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April 17 movie: The Maltese Falcon. Has it really been a month since I wrote up a movie? I think it has, maybe even longer. I've watched a couple dozen movies in the meantime, and I better get to it.

So, they showed The Maltese Falcon as part of TCM's fan favorite week. They had fans on to introduce their favorite movies every night. How do they find these fans, and how do I sign up? The fan favorite movies are usually big famous classics that we've all seen a million times, but you know, there's a reason why the biggest hits are the biggest hits.

(A friend of mine said that to me about the music I play on my show. Because I mostly try not to play the biggest, most famous songs -- the station's mission is "to educate and entertain" so I try to play lesser-known songs as much as I can. But at the end of last year I did a special 4 hour "a song a year" show, and for that show I did play a really famous or really important song from each year. So it was essentially a "greatest hits" show. And people loved it! I got more calls during that show than any other. Like my friend said, the biggest hits are generally hits because they're really good songs.)

It's been a long week and I actually fell asleep during The Maltese Falcon last night. At least I made it to the part where Sidney Greenstreeet says "I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." Unfortunately I missed Peter Lorre's Ren-like tirade, "you bloated idiot! you stupid fat-head!" I had seen this movie probably a half-dozen times before I realized that Ren from Ren & Stimpy was based on Joel Cairo.

Even with Claritin these allergies are kicking my ass. Nose itches and throat hurts all the time. I would think I had a killer cold, except that I don't feel sick at all except the itchy nose and hurty throat. A friend at work told me this was the first year he'd ever needed allergy medication too. Maybe next year it won't be so bad.

Tonight I made risotto for the first time. It turned out pretty well for a first time effort. Meaning, it was perfect when we took it off the heat. Then we dithered around with grating the cheese and stirring in the vegetables, meanwhile it cooled and thickened and got not so perfect. Kind of gummy and clumped up. At least it tasted good. Next time I'll know to stop cooking just before it seems done. It was kind of amazing how it visibly turned done. All of a sudden the rice grains got bigger and changed color. Well, they turned less opaque. Just enough to make the color seem to change.

Georg went to a concert, and I stayed home and read the torture memos. Which are staggeringly awful. Worse than my worst, most paranoid fears. And I can get fairly paranoid when I put my mind to it.

I needed to take my mind off things, you know, things like my own government coming up with cynical excuses to cover their own asses while they committed war crimes. Things like that. So I turned on a movie ... A Scanner Darkly. Um, yay? Good choice, now I'm all cheered up! Next maybe I'll listen to some Billie Holiday.

Had a wonderful dinner at Spice & Curry. We shared spinach pakora, a dosa stuffed with potato and paneer, and a lamb dish whose name I forget, which was just wonderful. They gave us an extra dosa too! The extra one was just the pancake, no filling. By the end of the meal we were the ones who were stuffed. And why are there always so few customers when we go in to Spice & Curry? It's far and away the best Indian food I've had in the Triangle. Do they do most of their business at lunch?

All that terrific Indian food put me in a Bollywood mood so I've been watching my favorite musical numbers on Youtube. Here's a little Shammi Kapoor to brighten your evening:

Opening night for the Durham Bulls tonight! We had great seats, front row in left field, thanks to D. and S. who have some kind of season ticket thing.

It was a good game: the Bulls won 2-1. Some new between-inning games too. The best game was a perennial favorite, where a small child races Wool E. Bull around the bases. They had found a little boy who was so young, he did not get the concept at all. He kept stopping when he got to each base, and at second base he started to wander off into the outfield. The umpire had to turn him around and steer him towards third. It was so cute! Usually when the kid is that small, a staffer goes around with them to make sure they go the right way. Wool E. Bull is a pro at losing these races. Somehow he always manages to time it just right, to make himself far enough behind that he can genuinely run the last base and still let the kid win.

Best part of the night: $1 hot dogs!

Since there's no Top Chef and no Project Runway, we've been watching Make Me a Supermodel. It's somewhat like America's Next Top Model, but so much better. For one thing, MMAS casts (mostly) actual models. And the prize for best photo of the week is an actual go-see, and a few of them have actually booked the job.

Both shows have a former supermodel among the judges: Paulina Porizkova on ANTM, and Jenny Shimizu on MMAS. Shimizu tends to come out with random words of advice that are both genuinely helpful and deliriously strange. My favorites so far:

"Even if I were alone in my house, I would not do that." (said of a jazz-hands / Batusi performance on the catwalk.)
"A threesome is something you really do not want to do. Someone is always the third wheel." (may only apply if Madonna is one of the other two.)
"Soft bunnies ... soft bunnies." (think of them to relax your face.)

