Kenneth rambling about food, movies, wine, coffee, sports, travel or whatever else he thinks of

I decided to be lazy this morning and not ride my bike in the rain, but to take the bus (thankfully my express bus was running).

The bus was emptier than usual because EVERYONE has the holiday off today except me (and I’m not bitter).

Around Baker or Divisidero a guy got on the bus and took a long time to pay the driver. I only looked up because of this. He came all the way to the back where I was sitting and reading (I like to sit at the very back) and took the middle seat blocking my view of the married cuties who like me were reading…

After messing around with his bag for a minute and loudly applying some anti-bacterial gel to his hands, he got out a permanent marker and wrote some drug name down on a piece of paper, then walked back up to the middle of the bus to give it to a woman he had been talking to at his bus stop.

He then came all the way back, realized he forgot to tell her something, walked back to the middle of the bus, loudly said something he thought was funny and sat back down. And started fidgeting to get his gel out again.

I should have mentioned that he was wearing fingerless Harbinger fingerless gloves and was really only putting the gel on his fingertips and was using a (used) paper towl to wipe off the excess.

But the thing that made me jumpy was that I took his bag to be a range bag at first. It could be a tool bag, but at 8am I was thinking “wtf, why is a guy wearing fingerless gloves and carrying a range bag in SF on a bus?”.

To make it even worse, I realized his bag was secured to his person– I mean, he had a locked cable that kept his bag attached to him.

wtf right?

Maybe I’m just paranoid due to staying up too late to watch the first season of The Wire. Or maybe the cop & spy books I’ve been reading lately have got me caught up in them. Either way I kept my eye on the guy for the rest of the ride. (pic below)

On the bright side- when we got to the last stop and he screamed “thank you operator” to the bus driver twice he wandered off and I watched him wander off towards Mission and one of the bus cuties asked me what that guy’s deal was.

I said I had no idea, but asked if she saw his bag. She said she also thought it was weird that it was cabled too him and wanted to know what was in it.

I said I had only seen smaller bags inside and used paper towels… and a lot of hand gel.

Yeah, I just turned a story about a creepy guy making me jumpy into a story about a cute girl talking to me on the bus.

guy on bus w/ bag strapped to himself

Oddly enough, I was more creeped out by the jackass clipping his nails on the 38 last week. That’s so nasty.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
was pleasantly surprised at how different the book was from the tv series- makes me more of a fan of both. .. I’ll definitely pick up more Lindsay books from this series

View all my reviews >>

thanks for the rec Replacement

I’m speechless… vajazzled? lol

(via basketbawful)

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This was recommended by a friend and I dove in w/o knowing much about it.
I thought it was a good story, but just okay. It’s a heavy and depressing subject, but the author did do a good job in keeping me interested.
I found some of the editing a bit distracting- and normally I don’t notice or care about that.
I also wore a bit weary of the device of jumping back and forth from the two timelines- although I wouldn’t know how to present both Anna’s and Trudy’s stories any other way. I must get annoyed easily by that timeline literary device because it really distracted me in Water for Elephants a lot too.

Despite my two stars, I’d recommend it.

View all my reviews >>

Edit- maybe I need a 3 day rule for books too. I was thinking more about this book today (and then wound up talking to the person who recommended it to me to begin with)… and I think while my criticisms remain, I should bump up the rating a bit more for the way the author handled the Anna character- especially at the end of the book…. I’ll chew on this more.

btw- if any of you are on Goodreads.com, add me as a friend

I think next new year’s I’m going to skip going to parties on the 31st and instead become evil-Kenny ™ for a night  [twirls moustache and arches eyebrows].

Here are some positively evil jobs for the 31st (and yes, I saw of a lot of these walking home from Angie’s party*):

Taxi Driver

These guys were just plain busy. But I saw a few guys forget to turn their top lights off and it was hilarious watching the drunks flock to them like moths only to get swatted down.

Tow Truck Driver

eeeevil

Unsanitary Food Cart Operator

pros: $$cash… under the table

cons: have to prep a lot of food beforehand… or do you? muahaha

Dexter

pros- depends on who you find

cons – tons of cleanup/disposal work; need to vet potential candidates first to make sure they meet Harry’s criteria ™

but the top job: Unscrupulous Limo Driver!

