sung across Europe and to millions of WRKO radio listeners upon the groups return to New York.

Interestingly, the article points out a song called "Our Toledo" was selected by the Toledo city council as the city's official song in 1909. I've never heard it - but "We're Strong for Toledo" continues to resonate with me. You can read the lyrics to "Our Toledo" at the link, but I find them maudlin and generic. I much prefer the fair girls and square boys and Murphy's wistful melody. Listen to it here.

RIP Madison-Lenox Hotel, 1900-2005

Read the link if you want to know why you should care. Sometimes it just feels like debacle after debacle after debacle.....

I'm half-full on Detroit. I adopted it 6 years ago, a week after college. I worked for the General Motors Tax Staff in the old GM Building on Grand Boulevard and Woodward, on the 14th floor, in the old executive offices. My view was of Popeye's on Woodward, but I smelled the history and loved the building, with its 70s decor, beautiful relief sculpture on the facade and amazing lobby ceiling. I worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers on the 31st floor of the Renaissance Center, Tower 300. I navigated the skywalk there on crutches after a Detroit city bus wrecked my Honda Civic and broke my knee. I saw shows at the Gold Dollar for 2 bucks. I went to the Majestic after work. I went to Eugene V. Debs Memorial Kazoo Night at Tiger Stadium - and I still have the free kazoo! I saved my cans in bags in my trunk for a couple of down-on-their luck guys I knew downtown. Now our new company, foneGEAR, is in Troy and growing, and I hope it will show people that new kinds of businesses can flourish in the Midwest.

Lauren and I live here. Noah will grow up here. So will lots of other little kids. Our house is in the burbs, but don't try to tell me that the future of the region doesn't hinge on pulling the city back together. When Noah grows up, I do not want him to be pissed off at me that he wasn't born in San Francisco. I want him to be proud to be from Detroit, the way that I will always be Strong for Toledo (go Hens!). I want there to be an interesting skyline left for him to look at if he ever works in the RenCen. I want it to be safer for him to go out after work than it was for me. I have plenty of friends who have had 'incidents' in Detroit - a couple of car break-ins, vandalism - and one friend whose parents were robbed at gunpoint. On their own block. I think I might have been naive about the risk when I was 22, but I was excited by the feeling of being out alone in a city, even a sprawling, faded palace like Detroit. I was excited to drive around and explore. I was excited to go places. I had (and still have) great friends.

Now it's different. We have a baby and a lawn to take care of, and my evenings are not free for sitting around the bar at the Majestic. And I don't want them to be - it is infinitely more fun to hang out with Noah. I am taking tremendous joy in my tomatoes (5 types last year!). But I'm looking forward to taking Noah to the Art Museum, and the Motown Museum, and the places I've worked, and to Tigers games so that we can look at the skyline over the outfield fence, and think about what a great place we live in. That's my dream. I hope we'll get to see it happen before they knock down whatever's left.

DAN LE BATARD: Detroit is the real pit of the universe

It's one thing when we say it. It is way different when someone from a place with plenty of its own problems knocks Detroit. This columnist from the Miami Herald wrote a typically Detroit-bashing piece in anticipation of the Heat-Pistons series. Let's just have a look at today's Herald front page for a second:

HURRICANE SEASON
'04 victims still reeling; hmm, haven't cleaned up last years debris, but worried about our highway infrastructure. Thanks.

Faulty contract costs millions
Jackson Memorial Hospital's pharmacy contract was supposed to save taxpayers money. Instead, it cost millions; Hmm, contract mismanagement at Miami's only public hospital. I thought that kind of ineptitude could only happen in Detroit though?

And this from MSN:
Worst Large Cities for Crime
Miami's violent crime rate is the highest in the nation, with especially high incidences of robbery and assault. Thankfully, the murder rate is relatively low. Good, you can be thankful for the low murder rate when you're recovering from that vicious assault robbery.

Look, I know that this article (and the corrolary Album piece) are written in a spirit of fun and are meant to poke the other city's fans in the eye a little to drum up interest in the series. The problem is that neither one of these articles is especially funny, and they just serve to reinforce stupid misconceptions. A waste of ink.

Catch-up

I am way behind on posting Noah pictures. Part of the problem is I have dozens and they are all cute. IMHO.


Ready to eat.


Bowl almost empty, yet baby suspiciously clean. Curious.

New Question Posted on "Ask How Bourgeois"

And it's a real doozy.

Rat batting is often a team sport

I had no idea that my brother lived in the same block as the West Side Rat Whacker. Disgusting, yet oddly compelling.

New Question Posted on "Ask How Bourgeois"

At the link.

Thanks for Fixing my Picture Sarah!

jon
Originally uploaded by Lolo1.

A big thanks to Sarah, whose mega brain saved me again. This time by rotating said picture when my Mac programs failed to listen to me.

Per Jon's request, I should elaborate on this photo and previous title. I thought it was self explainatory but...the reason why I love my husband so, is because he makes homemade treats for his grandmother's Birthday. What a sweetie! No pun intended...haha.

My New favorite Link

All cupcakes, all the time.

Why I Love my Husband

Bubbycake
Originally uploaded by Lolo1.

Opps! Sorry, I couldn't rotate this pic.

bubbycake2
Originally uploaded by Lolo1.

Have Smoke, Will Profit

This is pretty amazing, I have not thought much about how products like tobacco are marketed to retailers. This is the web site for a wholesale tobacco company that seems to sell primarily to convenience stores; go to the link and click on "featured products" for the full-sized versions of some pretty eye-opening promotional materials.



The Stashtray



Have Smoke, Will Profit



Kingpin

Images are the property of HBI Tobacco. No rights to these images are claimed or implied.

Ask How Bourgeois

This morning, Lauren and I are launching a companion blog to this site, entitled "Ask How Bourgeois." This new site will offer daily advice on a wide range of topics to those who need it. If you do not need it, you get to gape at other people's dilemmas. Everyone wins.

Why are we doing this? A couple of reasons. Our new header explains in part:

Welcome to the How Bourgeois advice blog. We are not credentialed (in anything), so this is for entertainment purposes only. We do have strong opinions formed from years of watching our friends' mistakes (well, maybe we made a couple too). Send questions to askhowbourgeois@gmail.com and we will post insightful replies and baking tips. Unless you prefer otherwise, all personal information will be kept anonymous. Sky's the limit on topics.

We'll try to answer everything, and we'll have a great reference librarian who will help us with the tough ones. Perhaps the best reason I can think of to launch this site is that the real heavyweights, Dear Prudence and Cary Tennis, just don't publish enough if you really want to read an advice column. You shouldn't have to wait until Thursday for the answer - Ask How Bourgeois today!

Lunch

Last night I bought some of these great flaxseed rolls from Papa Joe's. At about $.59 each, they're not cheap but they are extremely good (and incidentally healthy), and they are also much a better value than buying a whole bread that will go stale before I finish it (I know Bubby, I can keep it in the fridge. It still gets stale before I'm done).


They make amazing toast, which I especially like grilled. We have a grill attachment on our stove which is useless except for toast.


Here is some D'Artagnan mousse trouffe, with chicken and turkey livers, duck fat and 2% truffles. It goes great on the flax rolls.


So here is this wonderful lunch, for less than the cost of a pot pie at a bad "family" restaurant or a large burrito. I estimate the cost at around $4 for today's lunch, but I also got to see Lauren and Noah and drink club soda right from the 2-Liter, which you can't do at Panera.