Restaurants that give me a headache go off the list. As of tonight Broad Street Cafe is off the list. At least when they have a band.

Vermont overrides veto to legalize gay marriage. My understanding is this is the fourth state to legalize gay marriage, and the first to do it in the legislature, not in the state supreme court.

Damn those activist legislatures! Ignoring our democratic traditions and voting to make new laws from the ... wait.

Sarcasm aside, WOO! This is a great day for equality in America.

After our last day at the Durham Neighborhood College, Georg and I realized that one reason the class had gone so well was the good mix of people among the students. A pretty wide range of interests and concerns was represented, and everyone had a chance to speak up.

We've all been in groups where one person derails the discussion with their own pet issues. You know, there's time for five questions and someone has ten questions to ask. And each of their questions is almost as critically important as the sound of their own voice. Well, we didn't have anyone like that in our class. No one overly dominated, even when the discussion got heated at times. Well done, class!

Speaking of good groups, tonight was the first meeting of the Durham for Obama voting rights group. They want to keep the energy from last fall going by getting to work on issues of concern in the community. I'm not generally a big fan of meetings, but this was a good one. Very focused and action-oriented. We left with clear, practical goals and everyone had a task to complete for next time. I'm really excited about this group. It seems like there's a lot of opportunity here to do something concrete to help people exercise a fundamental right.

Some fine eating this weekend, first at the new Vietnamese restaurant, Saigon Grill on Friday night. We had a lovely dinner with D. and S., and Phil and his friend Laraine. I had lemongrass beef with vermicelli noodles. Really really good. Saigon Grill is clearly the place to be, as we kept seeing people we knew all night. In fact we hadn't planned on eating with D. and S., just ran into them there.

Then tonight we tried La Vaquita, the taqueria in the cow store on Chapel Hill Road. Georg had lengua tacos and I had pibil (pork slow cooked in citrus and achiote). Both so good! They just opened La Vaquita II on Hillsborough Road, right near us. I think we're going to be eating there a lot. No cow on the roof of the new location, alas.

Even with everything going on we managed to get some good yardwork in too. We weeded almost the entire blueberry bed. It was overrun with vines and wild brambles, both of which have long woody roots, and this evil weed that grows a root the size and shape of a daikon radish. So there was lots of digging to get all those deep roots out. One of the blueberries had brambles growing right in the middle of it. I had to dig the poor thing up, set it aside, dig the brambles out from under it, and then put it back. Lucky the soil was so wet, that made it easier to pull out the deep roots.

Georg also dug up several volunteer saplings that are growing right under the chain link fence. It's hard to dig them out from under the fence so we had been taking the easy way out for the past few years, just cutting them back over and over. Which unfortunately encourages them to grow stronger, deeper roots, making the job harder when we finally get around to doing it right. Well Georg got a bunch of them yesterday. And between the two of us we mowed the yard. First time this year!

I wanted to but did not get around to planting the seedlings outside. It's supposed to get down to the low 30s in a few days so maybe I should wait. The tomatoes are growing fast & will need to be transplanted again soon. Each time you almost the whole plant under the soil, leaving just a few leaves exposed. That helps them grow stronger root systems.

I am doing a special show of all lounge - exotica - bachelor pad music today from 2-4 pm. More info (and a link to make online requests) here. 88.7 if you're local, wxdu.org if you're not.

We had our graduation ceremony from the Durham Neighborhood College yesterday. It was an all-morning affair: we met at 8 am at a training facility out in Northeast Durham, near the landfill and the animal shelter. Had a nice breakfast (pastries, bagels and fruit) and then we had a bus tour of Durham. The best part of the tour was the water treatment facility out on 55 in RTP. They talked us through the whole process and we got to look at the computer monitoring system. Which is really cool. It's a diagram of the facility, and they can touch the screen to zoom in on that part of the system. We only had 20 minutes so we didn't get to walk around the outdoor facility and see everything. They invited us to come back for a full tour they were doing later that day, but Georg and I were tired so we didn't go.

We also got to see the emergency "command center" (where everyone gathers during an emergency or crisis) which is out on Stadium Dr. near Costco. They have workstations set aside with computers and phones for each branch of emergency services, and they have a special room off to the side for ham radio operators. The hams have to have quiet so they needed their own room. And they installed a window because they didn't want the hams to feel like they were working in a closet. There are also TVs all over the place so they can monitor what the media is saying about an emergency. While we were there, there was an Obama press conference in France on the TV. The sound was turned off and I was bummed about missing the press conference! I tried to find it on Youtube this morning but I couldn't. Maybe I'll try CNN later. I heard that he gave a great speech in Prague yesterday, and promised to sign the nuclear test ban treaty. About damn time.