Damn, I saw a bunch of these guys just preying on the drunk and desperate in need of a ride.

Pros: cash up front  Cons: illegal to operate as a cab

*I didn’t really see Dexter walking home in SF

I’m not going to write one… or am I?

Seems like a lot of people are anxious for 2009 to be over. I guess I didn’t think it was that bad. Sure, I’m ready for a new year, but I’ll be officially OLD in 2010 and I’m not looking forward to that.*

But looking back on ‘09, things weren’t that bad for me. They weren’t perfect, but there was some good stuff. (I’m not going to bitch about work in this post… that’s another ball game, and I’m pretty decent at separating my personal/work life)

We got a new president…

I met a cool girl (things didn’t work out, but we know what Tennyson said)

I started the year out jogging a lot, then in the spring switched to bike commuting and that’s helped my health (and mental health a lot)

The biking helped me look forward to more Wednesday Waffles…

I had a lot of good great wine with a lot of good great friends

Friends got married!

And I got to see a lot of you all, including a lot of you Texans who I miss a lot…both visiting you there and those of you who visited here!

I don’t think I’d change any of it.

I hope all of you had a great ‘09, and here’s to a even better 2010!

*I’m sure there were some negative things… I raise a glass to those who aren’t with us any more, and those of you who have had some bad times, or bad health. Here’s to you….

dentist fresh clean feeling all day

Ok, let’s get my pervy-ness out of the way first. Does the fact that I dig this ad mean I have a dental fetish?

Don’t worry, even though I’d like to (insert joke here) [ get her in my chair? clean her teeth ... the hard way? use laughing gas on her? ]

But, once I see the ring on her left hand I’m not interested. I think that means I’m getting old…

Half Price Rechargea..

Watch the ad…

Anyway- I think that ad is a lot like this video from Andrew WK. Except that the girl is much cuter…

edit: great, now that video for the toothbrush isn’t working…

I’m in a weird mood. This is how I feel today:

a bit long, but I like this kind of stuff

I’ve been thinking about twitter this week. I wasn’t fully offline the past few days, but I had a nice short vacation so I wasn’t keeping up with my rss feeds and twitter usage. Taking a break from that stuff is nice periodically for many reasons, but I like coming back to a full rss reader because it lets me figure out which feeds I don’t really need to be subscribed to and which ones had more important (to me) blog posts. Now I can do some end-of-the-year rss cleanup and unsubscribe from some things.

Twitter’s been the same- when I’m not commuting, I really don’t care as much about the SF Bus/Transit Alerts and all that. When I’m not up in early in the morning I don’t care as much about the NYSE/Nasdaq hot sectors & market trends. But with twitter it’s not that big a deal to let those go by. There’s not an “inbox” to clean out.

But I was thinking about how businesses tweet a lot recently. (Side note: The Bivings Group just posted their study of Twitter Usage by America’s Newspapers – go read it).

I’ve been hung up on whether or not the quality of a business tweet biases me away from or endears(?) me more towards being a fan of the business.

As with the newspapers most businesses are one-way tweeters (see study link above). That’s fine with me. I expect that to happen most of the time, but I am pleasantly surprised when businesses respond to communication.

The best examples of this for me this year seemed to be from wineries. I had some pleasant exchanges from some wine makers and wineries based off my tweets from CellarTracker. I didn’t expect to get followed, let alone tweeted to or emailed about things but it happened and it was fun.

Most of the time I expect things to be outbound communication. For example – restaurants tweeting about today’s menu, or reservation cancellations and table availability, or event events like some of the ones that Batter Blaster had (they also sponsored SXSW or ACL and had interesting contests going on).

I also expect what I consider “marketing updates” – things like mentions in the press about said company. Boom! Studios is good about this (disclosure, I know those guys)- they’re always providing links to reviews, event coverage, new release schedules, events, etc.

That said- what’s bugged the crap out of me lately points out how snotty I am. Allow me to pick on one business to point this out- they have the cleanest bad examples.

There’s a small restaurant walk up window that’s pretty popular in part of SF. The WSJ even had a brief mention of them. [side note: I've been there a few times now and have tried a lot of their menu and have been greatly disappointed with most of the items (not to mention the surly service). I think the old "location, location, location" adage really helps in their case.]

In this restaurant’s case, the one way tweets from them seem to be really annoying.

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