Philip Fibiger

Many people are writing about David Foster Wallace’s death, quoting beautiful and weighty words he delivered in a Kenyon College commencement speech a few years ago. My memory of the man, and his writing, is a much less serious event.

He was one of a number of writers reading at a “Downtown For Democracy” event at UCLA, sharing the stage with Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Anne Lamott and Alice Sebold. Emily bought us tickets as surprise birthday present. He was reading a short story he’d written which, as far as I know, remains unpublished. I’ve forgotten the plot of the story, but the main character was a goody two shoes kid. The part of the story that’s important to this anecdote is a conversation between the child and the child’s school principal (who detests the kid). The child is getting more and more wound up in the conversation while the principal is quietly seething. Wallace read the child’s dialog in character, mimicking the child’s hyperventilating. He starts to smile as he reads, and quickly the smile turns to an attempt to stifle laughter. As he quickly shifted between the child’s excitement and the quiet hatred of the principal, it seemed to crack him up even more. People were laughing out loud, both at the story and with Wallace’s obvious enjoyment. He was unable to keep it up, forced to walk away from the podium and take a drink before continuing.

It was a charming scene, and I loved the fact that after obviously having written and rewritten this countless times, he was still able to crack himself up over it.

Some guy went warflying over the Los Angeles basin. Wardialing is/was having a computer call larger numbers of phone numbers in sequence looking for modems, wardriving followed and was driving around a neighborhood with a laptop and a wireless card looking for open wireless access points. the logical extension of this is warflying, using a gps and a hardcore antenna to look for open access points.
It looks like he flew right over my apartment, as well as another I know that has an open access point, but neither of them show up in his list of APs. I have to imagine that the 2200 or so access points he found were a small fraction of the ones he flew over, and that a huge number had signals that deteriorated significantly due to concrete and the antenna didn’t pick them up.

If you want an object lesson in why I don’t trust America, whether it is to elect a president or to have taste in literature, have a look at the list of The Modern Library’s Top 100 novels. I first saw this list published in the New York Times a couple years ago. I recently finished reading William Kennedy’s Ironweed and I was pretty sure that Ironweed had made the list, so I went looking for it online to check. Included with the list is the readers’ list in response. This list was not published in the Times. Reading through the list, I was shocked. I won’t give anything away by listing some of the books on it, go check it out yourself.

Chowhound.com is a great reference if you’re looking for restaurant recommendations pretty much anywhere in the country, but the search functionality is poorly implemented and the message boards (one per metro area) aren’t organized at all. I can run into great information one time, and it’s sometimes impossible to go back and find it again. To solve that problem (at least for myself), I installed a wiki that I’m using to keep track of restaurant information in LA. When I find things on chowhound that look interesting/appealing, I can keep a log of them, and then go back through and update it when i’ve visited the restaurant. Here’s my burgeoning restaurant guide.

Related to chowhound, but broader in scope, I recently found egullet.com. It’s a pretty huge website and set of forums about cooking, eating, drinking, pretty much everything related to food. In particular it has great wine forums and a very active cooking forum. Recipes, reviews of gas ranges, listings of favorite < $10 wines, and information on brining meat, the site and its forums an incredible fount of information.

The forum seems to be full of people in various food industries..wine buyers, food scientists, chefs, cookbook authors, even Anthony Bourdain is a regular contributor.

We’ve definitely been on a post-wedding home kick the past month or so. After deciding that it would require far too much effort to move, we’ve been working on adding to and fixing up our apartment. In addition to trying to revitalize our garden, over the past two weeks we built a box valance to hide the industrial vertical blinds that our apartment came with, and reupholstered a chair of unknown vintage, but that was last reupholstered in Albany in 1976. The chair was in pretty bad shape, the fabric was pretty worn out, and I’d managed to cut myself when we were moving in and laid down a pretty good blood spatter on it.

The valance was pretty easy, Home Depot cut the 1×10 for us (I own no saw, that’s pretty sad), I assembled the valance while Emily cut out the batting and the fabric. Both the batting and fabric are just stapled to the valance frame, and then the velvet curtain was hemmed on a sewing machine and attached to the valance. Hung with four L brackets, It does a great job of covering the ugly aluminum paint splattered track for the vertical blinds.

The chair was more difficult, but still not too hard. Emily found some brown ultrasuede fabric (in the light the fabric looks different from the curtain) that was a pretty good deal. We laid the fabric over the existing chair, and then cut out panels of fabric to serve as the sides of the back cushion. Sewing the panels on to the main piece of fabric, I managed to sew a stitch through the plastic head of a pin. I didn’t even realize that was possible. Once it was sewn, it was slipped over the back of the chair, and then stapled to the underside. It looks a lot sleeker, and way less 70’s.

I think they turned out well, here’s a before and after shot of that part of the living room.