Anyway, after the bus tour we went back to the training facility (well duh, all our cars were there) and had lunch, which was a nice chance for everyone to talk. None of the folks from my group project had made it that day, which was sort of the good and the bad: I was sorry not to see them again, but on the other hand I had the chance to chat with people I hadn't gotten to know as well.

Finally we had the graduation ceremony. Which they made kind of a big deal out of. Becky Heron and Mike Woodard spoke -- Woodard is a DNC graduate -- and shook our hands when we got our diplomas. Heron and Woodard both encouraged us to get involved in government. They want us to join committees or advisory boards or something like that. I've been thinking about all the different parts of government we learned about & trying to figure out where I would like to get involved. One thing I have learned about myself is that I like feeling like I'm helping, but I don't really like decision-making. So the committees and what-not might not be the best place for me.

One thing that jumped out at me during the class, something I'd like to do, was the Citizen Observer Patrol. They told us about it during the tour of the jail: you get to drive around in an official-looking car (which is different colors than a police car of course) and if you see a crime happening you call the real police. They were saying that patrol coverage is a real problem, for instance people know what time the shift change is and there's a dramatic increase in crime during that hour, while the patrols are returning to the station and the new patrols are heading out. (He said they had recently started staggering the shift change to reduce that particular problem.) And one of the students in the DNC confirmed that in his neighborhood, the residents felt a lot safer when they saw the patrol car & they very much wanted more patrols.

It doesn't sound dangerous, not like being an actual police officer. You don't get out of the car if you see a crime in progress, just call it in to the real police. I looked it up online and the Citizen Observer Patrol also helps stranded motorists, does house checks for people on vacation and visits shut-ins. It sounds like a way to really help Durham. I think I'm going to find out how to apply.

I may not have mentioned this recently but Undersea Mah Jongg is an old car. 19 years old to be exact. And with an old car, things go wrong from time to time. One thing that went wrong about a year and a half ago, and had vexed me ever since, was the front passenger door. On the way home from an art car trip two summers ago it suddenly stopped working. Wouldn't open at all.

When I got home from that trip I talked to Brian, an auto mechanic I work with. He said that it could be a simple fix, but if you can't open the door, you can't remove the panel to find out. That seems like a design flaw to me -- getting inside the door is easy except when you need to -- though there's probably a good reason for it.

Anyway, since I almost never have passengers in my car and I'm also a cheapskate, I never tried to get the door fixed. Just hoped that one day it would open. Once about a year ago Georg did get it open, and I was so excited, but I stupidly thought it was fixed and locked my car, and then it wouldn't open again. Lesson learned: the problem had something to do with the lock.

Over the past year I've noticed that when the car is unlocked, the lock button on that door doesn't go up as high as all the others. That seemed significant, so I kept an eye on it, and a couple of days ago I noticed that the lock button was up as high as the rest. Tried the door, and woo-hoo, it opened!

Since then I've been trying my hardest to remember not to lock the car until I saw Brian again. I asked him if he could look at it or if I should call the shop. He agreed to do it, and he had it fixed in about 20 minutes!

Turns out it was a broken spring. The spring pulls the catch out of the way so the lock can disengage. Without the spring, the catch was loose in there, so it mostly blocked the lock but occasionally it would fall out of the way and let the door open.

The hook on one end of the spring had broken off and the spring had fallen down inside the door. Brian uncoiled the last bit of the spring, bent it over to make a new hook, and voila, good as new. All that time that door was broken, all over a spring.

Finally set up a Youtube video of the Durham Neighborhood College project. I'm really proud of how it turned out.

Two incredibly shallow questions about this photo. First, is Prince Philip a thousand years old or something?

Second, is Michelle's slip showing?
Oh, dear.

(photos from Talking Points Memo)

I just got an email advertising a free jar of cloves from Penzey's, no purchase necessary. Contact me for the coupon code in the email if you live near a store.

I seem to have a serious case of seasonal allergies. Either that or I have a bizarre cold where I don't feel sick but have itchy nose, sneezing, watery eyes, that will not quit. Do people suddenly get allergies like this? In previous years I've had only the mildest reaction: this time of year I'd sneeze once or twice when I got up in the morning, that was it. Now it's on and off all day. So annoying!

