Hackneyed

Lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite.
Hackneyed

Hackneyed

Lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite.

Dice

I learned this game at a bicycle shop in Brooklyn that had a liquor license.

Supposedly they had great brunch as well.

It requires at least three dice. Can be five but three goes quick.

Each player antes one dollar into the pot and they then take it in turn throwing the dice.

The object of the game is to score the lowest total amount by adding up the spot values of all three set aside dice but counting 3s as zeroes.

Each player has up to three rolls of the dice (or more if you have more dice. One roll per die).

You must set at least one aside after each throw.  Once a dice is set aside, it may not be rolled again.

The best possible score after all the dice have been set aside is zero (all threes).

In the event of equally low scores, tied players either play again or have a shoot-off with one die per person.

The winner takes the pot and rolls first in the next game.

Ugly Delicious

I chose the wrong career path.

As an outsider that is still obsessed with good food (read: I have an unrefined palette), it’s speaking my language. Bourdain is my hero, but he’s far more who I want to be than who I am.

From the New York Times:

David Chang and his new Netflix series, “Ugly Delicious,” can most easily be defined by what they’re not. Mr. Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high-energy American showman or an Anthony Bourdain-like poetic observer. “Ugly Delicious” is not a stand-and-stir cooking show or a pack-your-bags travelogue.

Its eight episodes take on topics as conventional as pizza, barbecue, fried chicken and Chinese cooking. The cameras pan over jars of artisanal tomato sauce and capture the squirting juices of xiao long bao. Ritualistic pronouncements of deliciousness abound, often punctuated with a certain four-letter word, and the occasional non-culinary star — Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel — drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage.

What Mr. Chang and the food writer Peter Meehan, his co-star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is something more ambitious, though: an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.

In the first episode Chang says he hates “being told I can’t like something.”

Amen.

Now. Time to get eating.

Principles & Values

Friends of mine own a pair of remarkable BBQ restaurants.

The food is great. They are great. Their principles and values are worth a read. Many (all?) can be adapted not only to any business, but life in general:

Be the best restaurant we can be, not just the best BBQ restaurant.

Produce the highest quality food at all levels and exceed standards.

Provide the most knowledgeable and remarkable customer service that exceeds all expectations.

Every item on the menu must be exceptional. A bigger menu isn’t a better menu.

Have a kitchen/restaurant that is so clean and safe that you’d be proud to show a customer at any time.

Be solution focused, not problem focused.

Honesty, integrity, and respect in all interactions with customers and colleagues.

Have the best communication in the industry.

Assume the best in others and be empathetic. Especially with customers.

Always ask, “how could this be better?” Challenge all sacred cows. Push to be the absolute best.

Empower Others – don’t be a bottleneck. Be systems and process focused.

Operate from a place of positivity, not negativity.

Operate with logic, facts and numbers. Not from emotion.

Be respectful of everyone’s time.

Bootstrap it: do more with less and work with the tools you have.

Milos Forman has passed.

He was 86.

In my formative years I often felt like an outsider and Forman’s best films – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Man on the Moon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Hair and Amadeus– sang to my rebellious heart.

Site Update

Not sure what I am doing here.

But I I like that.

Feel like this is an attempt to put all the pieces together, even if I don’t know what it is I am building.

If that makes me Winston with a puzzle, so be it.

“No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

Don’t know exactly how I feel about Apu in 2018.

But I think the conversation deserves more than a troll/PR stunt response. I wonder if Al Jean or Matt Groening understand that part of the problem with Apu is that his name is used as an insult. My best friend is Indian. I’ve seen it firsthand.

Having their response come from Lisa is a complete disservice to one of the best role models in modern fiction. I would probably stop watching the show if I hadn’t inadvertently already done that around season nine.

Tired of not doing the things I want to do.

That includes being tired of missing the things I used to do.

In the past year or so I’ve built and discarded about five or six skateboards online.

I finally pulled the trigger. Mark Gonzales deck, Spitfire wheels, Independent trucks. Life is too short to be missing out. To fear other’s perceptions. If you get any sort of joy from something harmless, let that shit ride.

(One last Gonz video for good measure. Apologies for the low-quality. As far as I’m concerned whichever service makes old skate videos available wins the streaming wars.)

On Reading

Still deleting/sorting old bookmarks. Found several related to reading.

Which is something I need to do more of.  One day I’ll read books and not just buy them. 

Farnam Street recommends trying to get through 25 pages per day. They see this as a clear path to completing works that might otherwise seem daunting:

Then I thought about all of the other great works I wanted to get to in my lifetime. Caro has four (eventually five) books about LBJ that are masterpieces on 20th century American politics. I want to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I want to read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I want to read Boswell’s Johnson. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. More of Ron Chernow’s biographies.

Let’s say that two days out of each month, you probably won’t have time to read. Plus Christmas. That gives you 340 days a year of solid reading time. 25 pages a day for 340 days is 8,500 pages. 8,500. What I have also found is that, when I commit to a minimum of 25 pages, I almost always read more. So let’s call the 8,500 pages 10,000. (I only need to extend that 25 pages into 30 to get there.)

With 10,000 pages a year, at a general pace of 25/day, what can we get done?

Well, The Power Broker is 1,100 pages. The four LBJ books are collectively 3,552 pages. Tolstoy’s two masterpieces come in at a combined 2,160. Gibbons is six volumes and runs to about 3,660 pages. That’s 10,472 pages.

Bill Gates thinks you should dedicate an hour at a time to reading and has some pretty good thoughts on how to read.

Austin Kleon also has good advice, including carrying a book with you at all times and keeping a stack to read nearby.

And throwing your phone in the ocean.

“I loved without memory.”

Masha Ivashintsova was born in Russia in 1942. When the Leningrad native passed away in 2000, they left behind over 30,000 photographs that had never been seen by anyone.

As Ivashintsova’s daughter explains:

My mother, Masha Ivashintsova, was heavily engaged in the Leningrad poetic and photography underground movement of the 1960−80s. She was a lover of three geniuses of the time: Photographer Boris Smelov, Poet Viktor Krivulin and Linguist Melvar Melkumyan, who is also my father. Her love for these three men, who could not be more different, defined her life, consumed her fully, but also tore her apart. She sincerely believed that she paled next to them and consequently never showed her photography works, her diaries and poetry to anyone during her life. As she put herself in her diary:

“I loved without memory: is that not an epigraph to the book, which does not exist? I never had a memory for myself, but always for others.”

Unsolicited Advice

Been slowly making my way through old bookmarks. Here’s a good one: John Perry Barlow’s list of twenty-five principles of adult behavior.

From the recently deceased Silicon visionary/occasional Grateful Dead lyricist’s mouth: “I don’t expect the perfect attainment of these principles. However, I post them as a standard for my conduct as an adult. Should any of my friends or colleagues catch me violating one of them, bust me.” Wholeheartedly echo this sentiment.

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, never blame. Say nothing behind another’s back you’d be unwilling to say, in exactly the same tone and language, to his face.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you yourself can deliver.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
11. Give up blood sports.
12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Do not endanger it frivolously. And never endanger the life of another.
13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.
18. Never let your errors pass without admission.
19. Become less suspicious of joy.
20. Understand humility.
21. Forgive.
22. Foster dignity.
23. Live memorably.
24. Love yourself.
25. Endure.

Darren Brown: The Push

Trying to figure out how to never have to agree to anything ever again. Afraid getting dinner with someone is only a few steps away from committing a crime.