Georg picked up some Claritin for me and I hope that helps. I'm really annoyed. The worst part isn't the sneezing, it's the constant "nose itching feels like I have to sneeze" feeling. You'd think that, working for a health website, I'd have a better idea of what to do for whatever ails me.

It was an all-music day today. First we had the all-station meeting for WXDU. These meetings are always pretty boring, but I can't complain because the last two times I got lucky and the meeting was scheduled during my show. This time it was two hours before my show, so at least I got to leave after an hour (on the grounds that I had to walk over to the station and do the op log before my show started).

I had a really fun show today. Lots of calls and notes to the request line, including one person who normally writes every week, but I hadn't heard from in a long time and I was honestly a bit worried about them. Well, they explained that they had been out of town for an extended stay with family. So glad to hear that they're okay. I also got calls from a couple of people I had never heard from before which is always nice. My only disappointment was that I couldn't fill one of the requests. It was a specific Duke Ellington tune called "A Rose of the Rio Grande" and neither the station nor I have it. I played several Ellington tracks that were recorded in the same year to make it up to him.

Then after dinner we went to a concert at Duke. It was classical Indian music, Pandit Shivkumar Sharma on santoor, a stringed instrument, & Zakir Hussain on tabla. I don't know much about classical Indian music, but according to the program they are considered the world's leading performers on their respective instruments. And it showed. It was truly a virtuoso performance. The part that blew my mind was that, in the introduction, Sharma explained that their performances are totally improvised. They don't rehearse or even discuss what they're going to play. Yet they were completely in harmony. They played two pieces: each time Sharma announced the basic structure they were going to play, then he played a short solo meditation on the theme, then they played together. It seemed to me that Hussain found out what he was going to be playing at the same time we did.

One of the most interesting parts (okay, if you're a geek) was watching an assistant tune one of the tablas before the concert started. It involves tapping the rim of the drumhead with a small hammer, either from the top or the underside. Then he pulled a string out of the drumhead, then used something that looked like a dull knife to push another string in, around the edge. Finally he hid the extra string under the carpet. I wish he had explained what he was doing as I had no idea what was up with the string. Later on, during the concert several times Hussain had to retune it while he was playing. Somehow they managed to incorporate the tapping with the hammer into the piece. It was incredible.

We're in the middle of several days of near-constant rain. Well, it's good for the garden. That's what I keep telling myself. And in truth, plants are springing up all over. We're even getting edible asparagus! The first few years you can't pick asparagus; the stalks come out skinny and you have to leave them to let the plant develop. This year for the first time we're seeing big fat stalks, a good size to eat. Unfortunately we're only getting one or two asparagus stalks at a time. Oops. Maybe that's because it's so early in the season and later on we'll be able to pick enough for a meal.

This morning we went to the farmer's market, where we saw lots of people we knew. I ran into someone I had known from the Obama campaign. It was really nice actually, because I had seen her a couple of months ago and approached her, and she clearly hadn't recognized me. Which had been disappointing because we had worked together every Wednesday morning at the campaign office for a couple of months. But she was at the office every day, so I figured she must have worked with so many people she couldn't be expected to remember all of them. Well this time she saw me first, called out my name and greeted me with a hug. That made me feel a lot better. Maybe last time she was just having a bad day or something.

I also went to the Scrap Exchange's warehouse fabric sale, which was a crazy scene. As advertised, it was in their warehouse, and it was crammed with people rummaging through bins of scrap fabric. I wasn't interested in small pieces; I was there for the fabric bolts. The one I liked best they only had several short ends; it would have taken three bolts to be sure I had enough. At $5 a bolt that wasn't much of a bargain. I found another that was almost as nice and had plenty of fabric. yay!

In the afternoon the rain stopped enough to get some weeding done. Georg did the really hard work, digging out wild brambles. They are taking over one part of the long flower bed along the driveway. Well he made a lot of progress. They aren't gone (those bastard brambles will probably never be gone) but he certainly set them back a lot.

I weeded too, and also cut a bunch of plants back. The three verbenas we planted last year really took off; one of them is threatening to overwhelm some lime thyme that I love. The thyme took a long time to get established and I don't want the verbena to swallow it whole. So I pulled up all the verbena that was too close to the thyme, and planted some of it on the other side of the yard in a bare patch where it can grow like mad, to its heart's content.

I also transplanted the tomato seedlings. Tomatoes are unusual in that the stem can grow roots if it comes in contact with soil. When you plant seedings, you're supposed to keep staging them up into larger and larger pots, each time burying most of the plant. That encourages a stronger root system. Well I've been pretty slack and am just now getting around to transplanting them. The poor things had gotten so leggy in their cell packs. I was able to sort of loop the stems and get them all the way inside the 3" pots. Next I'll go up to quart size pots and won't wait so long next time.

In the evening we went to a gallery opening for our friend David, and then a party at his house. I was hoping to get some recordings for the vox pop (I'm going to have to expand it pretty substantially for the radio show on the 12th) but it wasn't workable at all. Really noisy inside, and we couldn't go outside because it was pouring. Oh well, I know who I really wanted to get on tape and I can contact them privately. And I met an older lady at the party who told me she had grown up in Durham and had all kinds of stories she wanted to tell me. She didn't want to be recorded right then, she wanted to have get together later so she'd have time to tell her stories. I'd like to hear what she has to say.

We left the party early, because we were tired from yard work and also because I'd had as much as I could handle of a house jammed with people. I think I did pretty well though. We were there for about an hour and a half and I didn't get stressed out about being in a crowd. Well, not too stressed out.

This past Friday brought news of a handful of indictments of elections officials in Kentucky who are alleged to have rigged elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006 by changing votes in electronic voting machines. The group of five officials (plus one non-official) is charged with a list of crimes including manipulating the vote totals in electronic voting machines, certifying elections that they knew to be rigged, and arranging for votes to be sold. Remarkably, the vote manipulation technique here was essentially an exploit of a simple UI design flaw, and involved no computer skills at all on the part of the alleged perpetrators.

The accusation is that voting machines were set up with an extra a step: voters would select the candidates they wanted to vote for and press a big red "vote" button, which appeared to cast the vote, but then the voter was shown a confirmation screen where they had to press "confirm vote" on the screen to actually cast the vote. The indicted officials are alleged to have told voters the "vote" button was the final step so that voters would walk away leaving their vote uncompleted. The election worker would then go back and change the vote before pressing "confirm."

I'm sure if we try real hard, we can figure out a way that ACORN is behind this.

(actually Ars Technica says it appears to be a bipartisan conspiracy focused on personal enrichment rather than crooked party politics. But still, ACORN!)

Our Durham Neighborhood College presentations were tonight! I think the vox pop went well. At least people seemed to like it. It was strange to watch a bunch of people listen to audio I had produced. A totally different experience from radio, where you have no idea if anyone is even listening, much less how they react. I was gratified that all the parts I thought were funny, they laughed too.

The cartoons were a hit. We ended up making them into Powerpoint slides rather than holding up cue cards, because the ones done by the class member's daughter were on 8.5 × 11" paper and no one would have been able to see them. I was assigned to push the button advancing the slide show, because I had listened to the audio so many times. The crazy thing is, before today I had never used Powerpoint. I was actually nervous about it! I ended up going to the office of a woman in my group, so she could show me how to do it. Turns out all I had to do was push the "down" arrow key every time I wanted to advance a slide. Whew, I can do that!

Beforehand I practiced several times to make sure I had the timing right. I don't have Powerpoint at home (like I said, I never used it before today) so I got a PDF of the slides in order and I scrolled through the pages while listening to the audio. I made a little cheat sheet with the dialogue and marked the exact point where I wanted to advance to the next slide. While I was practicing I even said "BOOP" out loud each time I hit the next slide, to help me remember the transitions. Well, I stopped doing that when Georg got home; it felt kind of silly.

The finished audio is basically what I posted the other day, except I rearranged it some and edited a couple of people. Just to tighten everything up, and to remove negative references to other towns. We decided it wasn't necessary to criticize Chapel Hill and Raleigh in order to praise Durham. (And, we didn't agree with the specific criticisms either.)

Also one person's recording was kind of all over the place -- she would talk about one thing, then another, then go back to the first -- and I edited her a lot. Moved things around so it flowed more logically. The weird thing is, you can't tell at all. It sounds totally natural. I'm kind of alarmed that it's so easy to do that. I mean, I'm an amateur using open source editing software, and I'm able to completely change what she said. I didn't in any way alter her meaning, but it made me realize how easy it would be to do so.

I'm going to make a Youtube video of the whole thing put together -- tomorrow, right now I'm tired -- and will post it as soon as it's done. It was so much fun to work with this group. I really enjoyed getting to know Allison, Ricardo, Barbara and Joyce. During the presentation (which by the way, thank you to the rest of the group for handling the presentation so I only had to do the bare minimum of public speaking, for which I have little fondness) Ricardo called me "Sarita"! That was really sweet.